user 3.14159
How about having means to make an answer a community wiki? That is, no one editing it, including the first one to write it, earns stars for their personal score. I feel that there are situations in which one individual user can only give a partial answer but the community may provide a (more or less) complete answer. For instance, if one asks about the list of deprecated LaTeX packages, there should be IMHO just one but complete answer rather than several which rise to the top depending on how often they got starred.
So wiki answers would have the benefit of having the answer better organized. To be more specific, consider the possible question
> Which LaTeX packages are known to be mutually incompatible.
It is quite likely that not a single user can answer this, or will have the passion to do all the research to do that properly. In a wiki answer we could have *one* answer which sorts the packages (say alphabetically) and the information is much more accessible than having, say, 67 independent answers, which may also vary in their style.
There are many more examples in which the answers will be sort of encyclopedic, and the otherwise very useful way of ranking answers may not make too much sense.
One may say that the current settings do not prevent someone from editing an original answer to make it more complete. This is true, but I feel that users may not be as motivated doing that as for a wiki post, the more so since these answers will be conceivably getting a lot of stars, and those who are interested in competing for stars may just not be willing to spend time to make someone else get more stars.
Top Answer
Caleb
A CW style implementation that might work for this site would be to make it a different _question post_ type (just like blog / meta questions) with a unique property that:
1. A blank answer is automatically added, owned by *nobody*.
1. Only one answer post would ever be allowed. Much like the blog posts don't allow answers at all, CW questions would only have one answer.
This is different from the SE implementation that allows multiple answer posts and a mix of post types which I've always found confusing and very rarely useful. Either a question is best answered by multiple people taking a stab at it and the best post being sorted at the top, or it is best answered by lots of edits/users over time adding to a list. Mixing and matching is almost always bad.
Answer #2
Jack Douglas
I'm unsure if we ever want something exactly like Community Wiki the way it works on SE — but I'm interested to hear arguments for and against.
> That is, no one editing it, including the first one to write it, earns stars for their personal score.
This is possible already in a roundabout way that you may like to consider. If you post the question or answer with a dummy account (for example by 'joining' from a private browser session), then no-one real will get the 'credit':
1. open private window
2. click 'join'
3. go to profile and change account name to 'Wiki'
4. post blank answer
5. close private window.
There is no need to keep access to the wiki account, one per q/a would be sensible I think. And there is no need to post any actual content as the wiki user either — that is best done with your real account.
It would be reasonably easy to fold those accounts into an official 'Wiki' feature if we decided to implement one at a later date.
In general I think this should only be used for those rare cases where an answerable question is posted that absolutely requires a group effort to answer. Normally if you post an answer, I think you should take the credit for it, even if you are just quoting documentation.