What exactly do we believe about Community Wiki posts?

Question

Thinking about the concept and practice of Community Wiki more often than not these past few days as come to a head: what exactly does TeX.SX believe about community wiki? What questions count, and what questions don't?

Reading The Future of Community Wiki has me thinking that community wiki should only be used when the content needs to be edited from time to time, like our LaTeX Editors and IDEs question. Similarly, something like How can I explain the meaning of LaTeX to my grandma? is not community wiki because it does not need to be edited often if at all. The question is applicable to the entire TeX community and, while each answer is valid, there is a best answer as far as OP was concerned - the answer that his grandmother supposedly understood.

As with anything, there are many ways to approach a problem. There isn't "one right answer" to anything, and this lack of a single answer is what drives many questions to CW which isn't the point. The recent question Showcase of optical illusions made with TeX/LaTeX/LuaTeX/ConTeXt is a perfect example of this; while there is no one right answer, the answers will not need to be edited. While the sum of the answers is a community effort, each individual answer is not.

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I realize that we do things a little different around here and I think that's awesome. It's what makes us special and, frankly, a generally nicer environment than many other SE sites. We don't hound around for reputation, but are we to abuse what is designed to be a specific tool for great content?

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Edit

@JosephWright reminded me that answers can be made CW by their posters. I think these are something of a nobler outlier---where the poster of the answer knows his or her answer isn't perfect but wishes it to be so. (I've done this, too.) So, I would like to concentrate this meta question on CW questions, rather than answers that are elected to be so.

Answer 1

The general rule of thumb (as I understand it) is that there should be very few community wiki questions. However, sometimes we have used them for a couple of reason: big-list questions (which are generally discouraged, but should probably be CW) and sometimes for "canonical" questions for which we expect one (or sometimes a small number) of CW answers. A canonical question is usually a question that shows up a lot as a duplicate (i.e. the same question in varying forms is asked a lot by new users). As a community, we've often decided that it's helpful to have a single comprehensive answer or set of answers to which all new duplicates can be referred. The reason for making these questions CW, I think, is that those of us who have posed such questions have done so for the general benefit of the site, and therefore think that there's no need to gain reputation from them. An example of such a question is:

• How do I use a particular font for a small section of text in my document?

(I realize now from your addendum that these questions are not the sort you are necessarily asking about, since they are proposed to be CW by the questioner from the very beginning.)

Answer 2

My understanding as a casual user, and not a god like egreg, Alan Munn or Joseph Wright, was that Community Wiki could be used for questions that were very much matters of opinion: For example, the Text Editor question referenced above, I don't think it will need updating that often (Honestly, how often do vim and emacs change in a significant way?) but there is no right answer, it is an opinion. I mean, heck, you could justify using ed as your text editor. Similarly there isn't a right answer on how to explain to your grandmother what LaTeX doesn't have a right answer. Whereas 'How do I add this to my TOC' does have right and wrong answers, and probably one that is the most right for a given situation.