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Why does editing your own post beyond a threshold make your post community wiki. If the community was editing your post then I could understand. But if I'm the sole editor then it seems more like a bug.

Edit: Looks like this have been discussed before. It's easy to miss these dupes. After reading through that post it seems to me that the criteria for bumping a question could be honed a little. For instance, bumping can only take place after:

  • making a substantial edit (however that's defined)
  • waiting several minutes, i.e. a shutout window.

Or even go so far as to not bump questions when you edit your own answers. Although I definitely like the idea by Marc Gravell. :)

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2 Answers 2

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I don't consider this a bug, but I think it is something that should be changed nevertheless (if it is the case, I have never had the problem myself personally).

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It's not a bug. It's there to prevent people from constantly bumping their own question back to the top of the Active page.

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    Yes but as has been previously discussed, there are plenty of ways of doing this without editing your own post.
    – cletus
    Commented Aug 14, 2009 at 1:08
  • Plus you can edit your own post as many times as you want, as long as it occurs inside of 5 minutes.
    – Brad Gilbert
    Commented Aug 14, 2009 at 1:16
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    That's true, but it does prevent one easy form of gaming of the system. Enough edits will force wiki anyway, and sock puppet accounts will eventually be discovered and destroyed. I think this rule is in place to make gaming less obvious, more work, and a less profitable use of time than answering other questions.
    – Bill the Lizard
    Commented Aug 14, 2009 at 1:20
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    Of course, sock puppet accounts getting destroyed has no impact on edits, only on votes cast. I skipped my nap this afternoon.
    – Bill the Lizard
    Commented Aug 14, 2009 at 1:25
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    More to the point, I think this 6 changes making CW is actually detrimental in that it discourages people from maintaining their posts as things change. So you're balancing a truly marginal "benefit" against a likely detriment.
    – cletus
    Commented Aug 14, 2009 at 3:52
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    I like your point cletus. What if someone is active enough to update his answers and questions over a period of several years? His posts will eventually fall into the community wiki bucket. As a result I have to be careful how many times I edit my own posts. Seems like it should be something I should never have to worry about, personally.
    – Jonathon Watney
    Commented Aug 14, 2009 at 4:02
  • @cletus: How do you measure how marginal the benefit is? I'm fairly active, and I edit my old posts often, and I haven't forced one to CW mode by this method yet.
    – Bill the Lizard
    Commented Aug 14, 2009 at 11:53
  • @Bill: It's only a matter of time before your posts go wiki. And it might be after several years of up time before anyone notices anything detrimental. :/
    – Jonathon Watney
    Commented Aug 14, 2009 at 16:02
  • @Jonathon: I agree, it's only a matter of time, but I'm not convinced that's a big issue. Should I be getting reputation from a few stray upvotes on a post that's years old? I'm not sure, but I don't personally worry about reputation that much.
    – Bill the Lizard
    Commented Aug 14, 2009 at 16:52
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    I also want to make it clear that I'm not in complete disagreement with you guys on this. I don't see the harm in increasing the number of edits the original author can make, or at least count them separately from everyone else's edits. You could even rate-limit them, or just reset the count every month and I'd be fine with it. I just don't want to see anyone bumping their post every 30 minutes because they need an answer right now.
    – Bill the Lizard
    Commented Aug 14, 2009 at 16:55
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    @Bill: I think if someone is making the effort to maintain their posts over several years then yeah, they should also reap the benefits of more reputation. After all, if a reputation score is an indication of someone's know-how and contributions to the community then they should be entitled for maintaining posts. If a reputation score is just for fun then why not ditch it, stick with badges and make everything community wiki? I don't mean to be argumentative, I'm just curious about the subject. :)
    – Jonathon Watney
    Commented Aug 15, 2009 at 21:19
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    @Jonathon: It's perfectly fine to argue with me, particularly when you're making good points. I think the best compromise would be to reset the counter every so often (I'm thinking once a month would be about right) so that the original author can maintain their work far into the future without tripping the CW flag, but we also don't have to see the same posts bumped to the front page every hour, day, or week.
    – Bill the Lizard
    Commented Aug 15, 2009 at 22:34
  • ...actually, resetting the counter once a month would still allow you to bump your post every week, which seems a little too often to me, but that's just my opinion.
    – Bill the Lizard
    Commented Aug 15, 2009 at 22:38
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    Heres' a great example where the current approach is greatly detrimental: stackoverflow.com/questions/1527078/…. In this thread, the OP came up with 4 different issues, which required 4 major revisions to my answer. In addition I had a couple of other minor revisions. As it stands now, if he comes back one more time, I cannot reply because it will be my 9th edit and it will become a community wiki -- even though the answer is 100% mine.
    – Mike Rosenblum
    Commented Oct 12, 2009 at 19:11

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