How do you create Community Wiki Questions?

Question

When postings answers there is a check box for community Wiki answers. If you are posting a question how can this be made Community Wiki question as such checkbox does not appear?

Answer 1

The current list

The following search finds all our current CW topics: "wiki:1 is:question" (see also, How do I search?).

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Moderators

Making a question CW is something which moderators (but, now, only moderators) can do (moderators see the CW checkbox available when they edit a topic).

(Until 2010 users could mark their own questions as CW -- see here -- but they changed that, e.g. because it caused arguments, like "your question is slightly off-topic, so, you must mark it as CW").

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Examples on other sites

CW is and should be used rarely. It's mostly intended for collaborative topics, where there's not one best answer -- for example,

• Dictionary of regional vocabulary differences (US vs UK)

  This is one answer edited 10 times over more than 2 years

• Terminology index - a list of bike part names and cycling concepts

  This is many, separate answers; with an alphabetically-sorted list of links to each answer edited into the topic's "question".

Or for example there's,

• The Definitive C++ Book Guide and List

  This is so popular that it's CW and locked, edited nearly 100 times, and can now only be changed by their moderators (and, I guess but don't know, might have caused some disagreement if everyone tried to add their favourite book or the latest book to the list).

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CW on this site

This site has a few CW topics. They are listed here:

• Current list of all CW topics

Another example of something like CW is our,

• Useful resources (which were created collaboratively)

CW is a bit useless if it's not a collaborative effort. If there's a CW topic you'd like to create, perhaps post it here on meta first as a proposal.

Note that this site isn't really meant to be a wiki ... not trying to compete with Wikipedia.

Another time when CW might be useful is when nearly-the-same question is being asked by different people again and again -- because they're nearly the same they ought to be in one place, because they're not quite the same the answer might need to be more detailed/inclusive/edited to account for the various difference.