Should authors be encouraged to maintain their answers?

Question

The general message I've received is that a question and its answer should be applicable to a wide audience, and not be "too localised" and so limited to small, specific audience. At the same time, as all know, duplicate questions are discouraged.

Both of these lend themselves to the notion that answers should be maintained and updated, preventing the need for the question being asked again. In an ideal world, this would be done by the community, but most of the time, aside from the odd error correction, questions/answers are largely maintained by their authors -- they have the most to gain from an upvoted answer, after all.

At the same time, if an author edits their post 12 or more times, it is automatically turned into a "Community Wiki", and they lose any reputation they've earned (or will earn) -- which surely discourages authors from maintaining their answers for future readers.

Hence the dichotomy I wish to flag for attention. If we want authors to take an active interest in maintaining their posts, isn't this sending a mixed signal?

Community Wiki posts clearly have their place, but are we discouraging maintenance? And if so, is that what we want?

Unfortunately I don't have a proposal, I'm merely floating this for discussion.

Edit: Just to practice what I was talking about (updating and maintaining my own post :) automatic conversion to CW was removed last year: https://blog.stackoverflow.com/2014/04/putting-the-community-back-in-wiki/?cb=1

Answer 1

I agree with Bart that the number of high-quality posts that have been converted to CW is probably very low. Still, perhaps it is low because authors have been afraid of putting too much effort into maintaining their posts. I think it will be impossible to speculate with any confidence about users' motivations. We could go check the data on DataExplorer but even with the numbers it would be hard to tell if it was chicken or egg : did the answer only become high quality after it was made CW (e.g. the edits were required), or was an already high-quality answer maintained over the threshold? I up-voted a CW post today because the author unselfishly introduced it that way.

I thought that the purpose of CW was to prevent an author from benefitting from a post that has largely been edited/maintained by other members of the community. If that is the case, then it makes little sense to penalize authors for editing the post themselves - even if it can be undone by bothering a moderator (and this requires the knowledge that a moderator can even make this can happen - which I doubt is common knowledge among the SO population).

So my suggestion is twofold, and I am going to leave out specifics intentionally:

1. Do not make an author's own edits count toward CW status (or make them count less). To offset the potential gamification of editing posts to push them to the top of the front page (which, given the speed the front page moves in tags where it is likely to make a difference), put a limit on this (such as one substantial edit per <some time frame>). It should be easy to have a reset counter of some kind per post.

2. Lower the threshold of other users' edits that push a post to CW.

Yes, this is slightly more complicated than the current system, and involves that four-letter word (change) we all seem to be so afraid of, but I think this offers a better overall system that doesn't take away anything from what's in place now.

Answer 2

Authors should absolutely be encouraged to maintain their posts. If posts can be improved over time, or kept in a good and relevant condition through substantial edits, they should not hesitate to do so. Any extra rep they get out of it is well deserved.

Of course care has to be taken that these updates do not stray away from the original question asked. You don't want to end up invalidating answers by changing the actual question.

At the same time, if an author edits their post 12 or more times, it is automatically turned into a "Community Wiki", and they lose any reputation they've earned (or will earn), which (in turn) surely discourages authors from maintaining their answers for future readers.

That is indeed the case. Now keep in mind that 12 substantial updates to a question is quite a lot. I don't know how often authors hit that limit, but I would be surprised if this is the case for a significant amount of posts. But you're right, if the author is considerably improving the content over time and keeping it relevant, reputation should not be taken away.

And it's not. That is to say, moderators will be very likely to undo the Community Wiki status, if asked to do so, in case of self-edits to a post. But you have to ask. Perhaps a solution to this inconvenience would be to explicitly state that one can ask for this situation to be undone within the appropriate community FAQ here on Meta. Additionally, an explicit notification could be considered. For example:

Your post [title] has been converted into a Community Wiki. To find out what this means and why this happened, please visit What are "Community Wiki" posts?

Together with the previous option that might substantially clarify the situation.

Answer 3

We aren't discouraging maintenance by turning a post into community wiki after 12 edits. 12 edits by one person is a lot. It is to prevent people from making lots of small changes. Once you edit the post, it goes to the top of the question list. So they are trying to prevent people from constantly editing and gaining rep. So I think this is reasonable.

It has also been mentioned that you can flag for unwikification if you have been being responsible

Answer 4

Might I add a suggestion, to the auto-CW topic

I posted an answer to a niche question roughly 6 months ago. I answered because I had an interest in this unique area of programming. As time passed and I learned more I updated my answer with new information, and occasionally restructured it to make it look more appealing. Admittedly some oft he edits were purely cosmetic, but I was unaware of auto-CW and didn't think editing could have punitive consequences. I was proud of my answer and my maintenance of it. I edited my post 12 times and it auto-CW without my knowledge. My answer was the only answer during all my edits. I could not have been editing to maliciously bump my answer to the top of the list, because the list had a length of one. When the question received a bounty I did not receive any additional reputation from the upvotes because it had been auto-CW without my knowledge.

My suggestion is that an edit should only count toward the auto-CW limit of 12 int the number of answers to the question is greater then one at the time of the edit. Surely this conditional isn't difficult to add to the tabulation and it would have spared me the feeling being punished for the maintenance of my answer.

autoWikiLimit = 12;
editCount     = 0;
bumpingEdits  = 0;

onEdit() {
  ++editCount;
 bumpingEdits += (question.getAnswers().size() > 1) ? 1 : 0;
 if(bumpingedits >= autoWikiLimit)
   makeWikiIfNotAlreadyWiki();
}

Answer 5

If the only reason for the punitive use of community wiki is the prevention of malicious bumping surely the obvious answer is to allow people the option of making an edit without bumping the question. It should be made clear that you can make X edits that bump the question with the suggestion that they be used for major edits.

Or simpler still; just stop bumping the question if certain conditions are met (probably after X edits it stops the bumping process); so, rather than allowing an undesired behaviour and then punishing it, you stop it directly

Both of these solve the problem of malicious bumping directly, rather than discouraging answer maintenance as a significant side effect

The fear of community wikification has discouraged me from updating an answer that had long term relevance at least once.

Answer 6

Maintaining old answers results in Q&A pairs where

• only one of the answers is updated to today's knowledge
• the updated answer refers to newer technology than the question
• the state of votes reflects the pre-update answer

Authors should not be encouraged to maintain old answers.