why “Good & Bad Maps” changed to community wiki

Question

The first day the examples of good and bad maps questions went up someone flagged them as "should be community wiki". I personally resisted for a few days because in the wake of the recent removal of CW check box on new questions I have some confusion as to what should or shouldn't be community wiki, and waited to see what the other moderators would do.

Today in "Should poll questions be Community Wiki?" I found a sentiment which crystalized things for me and I acted.

In principle, there's no reason why they should be [community wiki]. Either the question is off-topic and should be removed, or it's on-topic and its wiki state should be at the discretion of its author.

In practice, there's a very good reason why they should be: polls work very, very poorly when answers cannot be voted on without giving or taking rep from the voters and votees. Furthermore, when posting a popular answer stands to garner rep for its author, there's more temptation to post a duplicate rather than up-voting an existing answer. And making a question CW is the only way to force all answers to be CW as well.

So long as the system continues to work this way, poll questions should always be CW for practical reasons. Admins should force this upon them if the original author neglects to do so...

Belatedly I realised with this act I effectively pushed Poll questions should be Community Wiki as a general GIS.se policy without discussion, and I only momentarily hold a Moderator's torch. So, please do tell us what your thoughts are about this. Thanks.

Answer 1

I don't particularly mind either way as long as people still post good answers. A question being CW has never deterred me from posting an answer, and so I hope the same can be said for everyone on this site.

I do like CW for my question as it alleviates me the duty of choosing an accepted answer, but besides that I see no benefit. I think the answers to both questions are useful to the community (and I hope people continually upload examples for a long time!)

Answer 2

I created a poll tag so people can filter on that if they want.

Also, while I applied the tag to Modern day John Snow I did not convert to CW. My reasoning being that while our site is in beta and not yet 'healthy' across the board we shouldn't limit reputation growth too quickly. So, my stance is to wait a bit and let the question develop first, and mark CW later. This is a personal opinion, everybody else should of course act as they see fit, that's what makes this system work.