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How can I prepare for getting hit by a bus?

At some point, this question became community wiki but I don't see a compelling reason for it to remain so.

Just a note, there are quite a few deleted answers on that question which I'm assuming helped push it to CW status.

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I think that manually removing CW status from questions may be a slippery slope later.

CW status is automatically put in place to minimize people piling answers on high-view questions in the hopes of getting easy reputation. If we manually remove the CW status on questions, then it circumvents that mechanism, which I think is a good mechanism. We do regularly get answers on older questions, and that will increase as we continue to grow.

If we want to remove that mechanism (or change the threshold), it will make the current issue with hot questions even more pronounced in the short-term, so I'm not a fan of that idea.

Again, for this question I don't see it as much of an issue now, but I think we may want to use caution going forward in making this sort of request. At least by having this comment here, anyone who stumbles across this request in the future will realize that it should be viewed in the context of when and why it was done, rather than carte blanche to ask CW status to be removed.

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    +1: I agree. I don't know why this is an exceptional question that needs to have its CW tag removed. Although to be perfectly honest, I would fully support abolishing the rule that made it a CW to begin with. @jmort253 can you weigh in here?
    – Jim G.
    Jan 22, 2014 at 2:47
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    @JimG. what would be the reason / benefit of abolishing that rule? As far as I can tell, it was working just fine for about a year. As an example, I can understand why it was dropped at Code Golf, but I see no reason why dropping it would make sense at Workplace
    – gnat
    Jan 22, 2014 at 6:15
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    We shouldn't remove the mechanism from the site altogether, but I see no problem with reviewing specific questions on a case by case basis, especially if we've all gone through and resolved any issues with the question or answers. Ensuring they're in the best shape possible before removing this safeguard from the post permanently will help turn such questions into good examples of what our site is about while also making it easier to spot any new issues later on.
    – jmort253
    Jan 22, 2014 at 8:17
  • @gnat: Can you remind me why this rule exists in the first place? As I understand it, Jim un-CW'ed this question so that enderland could regain +5 for each upvote. Was there another reason that I'm missing?
    – Jim G.
    Jan 22, 2014 at 14:33
  • @JimG. as with any kind of CW, it is to unlock free rating of highly collaborative content (lots of answers => highly collaborative) - that is, to make answers downvoting free. Code Golf are lucky in a sense that they have objective criteria to simply delete negative content (code that doesn't work), no other sites have that strong kind of protection, they have to rely on answers voting to rate stuff
    – gnat
    Jan 22, 2014 at 15:15
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    @jmort, totally agreed that we should make the question pretty and then there's no issue, I think the problem is that we don't downvote enough mediocre answers. There are usually a handful of answers on popular questions that contribute absolutely no new information, are not written well, and collect many upvotes anyway. We need to prevent that moving forward if we want to maintain quality, but we aren't very good at downvoting....
    – jmac
    Jan 23, 2014 at 1:59
  • I, J. Random New User, for one, had no idea that CW garbage can be downvoted with impunity. Maybe a question that automatically becomes CW can have a notice that "This question has received many answers, help filter the detritus by downvoting with impunity". I think I'll go back to all the CW questions I've read and offer downvotes and tips where I can... Should I?
    – Moop
    Mar 20, 2014 at 13:57
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Removing the automated community wiki status is something we should approach with the understanding that once a moderator removes the community wiki, the system will no longer step in and apply this safeguard, should additional answers pile on.

On such questions, it's our responsibility as a community to ensure we watch such posts to keep them free of spam, me too, and low quality answers.

The question is already protected against answers from very new users, so this shouldn't actively harm our site and should be fine. But let's all be sure to keep our eyes open for trouble, if it gets bumped to the top of the active page again.

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  • Could you explain why this particular question was worthy of the un-CW?
    – Jim G.
    Jan 22, 2014 at 14:32
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    @JimG. - Because it was bumped there by people with sock puppet accounts posting several worthless answers.
    – IDrinkandIKnowThings
    Jan 22, 2014 at 16:37
  • @Chad: Ah. Sock puppet accounts are bad. Thanks.
    – Jim G.
    Jan 22, 2014 at 16:53
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I've removed Community Wiki status from the question. It was auto-CWed because it crossed the answer threshold, not including deleted answers (15 non-deleted + 4 deleted = 19 total; threshold is 15).

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    OK. But can you explain why this question was worthy of the un-CW?
    – Jim G.
    Jan 22, 2014 at 14:32

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