How relevant is rep and community wiki on meta-stackoverflow

Question

Does rep even mean anything here?

Whats the point of community-wiki questions, considering everything here is likely to be subjective-argumentative anyway?

Rep-whoring, is that bad here? or is that good?

Answer 1

Jeff goes over part of this in the blog:

• bounties make little sense on a discussion site

• wording needs to be tweaked (i.e. questions->topics, answers->replies)
• need to be able to follow questions/get notices of additional replies
• remove notion of community wiki, as discussion sites have a stronger sense of ownership, plus nothing will be off-topic
• ensure that chronological ordering is the default, if not the only, sort order, both for replies and comments
• remove accepting an answer
• some of the close reasons will have to be removed or tweaked

We’ve made a few of the easier changes already that were based on (groan) meta-data. Others will be tougher. We won’t know until we try, so …

I honestly feel that because reputation does not matter here, we should have our SO reputation linked over to here and not be able to get any reputation off of questions on this site. After all, your StackOverflow reputation is relevant here because this is a site about StackOverflow. That's my take.

Answer 2

I think that reputation is still relevant here. The idea of both rewarding people for positive contributions as well as being able to identify them (with the score number) is important both for Q&A and ensuring that people are incentivized to provide quality posts. This argument also applies to the badges as well.

However, and I touched upon this in my email to Jeff, Community Wiki doesn't make much sense in a discussion site. First, because there's a stronger sense of ownership of content in a discussion - when people edit your post it changes what you've said. Also, StackOverflow uses the notion of Community Wiki for posts that are allowed to remain active, yet aren't strictly programming questions, mainly to prevent people from gaining obscene amounts of rep from them (example). However, such a post cannot occur here - if it's on-topic I see no reason why the author shouldn't receive reputation from it. If it's not, then it will be closed and/or moved to a more appropriate site. Once SuperUser is up it will be an easy place to send non-meta, non-programming/sysadmin questions.

Anyway, these are just my thoughts about the site, so feel free to disagree. My main conception was making it more discussion oriented, but the posts that currently populate the front page still follow the Q&A model, so we may end up needing CW, accepted answer, etc. after all.

Answer 3

Reputation is a large part of the community, even on meta. It still shows the level of commitment on the user side and a level of trust from the community side. Taking reputation out of the system would be a detriment to meta.

However, I have a hard time finding the reason of Community Wiki on meta. Almost everything here, including this question is a discussion. There is no single answer to be given here on almost any question. On this question, both Rich B and Jeff Atwood commented on why the question had been marked as CW. Jeff even said: "people should get rep for spending time on writing their thoughts". This, in my opinion, is the very essence of meta.

Answer 4

Rep encourages people to participate, so I think it's still relevent. It might need tweaking it for this site though.

Community-wiki, perhaps not so much. I'm not sure editing of others posts is really appropriate here either..