Please add deprecation message to "community wiki" checkbox

When one asks question or gives answer on this site, one has ability to create a “community wiki” post by checking relevant checkbox. The checkbox is labeled “community wiki (karma is not awarded & many others can edit wiki post):”.

However, reading through many posts in this site, it’s clear that new users are generally unaware if they need this checkbox, and check it very often when it’s clearly useless (and even wrong, because this disallows others to increase their karma by upvoting their questions/answers).

Can an admin change the label text next to this checkbox to make it prominent that average used most possibly SHOULD NOT check it? Something like:

community wiki (karma is not awarded & many others can edit wiki post). Not needed for general use. Please DO NOT check unless you understand what you are doing!

Good point! I would even let this feature be available only for those who both have a karma of 500+ and are here longer than a year.

+1 Good topic.

Since this site is called “ASK LibreOffice” ( rather than “Post a LibreOffice Wiki” ), i would suggest to discontinue the Wiki checkbox entirely.

Thanks, Mike.

For comparison, this is what Stack Exchange does to prevent invalid uses of community wiki:

  • Remove the community wiki checkbox when asking a question (as of October 2010)
  • Display a confirmation dialog when checking the “community wiki” box, stressing the irreversibility of this action (as of July 2015)
  • Require at least 10 rep to create community wiki posts

I posted the message below on the Askbot site a week ago,* and it is still “awaiting moderation”, although I have positive “karma” on that site, and previous posts, etc. I post it here, as I think this is getting worse, not better.

* Update: Finally approved and posted as of 27.04.2018 – fully a week after posting.


I am active on the LibreOffice Askbot site. Many “casual” users show up with a problem, and many post their questions as “Community Wiki” (even worse, I think, since Q&A at that link was posted), which produces this in the attribution label:

This post is a wiki. Anyone with karma >75 is welcome to improve it.

New users asking their questions as a “community wiki” inhibit the proper working of the site, especially:

  • they cannot get “reputation” from upvotes on their question, so fail to gain trust and privileges on the site; and
  • the question (almost) always is NOT suitable as a “community wiki” (I have never seen one that was suitable).

One solution would be to make the threshold for posting a question as “community wiki” the same as the editing threshold, i.e., > 75. By the time users have accrued that much rep, they are able to appreciate what they are doing.

Even better if it was much higher, as one commenter suggests.

Hmm… I’d assume that this problem should be solved by DTF infra, not by developers of software that is used as engine here. (I suppose that the functionality is already there - but I might be wrong; in that case, of course, asking developers of Ask is the right thing.)

DTF – I’d guess TDF was intended, The Document Foundation.

Added the request in the website mail list.

link text

Many thanks for nudging this forward! As the single response (at this writing) to your request mentions, this could be a simple fix for the official site mods. It would be a small but still wonderful thing to get this actioned! ¶ As for seeking consensus, this is one of the two most up-voted questions on the site ("+13", along with a Q about open-type features). I don’t think Guilhem needs to look any farther for “consensus”—that’s what these voting mechanisms are for, after all.

I think the guy who wrote askbot isn’t very fair or open to input. He has this meta ask site. I wrote there about getting something done on this issue, and my Q there was put on hold forever, and finally quietly deleted. I mean you start out with 1 point there, and so can’t say anything with it being censored. … I had a very good Q there quoting the key high level people at this site about how this isn’t working here… … So go figure. I think this silly meta issue will be with us until he is replaced.

May be more clear for them doing a new thread just for vote and link it in the mail list?.