Remove Reputation gained from Questions and Answers turned Community Wiki

Question

This is from my answer here. It sparked some interest, and I felt it should have its own discussion.

Background - The Problem with Reputation

As it stands, reputation surrounding community wiki (CW) questions can be unfair or even inconsistent. This would be fixed by removing reputation gained by posting CW answers, regardless of when they were posted.

Consider when a person asks a question that should be CW, and is only later changed to match this status. Often times, people will post their answer as non-CW, often to try to get a bit of reputation before the question is migrated to CW.

Once the question is made CW, any further answers will not generate reputation. This creates an inconsistent state of reputation, where people have earned reputation off of CW questions, which should be impossible.

Arguments For Reputation

One argument was "the intent of the author was for it not to be CW". Of course, this means we would have to never change the CW status of a question and assume the poster always intends correctly. There is reason to be believe this isn't always the case, though. Sometimes the CW status of a question needs fixing, and answers should match.

This would cause a bit of rep loss for myself and others, but I feel it would create a more consistent representation of reputation. Community Wiki questions are questions that do not affect reputation at all, and then we have regular questions.

Change Request

In short, I consider the ability to keep reputation on a previously non-CW question a loophole. Loopholes, while resembling free-hand circles, are generally not good.

Answer 1

Because edits by just a few users can cause a question or answer to become community wiki, removing all rep from questions/answers that become community wiki will not work. All you would need is a cabal of 4 people who agree to edit all or some significant fraction of a person's answers and/or the questions that a person has answered and you'd remove most or all of their rep. Even in the absence of nefarious conduct, legitimate questions can become community wiki simply by being around long enough to be edited by several people or because you've taken the trouble to keep it up-to-date. Losing rep because a question gets edited into community-dom is worse than the problem the solution attempts to correct.

From the FAQ:

How does a post become a Community Wiki post?

There are several ways a question or answer can enter community wiki mode, and most of these ways will occur automatically based on the rules of the system.

Posts enter community wiki mode when:

• The body of the post has been edited six times by at least four different people.
• The post has been edited eight times by the original owner.
• The post's author checks the community wiki checkbox when composing the question or answer.
• The post is edited by its original author, who when doing so opts to check the community wiki.
• The question generates more than 30 answers. In this case, the question and all answers will enter community mode, as will any future answers.

Answer 2

I actually back this proposal. However, there is the problem mentioned by tvanfosson, which I didn't think about until he brought it up.

I think, in order for this to work, the mode of conversion to wiki would have to have some impact on whether or not to remove rep gained. And unfortunately, I don't know if how a question came to be wiki is tracked.

In my mind, the following options should remove rep:

• The post's author checks the community wiki checkbox when composing the question or answer.
• The post is edited by its original author, who when doing so opts to check the community wiki.
• [not mentioned in FAQ] A mod sets the post to be community wiki.

And the following options should not:

• The body of the post has been edited six times by at least four different people.
• The post has been edited eight times by the original owner.
• The question generates more than 30 answers. In this case, the question and all answers will enter community mode, as will any future answers.

The reason is these last 3 really are the system conversions to wiki, whereas the first three are intentional state changes by someone of authority (either the author or a mod).

With a system like this, I'd be totally behind the idea.

Answer 3

Perhaps a compromise could be to make all existing answers CW once the question is made CW regardless of how it was converted.

That would remove the loop hole described here:

Consider when a person asks a question that should be CW, and is only later changed to match this status. Often times, people will post their answer as non-CW, often to try to get a bit of rep before the question.

But other than that I don't see the real benefit in changing the system. It works 95+% of the time.

Answer 4

Please don't do this. Community Wiki is muddy enough as it is. The few people who might benefit from it don't really understand what it is, and adding incentive to force more questions into Wiki would just make it the ultimate mosh pit.