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When you make a post, you have the option of making it "community wiki" by checking a box at the bottom right of the input field. This has the following effects:
Under what circumstances should a question be made community wiki? Certainly any time the goal is to get a sorted list of resources (like Examples of Great Writing), community wiki is a must. But CW is also appropriate for "soft questions" where there isn't really an answer and it seems inappropriate to gain reputation for the question (like Do good math jokes exist? orMost interesting mathematics mistake).
I'd like to have some kind of a rule for determining if a post should be CW. I feel like this is an important thing to figure out, but I'm not sure exactly why. What do other people think?
I've added a section to the FAQ explaining community wiki mode. Feedback is most welcome.
I disagree with this reason for community wiki:
If it would be inappropriate for you to accept an answer (i.e. you know when you're posting the question that there isn't really an answer), then your question should be community wiki.
I think that there is a deeper issue about when it is appropriate to accept an answer, and that not all questions where it isn't appropriate should be community wiki.
There are two obvious extremes of questions: the completely closed form such as my question on fourier series, and the completely open form such as my question on examples of good design of mathematical websites. In the first case, it is clear from the outset that there will be one answer and when I get it then I should (and did) accept it. In the second case, it is clear from the outset that the purpose is to build up a community knowledge base and so it should be community wiki.
I suspect that in programming, most questions fall into these two categories and there aren't that many in between. However, in mathematics there is a much broader range and most questions fall in between these two. For many questions there will not be one right answer, and it may even be clear at the outset that this is the case. However, I don't think that all such questions should be made community wiki. Making a question "community wiki" sends a signal that it's one of those that should be built up by lots of people contributing a small amount of knowledge - so small that it's not worth assigning any reputation to. Questions like "what's a good reference for X" are obviously in this category. Such questions are hoping to benefit from what might be called indirect experience: the answerer is merely passing on what helped them understand the issue. But I think that any question where the questioner is hoping to benefit from others' direct experience should be worth assigning reputation to, even if there is no intention of ever accepting an answer.
The question that made me think about this was Tom Leinster's on distributions. It's a marginal case, but he was asking for insight into distributions rather than just references so it draws on people's direct experience rather than indirect experience.
Let me make one thing clear: this is not an attempt to garner more reputation just because that happens to be my highest-ranked answer! I'm not interested in the reputation system as a scorecard (so long as I stay above Scott Morrison) - it's a way of keeping track of how useful my answers are and of seeing if I'm being of any use to others. But the reputation system is the oil that keeps the system working so community wiki questions should be the rarity rather than the norm. Otherwise, since so many questions won't have definite answers, you should just do away with the reputation system altogether.
My suggestion for a replacement text is: "A question should be made community wiki if you don't think that people should gain reputation for their answers. A typical case is requests for references where it is the reference that is being judged by the voting system rather than the person who supplied it. Similarly answers should be made community wiki if you don't think that you should gain reputation for the answer. A typical case is if your answer mainly builds upon answers already there, or if you think that it is only a step along the way and you hope others will add to it."
I should also say that, despite the length of the above, I don't feel too strongly about this. As I use the site then certain aspects jar and so I'm recording them in case others think the same and so that you (the site admin) get some feedback since the worst would be if no-one told you what they like or don't like about the site.
Can other people set the community wiki mode on individual answers?
I don't remember checking that box, unless maybe accidentally?
I looked at the FAQ, but it didn't seem to have info on that.
@Andrew: I think you hit on a big MO limitation.
Most programming questions are of the form How to do X?
Here's an answer! while most math questions are of the form of a conversation Is it possible to do X?
Perhaps...
But unlikely...
Indeed, here's the proof... or How do you think about Y?
I think Y is actually coming from Z in cohomology of T...
Read this reference...
The modern Z viewpoint is here...
and even when you think there's an answer you still have
What's a coefficient A in B?
It's 50 by direct calculation!
It's conjectured to be 7^2 + 1 by modular form!
It easily follows from Z to be 7^2 + 1, here's an explanaton!
I'm not sure what is the right course of action to follow from this observation.
@Jon: The only way a post can be converted to wiki is if the original author or a moderator make it community wiki. These actions leave a record in the edit history, so in the case of the post you're thinking of, you must have just accidentally checked the box. (Edit: I forgot that another way a post can become CW is if it is edited by more than 4 people or more than 8 (?) times, which is what happened in this case.)
@Andrew: I think I agree with you for the most part, though I think it's fine for users to gain rep even if they don't give a complete answer; they should just have the option of CWing their post to make it easy for others to add to it. I'll probably change the FAQ later today after I've let it stew in my brain for a few hours.
@David: I would agree that when you're deciding to make an answer CW, that is the primary effect, but when you make a question CW, it's usually not to make the answers easy to edit.
@Anton: Thanks, it has been an all-thumbs, bleary-eyed sort of day. Is there any way I can undo that?
@Jon: Nope. Sorry. If this feature-request on meta.SE gets implemented, then it might be reversible.
I would suggest that, when a thread has many back and forths, as Ilya describes, it would be good for someone to make a CW answer which attempts to summarize the other answers. I've done this a few times (for example, here). I think the best way to encourage this is simply for high profile community members to do it and hope that others follow suit.
It is possible to write a great summary answer without using CW mode; Greg Kuperberg did so here. But I would think that it would usually be better to use CW, as encouraging everyone to edit should make the answer more likely to correctly reflect the discussion.
Two questions were flagged to be converted to wiki earlier today:
They're both "soft" enough that I wikied them to mitigate the bike shed effect. People are likely to spend more time on "easy" questions that anybody can understand and think about. Converting them to CW exerts some pressure to counteract that since you don't gain any rep from CW posts.
But I did hesitate since converting to CW is irreversible and I still don't feel like I have a good CW policy. So I'd like to bump this discussion and ask for some more opinions. In particular, what do people think of the proposal that all non-math questions should be CW? (questions about being a mathematician or about the mathematical community fall into this category)
I just worry that I can't see a rationale for this that doesn't also justify banning such questions. I'm increasingly inclined to not community wiki as much. I think a better approach is to close and vilify not-so-great "soft questions", and hope the potential opprobrium of receiving this vilification makes people think twice, unless they really do have a great "soft question".
Addition, Subtraction, Multiplication, Division, & Vilification.
Bizarre!
@Scott Morrison: I disagree. I think there's definitely room on MO for questions for which people shouldn't be earning reputation.
@Peter McNamara: I'll modify the FAQ to say that questions with no actual math should be CW. Both of the questions I mentioned fall into this category. Of course there will still be ambiguous cases, but we'll deal with them as they come up. Hopefully once we have one or two hard rules about what should be CW, random members of the community will start flagging for moderator attention, saying that questions should be wikified (like they do when questions need to be closed). Here are a bunch of examples of questions that should probably be CW but aren't. If nobody objects, I'm going to hit them all with the wiki hammer (which converts the question and all answers to CW).
@Harry: I know. Increasing the weight of downvotes has been [status-planned] on meta.SO for months. I think they're not doing it because of the pain involved in doing a global rep recalculation and having so many people complain that they've lost rep. I don't know why they don't just leave existing votes with a weight of -2 and increase the weight of future downvotes. A tangentially related thing: if one of your posts is deleted because it accumulated too many spam/offensive flags in a short period of time, you're penalized 100 rep!
I am totally fine with history questions not being community wiki. After all, they are of interest to (some) mathematicians and they (usually?) have definite answers.
Gerry-
We've already had this discussion (I don't feel like searching for it, but it was of a length and vehemence quite out of proportion to its importance). None of us have a coherent defense of this rule, but none of us have the ability to change it. At this point it's just a harmless quirk of the system.
@Gerry: I would prefer not. If I remember correctly, that discussion started out with some rather unfortunate feuding, which led into a contentious discussion of the CW issue. While it more or less had a happy ending, the rather meandering way at which the conclusion was arrived, not to mention the amount of our "dirty laundry" in that thread, makes me disagree with its inclusion into the FAQ.
Of course, Ben may be thinking about a different thread, though I doubt it because of his reference to "length" and "vehemence".
On the general point of linking here from the FAQ, I would not be in favour of a discussion here being directly linked. Discussions here are a record of what was actually said, but what should go in the FAQ (whether directly or indirectly) should be the conclusion of that discussion.
(There's an episode of Yes, Prime Minister where Sir Humphrey explains the purpose of minutes to the PM. He explains that they aren't a record of what was actually said, but what on reflection the parties think they ought to have said.)
I've just had a quick look at the FAQ and so far as I can tell, when an actual discussion is linked then it is clear that it is a discussion. My interpretation of the proposal was that a discussion be linked as an explanation of something. So saying, "Join the discussion here" is fine but saying, "Here's where to find the definitive answer" is not. Hope that's clearer.
The explanation I remember hearing the first time it was discussed on meta is that this "feature" is for preventing edit wars (by removing the incentives).
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