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I posted this question: How do you handle an interview for a candidate who is performing poorly? at the start of the year. It's still my best question, and one that I was reasonably proud of.

It went onto the hot list and became community wiki pretty quickly as a result, but given that posts no longer become wikis automatically, I really wouldn't mind being able to gain points for new up votes ;)

I'm guessing that it might be a good idea to try and clean up some of the answers, though?

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    I didn't vote down but I guess that desire to be "able to gain points for new up votes" doesn't look like a solid justification for de-wikifying. After all, one can argue that reputation obtained from lemming upvotes in hot questions is enough already
    – gnat
    Commented Sep 6, 2014 at 20:33
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    I think I was hoping that a discussion of clean-up might interest people too :(
    – StackExchange What The Heck
    Commented Sep 6, 2014 at 21:18
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    discussing answers cleanup could be interesting but I guess readers perceive your question as primarily "please de-wikify this to help me get moar repz". I understand your feelings (2 of my 5 top-voted answers at Programmers are CW) but these don't look like making a solid ground for meta discussion (FWIW rep denial mechanism like one that hit you back then has been recently turned off so your future posts will not carry that risk anymore)
    – gnat
    Commented Sep 6, 2014 at 21:24
  • I agree with @gnat. Also, I'm usually against de-wikifying a question because the first TWP generation gained so much rep on such poor questions. I just don't want to see another rep-grab like that one again.
    – Jim G.
    Commented Sep 7, 2014 at 0:05

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I'm not against removing the wiki status, if the posts can be improved. Mostly, this is because we either want good, on-topic questions on the site or we want to remove them in favor of focusing on high signal content. So if the post is to remain open, we should clean up the things that would have caused it to go into the wiki status in the first place.

There's a lot of content there. Some of it may be noise, some of it may be signal. If there are similar answers, maybe they need to be removed as per the don't repeat others guidelines.

I would also suggest looking for posts that fundamentally don't answer the question. To do that, we must ask what that question is. Perhaps an edit to put all the questions in one spot at the bottom will be helpful. Right now, they're kinda spread out. I generally edit posts so that multiple (but related) questions are at the bottom anyway, so that answerers can easily glance back up at them to verify they've answered what is asked, without having to repeatedly skim the entire post.

Here's an answer that, while useful from the perspective of an interviewee, is something that I'm not 100% sure answers what you're asking. https://workplace.stackexchange.com/a/18417/98. Don't take this as me advocating for deletion, just that it might be a signal that the question might be a bit too broad, which would explain how the wiki filter got triggered in the first place.

So, what do we do with these? Do we edit them, remove them? Do we broaden the question a bit to make the answers fit better? I'm not 100% sure what the best approach is on this particular question. It got over 17,000 views, so I'd not want to remove whatever it is that folks found helpful.

At a minimum, having some editor-types go through and review it, even if we just copy edit and make the content look more professional, will leave it in a better state when and if we do de-wikify it. Let's use this as an opportunity to do that review you're asking for. Editing will bump it to the top so it's more visible to the community. Hope this helps!

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