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With the advent of the new weaker wiki, and the inability to mark a question as community wiki, I've felt a little weird about one of my questions (since removed) which I felt deserved a wiki spot, because it was a sort of a broad demi-question, and would have been closed. Is it acceptable to ask the community to make a post a wiki? If so, when? If not, why?

To make myself clear, I know about the flagging process, so what I want to know is: Is it OK to outright state in the question that you wish it to be a community wiki post so as to facilitate increased flagging?

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    Flag it for mod attention, they'll CW it if you want and they feel that it's necessary.
    – Manishearth
    Apr 27, 2012 at 4:37
  • No, no, I know that! I'm asking if it is acceptable to state in the question that you wish it to be a wiki?
    – CodaFi
    Apr 27, 2012 at 4:41
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    @Manishearth: we rarely wiki anymore. As in, if it needs wiki status it probably needs closing status more.
    – user1228
    Apr 27, 2012 at 14:07

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It sounds like you thought Community Wiki status would save your question from deletion. You may be confusing this with the historical lock, which is for edge cases when it's desirable to preserve old off-topic content.

Community Wiki status is not a license to ask questions that would normally be closed, nor is it an excuse to keep old ones around that are not acceptable by current standards. CW has one purpose only: to let users without edit rights edit the post without review. It's up to you if you want to flag your question for this, since as you know it's a mod-only feature, but it's not going to change what is or is not acceptable content.

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  • My question was about the fringe side of an aspect of the Objective-C language. It was a little broad, I'll admit, but not off topic. I know it isn't an excuse, it's just that when I posted it and mentioned I'd like it on the wiki, it was still downvoted and the close votes started to come in.
    – CodaFi
    Apr 27, 2012 at 4:48
  • So this was a new question? I do think "FAQ" posts get a little too much heat from the "CW Police" and whatnot, but without seeing the actual post it's hard to say what fate it deserved.
    – user159834
    Apr 27, 2012 at 4:49
  • I can't undelete it, but I can try to recreate it. And yes, it was new.
    – CodaFi
    Apr 27, 2012 at 4:50
  • People can downvote for any damn reason they please, and often do. Just because you're getting downvotes doesn't necessarily mean that a question is bad and/or shouldn't have been asked. As Wesley says, we'd need to see the question to issue a definitive verdict, but I too agree that specific programming-related questions do not need to be made community wiki. I thought we put the community wiki police out of business long ago.
    – Cody Gray - on strike
    Apr 27, 2012 at 4:51
  • It's pretty much irrelevant what the post contained, if the post was downvoted, closed and deleted then it was deemed not useful by the community. I guess I didn't address your literal question, but I wanted to reply to the first part.
    – user159834
    Apr 27, 2012 at 4:51
  • @WesleyMurch The community downvoted it, they didn't get enough votes to close it, and I deleted it.
    – CodaFi
    Apr 27, 2012 at 4:54
  • As for the MSO FAQ: its FAQ index tells folks to flag for CW, when adding the faq-proposed tag. (But I guess that was not the FAQ that your reference to "FAQ" posts was about.)
    – Arjan
    Apr 27, 2012 at 6:48
  • @Arjan: You are correct, I was not referring to meta posts. I wish there were more FAQ-style posts on SO about programming that were as comprehensive as the meta ones. People will sometimes put the effort into it and it seems to be always met with a negative attitude, including cries for CW status. I assume it is rep envy 99% of the time.
    – user159834
    Apr 27, 2012 at 6:54
  • @WesleyMurch: we kinda have that on SO, but it kinda sucks.
    – user1228
    Apr 27, 2012 at 14:08
  • @Won't: Yes, it does kind of suck. For just one example, most of the top FAQ questions about HTML are actually about regular expressions and parsers; nothing to do with HTML itself. In fact, very few of those posts are actually about HTML at all. I don't see that changing any time soon either, unless there is a major change to the so-called "FAQ" system.
    – user159834
    Apr 27, 2012 at 16:55
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It's generally considered acceptable to flag for any reason you want. However, raising a flag does not guarantee that your request will be honored—the decision is at the discretion of the moderator who processes your flag. So it can't hurt to try, but there's no guarantee it will save your question from closure.

When making the decision to flag, you might consider the advice provided by the blog entry announcing these changes to the community wiki feature: The Future of Community Wiki.

To make myself clear, I know about the flagging process, so what I want to know is: Is it OK to outright state in the question that you wish it to be a community wiki post?

No. That type of meta-information is considered noise and should be omitted from questions. If you do include it, it will likely be edited out.

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  • No, no, I know that! I'm asking if it is acceptable to state in the question that you wish it to be a wiki?
    – CodaFi
    Apr 27, 2012 at 4:41
  • Thank you. That is the answer I was looking for.
    – CodaFi
    Apr 27, 2012 at 4:44

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