Personal Interest
I'll be quick to say that I'm only asking this question because I recently answered an old question with what I thought was a unique insight into the original question and didn't realize that my response would automatically become a community wiki answer.
Does Automatically Marking New Answers as Community Wiki Discourage New Answers?
I don't regret posting my answer, but doesn't this logic of automatically converting a new answer into a community wiki answer discourage new answers altogether? Perhaps that is the point? I'm not entirely sure what the aim of that is meant to accomplish.
In my case, my answer became a community wiki answer for two reasons: 1.) Question was already marked as community wiki and 2.) There were over 30 answers already.
My answer can be found here: RegEx match open tags except XHTML self-contained tags. I'm not saying my answer is the best, but I do feel it brings a unique response that satisfies the question nicely and shows a considerable amount of research / documentation.
Similar Questions to This
In no way am I challenging why my answer became a community wiki answer. I get it. In fact I listed out two reasons why it became a community wiki answer above. I'm asking, doesn't this behavior discourage new answers? I'm pretty sure I won't go through the trouble I did again to post an answer that receives no points. It's bad enough to be buried by 36+ other competing answers. Creating a new answer that is automatically converted into a community wiki answer feels like wasted effort.
Anyhow, here are some questions that are remotely related to mine.
- Answer is not shown as "Community wiki answer"
- My answer got converted to Community Wiki
- Why is my answer Community Wiki?
Edit :: Aparently there is a very similar Q: Does making question wiki discourage people from giving answers?. But it has no answer :(
Discussion - Is there a better way? How to change things? Why is it the way it currently is?
It's hard to propose a better solution without knowing why this behavior exists to begin with. However, I wonder if something like having a user forfeit reputation in order to post an answer would be a better alternative. The user could still have an answer that is not a community wiki, but he'd have to 1.) perhaps have a certain level of reputation and 2.) be willing to part with reputation in order to answer.