This might require too much special casing to be realistic, but I think something like it is worth proposing. It falls somewhere in between moderation and the content maintenance that Uphill Luge was talking about in his deleted answer.

Let 30k users administer wiki-locked questions and curate their pages.

This might include:

• Applying a wiki answer lock to a question closed as "not constructive", "too broad", or (on SO) "recommendation" (possibly and older than D and with at least N score) (This could require voting, like deletion, rather than being unilateral.)
• Converting a historical lock to a wiki answer lock (not a likely feature)
• Editing a question that has a wiki answer lock, not just the answers.
• Commenting despite the lock; deleting and editing others' comments
• Deleting/undeleting answers regardless of score

The simplified version of this would be let 30k users ignore wiki answer locks: they can act on the question and answers as they normally would.

The idea here is to let users who are clearly great at creating good stuff work on some of the most potentially useful, but also controversial and usually messy, stuff on their site, to help bring it up to snuff. Generally someone with this rep level has a certain sense of ownership of a tag or set of tags, and wiki-locked questions can be important assets for a tag.

This isn't something that moderators are able to do -- limitations of time and subject proficiency mean that it's most sensible for them to apply the lock, prune the answers, and then just stand back for other users to do the editing. Allowing high-rep users to handle the whole affair takes moderators out of a loop they maybe don't need to be in, and the abuse potential is low since the power is so narrow.

Problems with this include the fact that I may be looking at this through a Stack Overflow lens. Wiki-answer locks are fairly rare, and I'm not sure this is even relevant for sites outside the Trilogy; they may just not have posts that warrant the lock.

For SO at least, though, this might help alleviate the rarity -- with more people able to meaningfully interact with those locked posts, it makes more sense to apply the locks widely.

This might require too much special casing to be realistic, but I think something like it is worth proposing. It falls somewhere in between moderation and the content maintenance that Uphill Luge was talking about in his deleted answer.

Let 30k users administer wiki-locked questions and curate their pages.

This might include:

• Applying a wiki answer lock to a question closed as "not constructive", "too broad", or (on SO) "recommendation" (possibly and older than D and with at least N score) (This could require voting, like deletion, rather than being unilateral.)
• Converting a historical lock to a wiki answer lock (not a likely feature)
• Editing a question that has a wiki answer lock, not just the answers.
• Commenting despite the lock; deleting and editing others' comments
• Deleting/undeleting answers regardless of score

The simplified version of this would be let 30k users ignore wiki answer locks: they can act on the question and answers as they normally would.

The idea here is to let users who are clearly great at creating good stuff work on some of the most potentially useful, but also controversial and usually messy, stuff on their site, to help bring it up to snuff. Generally someone with this rep level has a certain sense of ownership of a tag or set of tags, and wiki-locked questions can be important assets for a tag.

This isn't something that moderators are able to do -- limitations of time and subject proficiency mean that it's most sensible for them to apply the lock, prune the answers, and then just stand back for other users to do the editing. Allowing high-rep users to handle the whole affair takes moderators out of a loop they maybe don't need to be in, and the abuse potential is low since the power is so narrow.

Problems with this include the fact that I may be looking at this through a Stack Overflow lens. Wiki-answer locks are fairly rare, and I'm not sure this is even relevant for sites outside the Trilogy; they may just not have posts that warrant the lock.

For SO at least, though, this might help alleviate the rarity -- with more people able to meaningfully interact with those locked posts, it makes more sense to apply the locks widely.