I have no real objection if others want a community wiki (or whatever it should be called) post type, but want to point out that these never really worked right on SE. I'm very unlikely to make of such a post type.

I can see how it sounds nice at first glance, but take a look at some real examples. The problem is that multiple authors don't always agree on style, content, presentation order, and any other of the many considerations a single author gives to their work.

These types of many-author posts suffer from the too many cooks in the kitchen problem. The result is usually too confusing or messy than the coherent vision of a single author.

I have had a few of my posts on SE converted to community wiki. None of those were good experiences. Especially when writing a canonical post, I think carefully about presentation order, formatting, how things are explained, what to get into and what not, etc. Others don't know what my design considerations were, don't care, and have different ones anyway. The result was usually adding something distracting I deliberately left out, put in the wrong presentation order, or whatever.

If others think they have a better way of presenting something I wrote, I'd rather they either mention it in a comment and let me decide, or write their own post.

I don't see a problem writing canonical posts that are then used to close duplicates, even if you're the one to suggest the closing. It tends to be the high-rep users that write the canonical posts, since they know what question keep popping up. Those are the people you want writing the canonical posts, and those are the people most likely to notice the duplicates. I don't see a problem here.

I also don't see a problem getting a rep bump from duplicates pointed at your canonical post. You're answering the question, and you did the work to make the answer available. The result is something beneficial to the site, so you should be incentivized to do that.

posted over 3 years ago

CC BY-SA 4.0

Olin Lathrop‭

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