I like to edit my answers. To clarify, illuminate, add examples, add links, point to new information as it crops up, etc.
It's highly irritating that my effort to improve my answer turns it into a Community Wiki.
Could anything be done to keep me from turning into a collective?
I concur with this one; edits from the original author shouldn't count towards community-wiki-ness.
Someone just pointed out in a comment that this post has been CW'ed. Now I'm not so much of a rep whore that this really upsets me, but it seems counterintuitive, as it effectively punishes me for making my answers better. In this case, it seems a bit unfortunate that I apparently disowned an answer with 87 upvotes. (my third-most repped answer)
I understand the rationale for turning the post CW after X edits, but it seems a lot of good answers get caught in the crossfire.
A couple of possible modifications to the rules could be:
Just a few ideas. This seems like one of the few cases where SO actually discourages positive behavior. I tend to edit my posts quite a lot, and I think that's a good thing. My answers are better than they would be otherwise.
The reason for having the questions/answers automatically going into Comunity Wiki status, was to prevent people from editing Their question/answer just to bump the question to the first page.
The only thing is, it doesn't really solve the problem, you could just go edit someone else's answer, and it would bump the question up. Or add another answer to the page, perhaps with a dummy account, and have it edit it's own answer repeatedly.
I personally would prefer it not bumping, to it becoming a Community Wiki.
If anybody wants to know where this rule came from, it was discussed on podcast #20. I have included the relevant portion of the transcript.
Atwood: -
Somebody wrote a bot that would just revise posts every minute to keep it on the top of the stack. Actually there is a certain amount of people doing that still, which I'm trying to discourage. They way I like to discourage things is, where possible, creating rules in the system that make that behavior not desirable. Not negative, necessarily, but things happen that make it not worth much to you.
So let me give you a specific example in that scenario. You have the user who's just editing their own posts every three hours so that it's always on the top of the stack. We have this concept now, it's actually implemented though I talked about it in previous podcasts, of the community owned post. Because one of the great divides in StackOverflow is that we have this ownership system where you get voted up and down, your content gets voted up and down, and that affects your reputation. You own stuff, so when you post something you own it. Then you contrast that with the Wikipedia model which is that nobody seems to own it, and we're trying to do both of those things.
At the transition point we came up with a couple rules. The initial rule I had was that edits by four different people will cause a post to switch from being owned by Joel, for example, to being owned by the community user. At that point you don't lose any reputation that you got up to that point, but any future upvotes on that content don't go to anybody they go to the content. I think this is the way it should be. Ultimately you're voting on the content more than the person anyway, so hopefully people are ok with this.
Seeing that people kept editing stuff over and over I bent the rules a little bit and said ok, if you edit your own thing more than N times then it also becomes a community owned post. There is no real value to the user, in terms of getting additional reputation, to bump stuff up to the top of the stack anymore because if you edit your own thing enough you won't get any reputation from it. It behooves you to only edit it once, or however many times you need to edit it but hopefully no more than once, and just let it sit there and have people find it organically and naturally the way it is supposed to happen.
I edit compulsively. I doubt there's any post over a few paragraphs in length that I haven't edited at least a half-dozen times.
And yet, I can't remember a single instance where I've accidentally triggered CW mode. Indeed, before SO put the checkbox on the edit screen, I struggled at times to force answers I wanted CW into CW mode!
See, I edit in spurts. A big change, followed by several small changes as I proof-read. And all that happens within the 5-minute grace period, so most of them don't even show up in revision history (much less the more lenient CW trigger).
So, my advice then, is... save up your edits. Make 'em count. Open a text editor, and make your changes while you're researching, then submit them en-mass. Not only does this reduce the chance that you'll inadvertently trigger CW, it provides those reading the front page with more of a reward for clicking through to see what changed when the question gets bumped by your edit...
Kaveh brought up some valid points, points I've been considering for a while during some thoughts I've had on community wiki.
- it doesn't seem to be very effective in preventing too many small edits,
- it is abusing a feature which seems to have been designed with a different goal and using it as a punishment,
- it has side-effects like reasonable edits over reasonable periods of time causing a post to become CW.
1 isn't as much one I follow as much as, it didn't do much about too many small edits. It was just "Wiki, we're done here", and that's it. No one is told that it happened, no one is told why it happened, and no one is told what shouldn't have happened. The other two, especially the second, are very much on point about the issue.
It is my pleasure to announce that we will no longer automatically turn your edited answers to community wiki. Or any posts at all - all of the automatic triggers in the system have been removed. In their place, we have setup a number of alert flags that are given to moderators in the event of too much revision activity or too much answer activity. The point of these will be to help identify when their is abuse, and have it handled much more appropriately.
I edit like crazy. If my answer reaches the top of the list, I edit even more. There is always something I forgot to add, something that could have been said better, a sentence best followed by a code example or refinements based on comments.
While I usually refrain from editing other people's posts unless some glaring error remains after leaving a comment to point it out, I edit my own religiously. I've been nailed by the same thing a few times, actually I became rather upset the first time. I'm at 9k something now, I'd be well over 10k if I actually earned the rep from every up vote.
I really don't care about rep anymore. Well, sure I do care, but not to the point that I won't correct or add something to make my answer better, even if it means not seeing a number on a web page increment.
Due to having my site in my profile, I've actually received email regarding some of my answers, not just comments, especially on controversial topics. Make edits when you need to correct or augment something, even if it means your score at the top of the page doesn't increment as much as it would. The answer is what matters, if you care enough to edit in the first place.
Besides, you still earn badges.
My proposal is this:
Increase the amount of times the author can edit a post before making it CW. I suggest making this 8 or 10.
Edits that are done by the same user(including author) within 5-10 minutes(to taste) within each other are not counted and will not rebump the question.
The first 15 minutes a question/answer is posted, none of the edits count.
1 will help with improving answers/questions as more research is done. 2 will fix the minor-edit problem for whenever you make an edit and then discover you misspelled something, and then after discover your formatting is a bit wrong. 3 will fix the problem for when someone posts a poorly formatted question on a popular topic and 6 people edit it at the same time.
The reason this is in place, if I remember correctly, is to prevent people form endlessly bumping their posts with edits.
I agree that it is a pain though.
Not bumping through edits would prevent sediment churn, which means old (and possibly wrong) information would be left to fester and die in the bowels of the system -- unseen and unloved. That's much more toxic to our community than someone sacrificing a few reputation points.
Our CW threshold is quite generous; I suggest adapting your workflow to do fewer, larger edits instead.
Remember: getting good information out into the world, and getting answers, are the real goal, not arbitrary points -- so we have to favor processes that further that goal.
Also, being a hybrid system, we have aspects of wiki (information-first) and traditional bulletin board / blog (owner-first), but there's always a tension in balancing those aspects of the system.
I was wondering, now that CW for questions has become a mod privilege shouldn't we also update this automatic triggering?
I understand the problem that Jeff refers to but it seems to me that it is not a good way of preventing too many edits:
Can't we come up with some other way of discouraging too many small edits? E.g. how about limiting the number of edits a user can perform on his own posts over some period? in a way similar to limits on the number of questions a user can post?
I just accidently triggered the auto community wiki by editing my answer to this question:
What should I know to select a power supply?
I just wanted to point out other good points from other answers even though mine was accepted as the answer. I guess i should have just used comments. And you cannot even rollback. I guess I know from now on and there is no way to reverse it.
I think we should continue to leave the CW bumping. The system works fine as it is.
I have seen quite a few instances where people abuse the system with editing and bumping, and if the system didn't automatically change the post to CW, they would gain a lot more reputation for this abusive behavior.
