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Apologies if this is obvious, but I'm new here. I see the term "community wiki" bouncing around a lot and have no idea what it means. Maybe my reputation is not high enough to have access to community-wiki features?

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  • UPDATE: policy has changed since this question was last answered. ---- 1. Community wiki is no longer available on questions ---- 2. Answers can be marked Community Wiki if you want them to be worked on collaboratively: useful for gathering all the little bits in one place. Everybody with 100 reputation or more can edit CW answers.
    – Esteis
    Commented Jun 5, 2012 at 13:02
  • Meta.SE reference: What are "Community Wiki" posts?
    – Werner Mod
    Commented Feb 14, 2019 at 17:42

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
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Community wiki is just a way to let (almost) everyone edit questions and answers. There's a check box at the bottom of the question and answer input box to select community wiki. Currently, you don't have enough rep to edit community wiki posts, but that will change very soon. See the faq.

One other feature of community wiki is that no one gains reputation for questions or answers marked community wiki (which makes sense since multiple people can edit it).

Community wiki is especially useful when a question has no real right answers. For example, this question is community wiki.

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  • thanks for the clarification!
    – Brandon Kuczenski
    Commented Sep 28, 2010 at 9:37
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    I couldn't find a FAQ entry or similar describing what community wiki is, what happens to rep, guidelines when to use it and when not, etc.....should there not be one?
    – Yossi Farjoun
    Commented Oct 21, 2010 at 14:49
  • I fully agree with Yossi.
    – Milo Wielondek
    Commented Feb 16, 2011 at 20:32
  • Is it ok to edit community wiki answers in a way that changes the meaning, as in correcting it? As an example, this answer seems really imprecise to me (not differing between hyphenation rules and orthography reforms), but an edit would be more than "clarifying". The info box on the right of the editing page, however, says "clarify meaning without changing it".
    – doncherry
    Commented May 5, 2011 at 7:34
  • @doncherry: best to ask that as a question in meta.
    – TH.
    Commented May 5, 2011 at 8:14
  • @TH.: If a question I asked received an excellent answer that I'd like to reward with a belated bounty, can I still do that if the question has since been turned into a community wiki question?
    – SSilk
    Commented Sep 27, 2011 at 1:12
  • @SSilk: You should ask that as a separate question. I don't know the answer to that off-hand, but I suspect the answer is no.
    – TH.
    Commented Oct 5, 2011 at 0:33

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