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From the FAQ on community wiki:

Posts enter community wiki mode when one of the following happens:

  • The body of the post has been edited† by at least five (5) different users.

I propose to remove this feature entirely, it does not serve any useful purpose in my opinion.

The decision to make a post community wiki, and to explicitly invite contributions from other users should be left to the original author. While SE sites have a wiki-like aspect, drastic edits to other user's posts are frowned upon in most situations.

Most edits fix small problems in posts: grammar, typos and smaller factual errors. Large-scale additions or rewriting of non-CW answers is not a good idea in most cases, posting a new answer with that content is often the preferred alternative.

The only thing this feature achieves is to take away the credit and possible reputation gain from the original poster if too many people edit their post. I can't actually think of any cases where this feature provides any benefit, it should simply be removed.

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    What if original author abandoned an answer and now it's the community who keeps it up to date? Why should he still have an option to gather rep on that? – Mołot Jan 23 '14 at 9:28
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    @Mołot Answers that need regular, substantial updates are rare, most of the questions that would require such answers are not considered on-topic anymore. A collaborative answer should be made CW from the start, but that doesn't meant that you should be able to force an answer to CW against the original authors intent. Just create a new CW answer and start collaborating in such a case. – Mad Scientist Jan 23 '14 at 9:32
  • @mehow This is not a duplicate, my post is about the 5 different user limit, not about the 10 edits by the original user the linked question is about. – Mad Scientist Jan 23 '14 at 9:33
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    @mehow No, those two limits have fundamentally different purposes. The 10 edits by the original user is meant to prevent excessive bumping of posts, this is a completely different issue. – Mad Scientist Jan 23 '14 at 9:35
  • @MadScientist many (if not most) of JS, CSS and HTML questions will need regular updates to their answers, as browsers changes monthly. – Mołot Jan 23 '14 at 9:38
  • @Mołot So why do you want to punish the original authors just because their answers became out of date? – Mad Scientist Jan 23 '14 at 9:39
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    @MadScientist How do I want to take away rep they gained when it was valid? I can't see where I have said that. I was sure they keep the rep earned before CW status, and I certainly want them to keep it. I just don't want to reward them for the job done by others. – Mołot Jan 23 '14 at 9:40
  • @Mołot If you're editing a post so substantially that the original author would not deserve any reputation for it anymore, you're likely doing it wrong and should post a new answer instead. If you're only fixing smaller parts of the answer, the original author still deserves the reputation. – Mad Scientist Jan 23 '14 at 9:42
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    I can agree that if original author (or anyone else, really) rolls back the answer to state from before CW status, that CW status should be retracted as well. But if nobody thinks edit was bad, and original author's work starts to be minority of the post, then it would be improper to still award him rep. – Mołot Jan 23 '14 at 9:46
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In removing the entirety of automatic triggers for community wiki, the conversion from 5 editors hitting a post has been removed.

5 edits is kinda low, and it's pretty easy for a post to be smashed by 5 users who are just editing different portions. People don't always fix everything on a post, after all. As such, a moderator flag will be raised by the Community User when a post is edited by at least 10 different users than the original author. This should help avoid the flag turning up as many false positives, but ultimately it's still not necessary that any action at all should be taken even if 10 people edited a post.

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