Who actually owns Community Wiki posts?

Question

The post here by Monica Cellio, plainly says that community wiki is still owned by the poster.

Community wiki is the process of opening a post (question or answer) for community editing. Because they're designed to be collaborative, they stop earning reputation from the time they are given this status. However, those posts are still owned by whoever posted the first revision; the posts are linked on that user's profile, and that user will earn badges for votes, views, favoriting, and so on. Those posts are community wiki but not community-owned.

The comment by Shadow Wizard in the question referred also agrees to the same.

I think you have been confused by a very old information. The part you quoted was written six years ago when things were very different. Since then I'm 99.999% sure CW posts no longer owned by the Community account. – Shadow Wizard

However the FAQ on community user says that community wiki posts are owned by community.

How do Community Wiki posts work?

Community wiki posts work by transferring ownership of the post from the original author to the community. They make the post easier to edit and maintain by a wider group of users, but they do not contribute to any user's reputation.

The "ownwership" that Shadow Wizard and Monica Cellio are talking about is (in my opinion) in the real sense of the word, meaning the post belongs to them. I don't really know what the community wiki post is talking about when it speaks about "Ownership", but I think it is speaking in the same sense as above.

I want official clarification as to who owns community wiki posts. It would also be very very good if some experienced user edits the community wiki FAQ to reflect the official statement.

Answer 1

The post is owned, in every sense of the word, by the original poster. To a limited extent, the wider community of users shares some ownership, but the original poster is very definitely first among equals. Community ♦ has no particular connection to a CW post.

I've verified* that the original poster

• cannot vote up or down on it
• still gets badges for it
• still gets notifications for all activity on it
• still gets bounty rep awarded if it's an answer
• can still (un)delete it unilaterally
• can't flag anything on it except for mod intervention
• gets double credit for every line they contribute to the CW authorship percentage displayed
• can vote to close with 250 rep instead of 3k (if it's a question)
• can't change sort order by accepting (if the post was a self-answer)
• still has their revisions and comments highlighted as owner
• edit the post without review even if they don't have enough rep to edit CW posts

And if I'm not mistaken** the original owner can also still

• unilaterally review all suggested edits and override reviews
• confirm proposed dupes unilaterally
• have votes on the post reversed automatically if detected as part of serial voting patterns against that user

None of this is consistent with the idea that it's owned by the community. (And certainly not with ownership by Community ♦.) The community can borrow it when they come over to visit, is all.

CW is a semantic glitch in SE's tidy design, a hack that sort of mostly works, and it's tolerated because it (more or less) fills a real need. But its meaning, in practice, is a jumble of "make it easier for others to mess with, but not too easy", "rep-denial!", and "not really a real post" — even after tweaks have been applied and outreach attempted over the years to reduce those negative aspects of its definition. Its design does not include any provision to transfer ownership to anyone, so the FAQ is simply mistaken. (It does include two provisions to share some ownership privileges with the community at large — authorship percentage and lower editing rep thresholds — but even in those cases the original poster still retains a higher level of privilege than anyone else.)

_{*I've seen these happen, either on my own account or in the wild, or there's good documentation for them
**I haven't seen these happen (yet), but know of no reason to suppose they don't}

(Most of this answer was originally posted on MSO: Why can't I vote for my "own" community-wiki answer when "explicit ownership" has been removed?)

Answer 2

Looks like your first two quotes are right. At least, that's what it looks like in the Data Explorer. This query pulls a few items from the Posts table to see who owns the provided post. A google search for "community wiki" site:stackoverflow.com -site:meta.stackoverflow.com -site:blog.stackoverflow.com and then filtered to the past year gets plenty of posts that are recent and Community Wiki. Grab the ID from one, and throw it into the query.

The query shows that the user who originally made the post is who still owns the post. And if you pull up that user's profile and dig through their questions or answers, the CW post is there.

However, there's a column there 'CommunityOwnedDate', which has the timestamp of when the post was made a Community Wiki. That seems to be the thing in the DB that indicates that the post is a CW. But you'll notice that the user Community isn't involved. So the post isn't literally owned by Community. Instead it belongs to the community in the sense that anyone can now easily edit it, which seems to be the meaning of that last quote in your post.

Answer 3

The posts are owned, in the sense of which user account they're attached to, by the original poster. You'll see them on the originating user's profile, and that's the user who earns score-based badges (though, of course, no reputation). The posts are not connected to the Community user.

I think the source of your confusion is this part that you quoted (emphasis mine):

Community wiki posts work by transferring ownership of the post from the original author to the community.

"The community" refers to the group of people who care about and maintain a site. That's different from the Community user.