Is there any point forcing a post to Community Wiki after 6 owner edits?

Question

Personally I think not. If the concern is spurious bumping then simply stop bumping the post after some arbitrary edit.

This site might be part-Wiki, part-Q&A but I think its clear that people feel a sense of ownership over their questions and answers, which CW diminishes to some respect.

The question is: does this happen enough such that people won't maintain their posts as the facts change? I suspect it does.

Edit: Let me just add that there are plenty of ways of bumping your post without editing it currently, such as:

• Retagging the question (assuming you wrote an answer);
• Editing the question (assuming you wrote an answer);
• Editing someone else's answer;
• Adding another answer to the question;
  
  
• Using a sock puppet to add another answer.
• Have a sock puppet edit it's own answer.
• Have a sock puppet edit someone else's answer (provided it has enough rep).
• Have a sock puppet edit the question/tags (provided it has enough rep, or owns the question).

AFAIK all of these things will bump the question to the front page and none of them involves editing your post. So if someone wanted to constantly bump a question they already can. I haven't seen a problem like this to date, which suggest to me that we don't have a problem with spurious bumping.

Answer 1

Personally, I'd rather that there was a vote-to-wiki that functioned like "close" etc; this would prevent the ugliness of people editing deliberately to force wiki, and avoid the accidental wiki you sometimes get by people tidying up a post

Answer 2

This "auto-moderation" feature has outlived its usefulness.

Community Wiki really isn't used much anymore. Partially, as I explain below, that's because it's a malfeature. But more importantly, we now have Suggested Edits, which means that even anonymous users can fix problems in posts. It's nice that low-reputation users can skip the review process on CW questions, but very few questions lend themselves to this sort of treatment in my experience. (There's an argument to be made for CW posts in the meta.* side of a site, but I don't intend to make that argument.)

Since Community Wiki rarely occurs naturally, users are only confronted with it when it is imposed artificially as a tool to moderate user behavior or limit reputation from a single post. The first is utterly pointless since most users don't learn about this from of censor until after the punishment has been meted. As far as I know, the user isn't even notified that they are running out of "free" edits.

As for limiting reputation, are these the sort of posts we should discourage:

• A thoughtful answer to my Philosophy question.
• A continuously updated question concerning Genealogy and Family History.
• An answer that has been called "one of the best answers on SO" and a "Beautiful answer" and "one of the best answers I have read on this site."
• [Insert other examples that I've noticed but can no longer find or new examples as they come up.]

These are good posts made better via edits.

On the gripping hand:

• A frankly poor answer from a user who really is trying to improve. The trouble here is that CW makes it seem like he wants his detractors to freely edit the answer. CW sends the wrong signal in this case.

These posts should be reviewed instead.

When this feature was introduced, there wasn't a mechanism for humans to review the work of other participants except by watching the question stack. These days, we have a Community Review Task feature. It seems to me that if a post has been edited many times¹, the post is a candidate for the Low Quality Posts queue or, perhaps, a new queue altogether. Some frequently edited posts are of low quality. But not all. The ones that aren't should be allowed to life full, rich lives. And, of course, low quality posts (of all sorts) should be downvoted and/or deleted.

Currently, if you want to have the Community Wiki status removed, simply flag a moderator. On smaller sites at least, we are happy to fix the problem.²

---

"Community wiki" is a Frankenstein's monster of a feature. (Look at it's name! What does it mean?) A great many of the uses for this feature have, in my opinion, been removed by the introduction of this meta-site. Over-editting is definitely one of the odder ways to trigger "community wiki", but it makes a bit of sense if the purpose of the feature is to open up editing to more people. If a post is edited X times, it's a good guess that it's the sort of post that could benefit from more editors.

Sadly, "community wiki" does more than just allow a larger population to edit a post. Some of the effects might make sense in certain cases, but it seems dumb to penalize a question that happens to have a number of typos. Even worse is penalizing a questioner who periodically maintains their own question.

I think the entire feature needs to be rethought and this particular problem readdressed. The current "solution" is too complicated.

---

Footnotes:

1. Is it 10 rather than 6 times now? It's hard to keep track. Which is another reason to kill this "feature".

2. I'm not sure what happens to those flags on larger sites. It probably depends on which moderator sees the flag and what sort of mood they are in at the time. On the site I'm currently a moderator for, we are excited to see a flag since they are somewhat rare. I gather that's not the case on some of the bigger sites.

Answer 3

I do also. I often worry if I am coming back later and fixing up the question with more relevant data that I will trigger the CW.

I like the idea you had of stopping bumping after n consecutive edits by the owner (or some other person)

I think we all benefit from editing without fear.

Answer 4

The forced-CW action when there are many edits from various authors makes sense because at some point then the post should no longer be considered solely the original author's work, and the site should reflect that.

But this scenario, where a single author modifies a post multiple times... perhaps over the course of several months even, does not really indicate anything special. I agree that, ideally, it shouldn't force CW.

However, it was put in place to solve a very real problem. Some people will make periodic, pointless edits to their own questions in order to garner additional attention. Abusing what is normally a useful feature. Forcing CW doesn't stop this, but it does help to remove one potential motivation for it (rep). If it were possible to suppress this via other means, i'd be all for it...

So: how do you propose to stop gratuitous bumping of posts without also removing the ability for those who do make valuable and substantial updates to their posts to garner fresh reviews?

• Time-based suppression? (1 bump / day) (still provides plenty of opportunity for abuse by the patient)
• A fixed number of bumps for the life of the post? (first six edits bump, but later edits do not)
• Quanity-based suppression? (bump only on edits changing more than 50% of the post) (still fairly easy to abuse)?
• ?

Answer 5

I actively fix minor grammatical errors and improve formatting on other people's questions. Sometimes this happens in multiple edits that are more than five minutes apart, so they don't count as a single edit. I've been warned once or twice by other users that this is pushing a given post to its six-edit limit. But I have no intention of changing my behavior (which improves the site!) to accommodate a dumb rule.

In fact, I disagree very strongly with this StackOverflow Blog post, which says (among other things) that I shouldn't bother changing "it's" to "its" unless I also have something more substantive to change.

Answer 6

I'm happy to announce that starting today, community wiki is no longer automatically forced on a question for any reason, including this one. This has always been a long standing issue, how this mechanic worked. It was never a comfortable one, even for this team, but it had a job that it was doing and it was the only thing doing that job.

Now, we have made a lot of changes to flagging, and with more changes to come. For this, we've changed the system so that in the situations that formerly resulted in automatic conversion (with some thresholds modified), a flag will instead be raised. This will allow us to have better awareness of the situations as they come up, and allow more appropriate actions such as contacting users or cleaning up posts. The time of community wiki for this kind of thing has come to an end, basically.

Answer 7

I think the reasoning behind this is to prevent people "evilly" gaining reputation and attention by constantly editing their question, which bumps it to the front page.