How to manage a community wiki?

Question

CKEditor is not easy to set up correctly. It actually took me a while to figure it out.

After trying to help out in a number of threads where people struggling with this beast, I thought it was a good idea to collect all the bits and pieces scattered around and have a sort of canonical question that people could be referred to when they had this problem.

There would be a list with the "standard" answers, and if none of them solved the problem, people could add their own. I was under the impression that on SE, this sort of thing was called a "community wiki", and that it was an accepted practice here.

Here is the pair: How do I debug a CKEditor installation on Drupal 7?

To make my intentions clear (i.e. that this was intented as a community wiki), I added the following paragraph at the end:

If none of the answers given to this question helps you, please edit this question and add details about what you've tried so far to solve your problem, and any details you can offer about your configuration. You can add information under the line below. (AFIK, there is no longer possible to create a community wiki question, but this question will enter the community wiki when it has been edited by at least 5 different users, this is intended.)

However, the part of the text quoted above was promptly deleted by one of the diamod mods, with a note that:

nobody should edit somebody else's question to add details for their own case

To me, it is important to encourage users to edit the question. Here's why:

When trying to help out, my attempts to answer usually resulted in a "didn't work" response, but this also prompted the OP to add more detail to the question. That additional detail allowed me (after a few rounds) to reproduce their problem at my test site and hence propose a solution.

Most of these users seemed to be pretty inexperienced (nothing bad about that - we all were there at one time), and would not be able to improve anything by editing the answer. It was the additional detail added to the questions by the user with the problem that allowed me to improve the answer.

By setting up the wiki the way I did, and in particular by explicitly encouraging users that didn't have their problem solved by the present answers to add new detail to the question (which then would be removed again after a solution found and the case added to the list of solutions), the wiki would evolve.

I've of course nothing against anyone adding stuff directly to the answer (that is in the nature of wikis), but I believe that without getting fresh problem reports form those with problem, this will be a static affair with little chance of catching new problems and solving those.

I won't add any encouragement to add new problem cases to the question before I get a clear OK from the mods here on meta that it's OK (i.e. I won't start an edit war) - but if I think the wiki would work better if user's were encouraged to add details about new problems they experience to the question.

Answer 1

For the last day, I have been trying to understand what happened with this question, and to be honest I am fairly confused.

CW posts lower the barrier for people to be able to edit posts, and by removing reputation rewards from them they become more of a community effort.

That doesn't relieve them from any of the restrictions of "normal" posts. Questions should be as concise as possible, and should represent real-world problems.

The question linked above does represent this. The only problem that I saw with the original, was the extraneous parts at the bottom (which were edited out). That type of information should be reflected in comments. And, that is a good use of comments to try to flesh out a good, canonical answer for this topic.

The edits to CW questions should be done to benefit all future readers and not just one future reader. So, editing to add in additional details could be done, but it has to be done in a generic enough way. Another way to state this is that we can add in additional symptoms, but it can't be for a unique, specific case.

I think of it this way. A user asks a CKE question, and we close as dup, pointing to this question. We also leave a comment saying, if this doesn't help you, edit in details to the question we closed. Someone can then try to address this specific situation, and we can see if is generic enough to warrant updating the canonical question / answer.

See also: http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2011/01/the-wikipedia-of-long-tail-programming-questions/

Answer 2

Questions are not supposed to be edited by other users to add details that interest just them. Edits should not change the meaning of a question, even Community Wiki questions. The fact a question is CW just means it can be put in shape by users who have a reputation lower than the reputation required to edit a post made from others; since the introduction of suggested edits, making a question CW doesn't have the same meaning it had before, and it is now used for those questions meant to be canonical questions or similar cases.

If you need a question to be CW, just flag it for moderation attention. Suggesting to make enough edits to make it CW is a bad practice that should avoided; in some way, it is abusive.

As side note, the edit summary for my edit says "nobody should edit somebody else's question to add details for their own case"; if somebody has more information about the steps to follow to debug the issue, they can add them to the answer, when the answer is CW (which also happens when the question being answered is CW).
The edit removed the following part:

If none of these help, please edit this question by editing detail about your case to it.