There are now several people on Math Overflow with edit privileges which are not moderators and there will be more people with more privileges in the future. It could be a good time to stop a bit and reflect about getting the consensus worked out.

Edit privileges are useful since they allow more people to do collaboration, especially helping novices — I personally tried them several times with typos, formatting help and reworking absolutely poor questions. This use seems to be rather non-controversial to me and in the absense of a historical community knowledge and guidelines about editing I don't plan to be using this feature for anything else. (And I'll certainly stop these harmless activities as well if the community objects).

Now to my suggestion. To simplify the process of establishing a consistent voice, I proposethat we create a place that would work as a FAQ but targeted at the more advanced users. It would be a place to write down the consensus, "things MO is not", etc. Wiki would probably work best among different technical possibilities.

The FAQ would somehow describe the community consensus. Its main difference from the user FAQ would be that the etiquette should presume that advanced users have really read it -- during a long time on MO a person will likely find time to glance at it, especially with somebody else's nudge. This is in contrast to novices -- I think a polite etiqutte shouldn't presume the person who posts the question has read anything at all (interestingly, here's a recent post by creators of Stack Overflow about its interface and how users treat it)

While meta currently serves as a substitute for this FAQ, it will be hard for new people joining the community to read all the posts, thus my idea.

The structure of a new FAQ could be close to the case law summary, like in common law (which will hopefully be a better model for the community life of MO than civil law, dictatorship or direct democracy system) the law doesn't have to be written until the specific case arises; and when the case is adjudiacted all similar cases are presumed to be known. The best part about any law system is that the law is known to everyone; even better property of common law system is that the law progresses slowly but surely by building on the pervious work, rather then changing with the political winds.

I think the stability and benefits to community brought by the activity of writing such a text would be enormous.

(For now my schedule isn't best so tomorrow I might be slow in replying to comments. I still post it here in the hope that others will have some thoughts on the topic as well)

How to do retagging is a good topic for a Level 2 FAQ. Maybe it could be even automatically shown to people at 500 rep.

I'll be happy to write something during the weekend if there's a need. I don't know what others' take on the idea and whether we should accept Scott's offer of a page at tqft.net (perhaps http://tqft.net/wiki/MathOverflow_Level_2_FAQ?)

Homework questions --(me)--> off topic.

In particular, what is being used for "too basic for this site"? That is, the so-called "homework questions".

If the material in the question is too simple to be of interest to mathematicians, I close it as "off topic". If the material is good, but the question itself is offensive because it's basically asking people to do some very specific problem, I close it as "too localized".

Also, is there a way to get a list of questions that people have voted to close but that don't have enough votes to close them yet?

Yes, this is in the "tools" link that you get once you reach 10k reputation. Here's a complete list of 10k+ super powers.