How should this site be using community wiki?

Question

It has already been brought up to use the community wiki feature of stack exchange as this site is in its early beta state.

The existing example is to convert an answer(you can no longer do this for posts) to community wiki so the SmugMug FAQ can be covered and filled in by the community at large. I am not sure what was meant by the SmugMug FAQ, maybe the help site(http://help.smugmug.com/)?

It is important to point out what the stack exchange community at large has determined the fate of community wiki to be. In this post the piece that I think is most relevant to the above example is this:

The intent of community wiki in answers is to help share the burden of solving a question. An incomplete “seed” answer is a stepping stone to a complete solution with help from others; an incomplete question is a hindrance and an obstacle to getting a solution as no one understands the inquiry. It is in answers that the goal of community wiki, for the community, by the community, shows its truest colors.

Yet even in answers, true collaboration is scarce. Most of the time, a single individual can provide a complete answer. There are even times where a question looks like it’ll need a massive effort, but one gallant user steps up to the plate with an impressive and comprehensive answer.

With the ground rules above said, is this what the community here deems as a good idea to use Community Wiki? Do we want one big post that covers the SmugMug FAQ? Do we want to setup 9 posts to cover all the same things covered at the help site, then just basically quote that? Ideas?

Answer 1

I definitely haven't seen anything that warrants a community wiki question. Most often times CW is used to shoe horn in questions that don't really fit the SE model. They're either slightly off topic or too general or too trivial - but the community sees value in the information and would like to find a way to present it.

Answers don't really need to be marked as a community wiki for most things. If there are enough edits, the answer will automatically get marked as a community wiki. Remember that users can edit things without it being a CW. A CW removes a sense of ownership and diminishes the gains from posting a great answer. For the vast majority of things, normal edits and normal answers are just fine.

In this case, we don't really need to find a way to present it if its already on the SmugMug site. The information already exists. If there exists a SmugMug FAQ, we should just link it in our FAQ to start with.

This should be a site of experts answering non-trivial questions - not every possible question that somebody has about SmugMug. There's no reason we should have a question about "what color is the building SmugMug is in" or such. These kinds of questions turn off real experts even if its a common question.

Answer 2

Keep in mind that the role of Community Wiki has largely diminished in Stack Exchange with other tools like "suggested edits." See

The Future of Community Wiki

The thrust of that post is that a Community Wiki questions are exceedingly rare. If you feel a question should be made community wiki, you should take a second look at the question to consider if it belongs at all. It is more than likely the question is not a good fit for the site, and making a question "community wiki" does not fix or even excuse that.

Answer 3

I think that the community wiki is an excellent idea.

You have to understand that a lot of the folks that will be coming here are not computer savvy and in some cases do not speak english as their native language. They have an expectation that they will get answers and not criticized that their question is "wrong", or not worded right, etc. We need to be very careful and err on the side of helping. Make them mad and they will leave forever. We can edit, or help them edit their questions versus voting them down or closing it.

Once they get used to the site, a lot of them may become active Stack Exchange users and even move to other stacks like the photo.se.

If these example questions/answers are wrong for the active SM stack, then we really need to put them in the wiki so that the answers can be found. It will save on multiple users asking the same thing. Trust me, it will happen. We see it all the time on dgrin.com currently and that is part of why SE is such a great thing. The good stuff floats to the top.

Collaboration is a very good thing on these answers. I have already seen a couple examples where the answers given are not always 100% complete or accurate. It may be that there is other ways to solve the problem at hand. This is often the case with SmugMug related customization questions.

Some of what gets asked here may be a duplication of the SmugMug help pages. But I don't see that as a huge problem. There are some things that are hard to locate depending on the keywords used etc. Links would be great. But if someone has come here looking for answers, lets help them find the answer. Wiki, Stack, or however else it best gets them where they need to be.

So my vote is yes, lets get the wiki started and move over the items that are not perfect for the Q/A but need to be visible to new users.