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Comments on Do we have/should we have community wikis?
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Do we have/should we have community wikis?
Over at Software Development, I've tried to write a self-answered Q&A that addresses the by far most common FAQ of all time in the topics of C and C++ programming.
When posting it on SO, I would have made such a post "community wiki", meaning that I would up all claims & credits for the post and the rep generated by it and let anyone edit it and add further details.
The only benefit of doing so for me as the author, is that I will be able to use the post as a "canonical duplicate" target in the future and close posts pointing at the canonical one. But that might be frowned upon in case I'm partial - it might be regarded as if I use close votes as a way to draw more attention to my own posts.
While what I truly wish for above all, is to have a nice, detailed post that I can clobber down endless FAQ duplicates with. (A bonus if it is better and more detailed than the corresponding post on SO.) I'm certain that similar FAQs exist all across the various Codidact communities.
My questions:
- Do we have the ability to create community wikis? I can't find anything about it on the site.
- If we don't have that ability, then should we have it?
I'm particularly interested in scenarios like the one above, to create canonical Q&A that can be used as duplicate targets. And not so much in creating general "good to know" posts/articles/documentation with a wiki separate from Q&A, for the reasons described here.
Update: We didn't do what I proposed here, but we instead created a wiki post type. See there for details. I wro …
3y ago
Alternatively, we could just make a policy that it's OK to close vote posts as duplicates even when you are the original …
3y ago
At a high level, given the proposed use-cases of canonical FAQs and Wiki categories, this sounds like a somewhat more ge …
3y ago
I have no real objection if others want a community wiki (or whatever it should be called) post type, but want to point …
3y ago
Post
Update: We didn't do what I proposed here, but we instead created a wiki post type. See there for details.
I wrote a GH ticket based on this suggestion, with the following expansion:
We should avoid the term "community wiki", which was sometimes confusing on Some Other platform too. If we need a name for the type of post that has this designation, we could call it "freely editable" or "shared resource" or something else.
The author of a post should, at creation time or in an edit, be able to designate a post as having this status. The author shouldn't be able to reverse this setting later, so there should be a suitable warning in the UI.
Setting this status should have the following effects:
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The post is labelled somehow in the UI as being freely editable. (This might be accomplished by having the System user show up as the "author" or might be explicit. Maybe an icon with an informative tooltip?)
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Anybody with the Participate Generally ability can edit the post without the edit having to be reviewed. Users without this ability can suggest edits.
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The post does not contribute to anybody's "post score" computation (for abilities) or reputation.
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MAYBE: change the license type? I'm not sure what would be suitable here. At the very least, "attribution" seems murkier with this kind of post.
To be determined: Should the post remain "owned" by the creator, or should it become owned by the System user? If the latter, should anybody receive edit notifications? (The author would have, but if it's System... that doesn't work.) One way to allow users easy access to their work, without retaining ownership, would be for System to own the post and for the initial revision to show in the author's actions. (All edits should show up as actions regardless; the initial post is the thing that might get lost if we don't take action.)
The GH issue links back to this meta post, so discussion here will be seen by whoever picks up this request.
I see there is some discussion in comments about a "wiki" category versus editable posts. Communities might also want to have wikis, but I think there are also use cases for canonical Q&A that's part of Q&A. Who can edit is orthogonal to what type of post is this, in my opinion. In a wiki category all posts should have this designation; they'll probably also all be articles, not questions and answers. But there might be canonical answers in Q&A that should, unlike all other Q&A, be broadly editable, so that's why I see this as a post-level designation.
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