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I was trying to learn a bit more about community wikis (see help doc here) and it seems like several of the questions asked on Bioacoustics SE at this stage may be really well suited to a community wiki. To summarize - a community wiki is an answer that no one gets reputation points for, and anyone can edit. We already have an example one here: 'Foundational Literature' in Terrestrial Bioacoustics. What do users think?

I see two question types that might make good wikis:

(1) Questions about how to do some particular thing, that may have several possible answers because you can use different programs, etc. A few examples:

Easy way to split .wav files

Software for calculating long-term spectral averages

(2) Questions that ask about "standards" or conventions such as

Are there conventions for describing the visual representation of sounds on a spectrogram (i.e. names for shape patterns)?

Edit:

Just putting a link to this question here as it seems like another good candidate for a community wiki

Bioacoustics conferences question

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    $\begingroup$ Maybe it is too early at the beginning of beta phase? Now it is certainly good when many users get points for good questions. $\endgroup$
    – pabouk - Ukraine stay strong
    Commented Jul 7, 2022 at 21:07
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    $\begingroup$ Relevant FAQ on MSE: What are "Community Wiki" posts? In general, there's little reason to use community-wiki status on most posts. It only really makes sense to apply it when you're dealing with something like a canonical Q&A that's intended to be openly editable by everyone – and specifically, edited often to keep it up to date. (See Mark's answer below.) $\endgroup$
    – V2Blast Staff
    Commented Jul 26, 2022 at 22:17
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    $\begingroup$ Even if a post is not made community-wiki, users without the ability to edit others' posts directly can usually suggest an edit. (The one exception I know of is on Meta sites, where users without that privilege can't edit others' posts at all – they can only edit posts they didn't write if the post has community-wiki status applied to it. This is usually done mainly for FAQs about the site/its policies, where the question and answer are meant to represent the consensus of the community rather than any one user's opinion.) $\endgroup$
    – V2Blast Staff
    Commented Jul 26, 2022 at 22:18
  • $\begingroup$ To discuss how to change a post into a wiki, in practice, see the other selene's post here $\endgroup$
    – Noil
    Commented Oct 17, 2022 at 8:37
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    $\begingroup$ Others threads which could benefit from a wiki (because they will be kept being updated forever): Holistic intro to Bioacoustics, Bioacoustics in audio-art performances, What software to downsample large audio file $\endgroup$
    – Noil
    Commented Oct 17, 2022 at 8:40
  • $\begingroup$ @Noil Would it help to have a meta post for each one of these questions you flagged here, so that we can tag them accordingly and sort of make a "to-do" list to have the moderators conver them? I'm happy to help tackle editing once they are converted to a CW. In that case we could also have post-specific discussion in case someone had a strong argument AGAINST converting any of the suggestions. $\endgroup$
    – selene
    Commented Oct 17, 2022 at 16:13
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    $\begingroup$ @selene Do you mean to add posts in this thread? Another possibility would be to flag these post for moderator's attention (built-in flag option), and then if they are flagged by several people, moderators can decide whether or not it is worth turning them into a wiki, which is maybe the standard way to do so in SE? $\endgroup$
    – Noil
    Commented Oct 18, 2022 at 8:36
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    $\begingroup$ @Noil I was proposing a separate meta post per each main SE candidate CW question, but yes, flagging would be good too! Maybe we should ask the moderators what they prefer...I tried tagging them here but since they aren't in this thread that didn't work but maybe we can ping them on the chat. $\endgroup$
    – selene
    Commented Oct 18, 2022 at 15:07

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This is a really great idea that we should may be push more.

The main criteria should be if the question is of very broad interest (an admittedly vague term!). The terrestrial literature list + split wave files is indeed a great set of examples.

However I do agree w @pabouk, it may be best to wait it out a bit and let people's time reflect directly to points first before we suggest that member's points are 'donated' to wiki answers.

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Based on my experience on other sites, there are two situations where "community wiki" works well:

  1. Questions where many people have part of the answer, but nobody has the entire answer. An example of this would be Seasoned Advice's list of cooking terms in various languages.
  2. Canonical answers, where people frequently ask minor variations of the same question. Again from Seasoned Advice, the canonical food-safety question.
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Perhaps we can identify questions we think might be worth of consideration as wiki (as a comment on that question), and we can vote up on that comment if we agree with it. If we disagree-- then we can add a comment that we DO NOT think it should be a wiki (and why). Then people can choose to vote on the either the comment to WIKI or on the comment to NOT WIKI.

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I think this discussion was sparked because I Community Wiki'd this question. As I mentioned in the comment I left upon doing that:

I've made this post a Community Wiki because it is a 'list of X' type of question that contains enough value to avoid deletion. That being said, these types of questions are some times maintained on Meta, rather than the main site — see an example on Japanese Language.

If you've read through the Help Center, at some point you'll have stumbled upon What types of questions should I avoid asking?, one of which are questions where:

every answer is equally valid: “What’s your favorite ______?”

That means that, for that question, I could either have closed it as off-topic because it does not adhere to the format our platform allows, or, since it had some value, I converted it to a Community Wiki (CW) with the intention that y'all do some clean-up on it and make maintaining that list a community effort. I even pointed to an example elsewhere on the network of how that's done, in case y'all needed some pointers, and further mentioned that some sites keep these on their Metas because they're generally considered off-topic for the main site but still have some value as FAQ-type questions.

Maybe I shoulda been clearer about the expectations around the question, so apologies for that.

As Grace Note wrote one this blog post about CW a while back:

Community wiki is for that rare gem of a post that needs true community collaboration. That’s when community wiki shines.

I recommend reading through the whole article, but essentially the quote above explains the general use-case for CWs: if you're gonna have an ever-growing list of answers, none of which is "more correct" than the other, AND the question is definitely on-topic, maybe it's a good candidate to CW.

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Something that could be taken into consideration to decide when a thread should be changed to a wiki:

Reputation earned for [deleted] posts with a score of 3 or higher, and where the [deleted] post has been visible on the site for at least 60 days, is retained

(from this Meta response)

So I would suggest either:

  • move to a wiki quickly after a question has been asked
  • or wait for 60 days for old posts to be changed to wiki
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    $\begingroup$ It's good that you're expressing concern for people "losing" their reputation points, and trying to avoid that, but to me this feels like being too careful. I think "move to a wiki quickly" is a good suggestion, but otherwise I don't think we should be too fragile about accumulated points. We don't plan to use the moderator "convert to wiki" option frequently, I think; it shouldn't have much impact on people's points. $\endgroup$
    – Dan Stowell Mod
    Commented Oct 17, 2022 at 15:45
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    $\begingroup$ I agree with @DanStowell that the points lost shouldn't be a primary concern. To me, the conversion to a wiki is worth me losing any possible points, but that is just my opinion and interest in the site (I want points to be able to help run the site but don't need to have the most!) $\endgroup$
    – selene
    Commented Oct 17, 2022 at 16:07
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    $\begingroup$ Now that there is a moderation team in place and the community understands a bit more about wiki's, that we will be more proactive with new posts that are potential wiki's, but this is obviously not possible with questions that were asked months ago, in private beta, etc. So yes moving forward, we'll go with option 1, but the debate is more so about how to retroactively deal with previous posts. All of them do happen to be 60 days old, for what it's worth. $\endgroup$
    – Carly Batist Mod
    Commented Oct 17, 2022 at 16:28
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    $\begingroup$ @CarlyBatist maybe you and the other mods can discuss here or over on chat - what would be your preferred approach to us flagging or listing or working through the older posts that make sense to convert? See noil and my comments below the initial question. I couldn't ping you up there. $\endgroup$
    – selene
    Commented Oct 18, 2022 at 15:11

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