Is converting link-only answers to Community Wiki working?

Question

For a few months now, link-only answers have been subject to a new policy where they are given notice to improve, then converted to Community Wiki. This has the result of reducing the threshold to edit to just 100 rep, and also stops any further reputation changes for the author (they will neither gain nor lose any more rep after conversion).

From the linked post:

Rather than swooping in right away and deleting the post, this offers a positive means of informing people about our standards and giving them an opportunity to correct the problem themselves. If not, hopefully we as a community can do it.

I thought this was an interesting idea, so I set up a Data Explorer query to see if this was working as intended.

• 77 answers were converted to Community Wiki by a moderator

Out of these 77 answers:

• 13 answers (17%) were edited after conversion to Community Wiki (by either the OP or a member of the community)

  • 7 answers (9%) were later edited by their owner after CW conversion

  • 5 answers (6%) were converted to CW, then edited by a moderator.

  • 1 answer (1%) was later edited by another user (this answer).

Only one post was actually edited by another user.

That's a little disappointing. Given the fact that administrating this is a lot more difficult than just outright deleting these posts, it might be time to consider whether this policy is working well, or how the community can help.

• Here are the 62 answers that were never edited after CW conversion. It might be worth organising interested users to try and clean these up and improve them, or get rid of them altogether if they're unsalvageable.

• Another thing to discuss: are the link-only answers worth keeping in their current state, or would it be easier to just delete link-only answers upon flagging? The obvious disadvantage of this is that you lose the information that the link does contain, which might have actually been a solution. Equally, there's the argument that bad answers act as broken windows.

I'd love to hear everyone else's thoughts on whether this policy is useful and how we can improve the situation as a community (that's if the situation needs improving—one option could be that this is fine as it is!).

Answer 1

I'd love to hear everyone else's thoughts on whether this policy is useful

I had thought we'd given up on this a number of months ago; I've just returned from a six week hiatus, and the chat rooms used to handle this have disappeared.¹

I haven't looked back through the mod chat logs but my recollection is that Ghanima, Jacob, and I discussed this briefly and decided it was not worth the bother. The post you link in your first sentence ("...link-only answers have been subject to a new policy...") contains a note added by me:

[As of June/17 our policy includes converting these to comments.]

I think I chose "includes" here to indicate it was an option we were using, and that's what I've been doing since then (excluding old answers with upvotes, since that seems unfair). This is more in keeping with an orthodox "not an answer" interpretation.

Only one post was actually edited by another user.

Thanks for the stats! A 1 in 6 success rate is actually not as bad as I would have guessed, and almost justifies the strategy...

Almost. I'm fine with the much easier convert-to-comment. My biggest problem with link-only answers is serial offenders, and that deals with such effectively.

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^{1. Or more accurately shown as frozen/deleted -- however the last post appears to be "4 days ago" O_o? ...Looking back through the posts for whatever reason I only see times and not dates, as if they were all from today. In any case, the public one ("Link Only Community Holding Pen") is not visible to normal users.}

Answer 2

I'm relatively new here, but, for what it's worth, I think this was a bad policy in general made worse by the non-conformance with the rest of the SE universe. There's nothing apparently special about this instantiation of SE that makes the issues raised in the question different than any other instantiation of SE. In all of them, for example, if you delete you lose the information that's at the link. The underlying reason for this policy is that the links typically go dead over time anyway, so there is no archival value and the Q&A gets mucked up with non-response answers over time. Going back to clear those out later - even as "Community Wiki" - is just kicking the can down the road. It's probably kicking it so far down the road that it never gets cleaned up.

I suggest that these should be handled as on other SE sites - Flagged and then deleted. It allows someone else who thinks there's some merit to the information at the link to post a "high quality" answer that includes the link. Editing very low-quality posts should also be discouraged so as not to reward people making such posts.

EDIT

In light of the comments, I'm adding a screen capture of what you get in the very low quality review queue for those following along who may not have seen a VLQ instance in the process of getting deleted. Note the comment on this one that has one vote to be deleted. The message was populated when the first person chose a reason for deleting and is visible to the person who posted. That comment will get up-votes as additional people vote to delete it. Just to point out that the normal review process already has feedback built-in.

There's also nothing to stop someone from responding to that feedback and improving the answer before or after it is deleted. Even on SO where these sometimes get reviewed quickly, I sometimes get a response from the author on these through the comments, so it's definitely possible. Even more so on a small site like this where it will take a while for enough people to review to cause the deletion.

Finally, there's nothing to stop you from adding an additional comment at the time with a more custom suggestion. Again, as part of the normal review process.

While I totally see that the idea discussed on this question is well-intentioned, I think it's a bad idea to try to make this one site work differently than the rest, especially since the underlying problem - in this case and in my opinion - does not exist in the first place.