Does this mean I can now use the Community Wiki to avoid upvotes and downvotes on poor quality answers?
No.
CW does two things:
- Prevents you from gaining or losing rep.
- Lowers the rep requirement for editing.
Neither of those two things has anything whatsoever to do with how voting behaves. CW answers can rise and fall like any other, get grayed out after being heavily downvoted, and can be deleted by the community where necessary. They are not "special" and do not get any protection from the site's core functionality.
If an answer is low-effort, downvote it. If it is CW, downvote it anyway. CW is not an excuse for posting bad answers.
Maybe you meant this:
Does this mean I can now use the Community Wiki to avoid losing rep on poor quality answers?
Yes, technically, but you should not be writing poor quality answers in the first place. Poor quality answers should still be downvoted and delete-voted regardless of CW. The problem in this case is not "A high-rep user used CW wrong." The problem is "A high-rep user wrote a low-effort answer." The solution to that problem is the downvote button (and in some cases, the delete button). If you notice a pattern of low-effort answers from the same user, either take it to meta or flag it for moderator attention.
As the CMs often like to point out, a lot of energy is expended arguing over the merits of answers to poor questions. That may be the case here. This answer basically says "The question doesn't have an answer because it is too speculative." That sounds a lot more like a close reason than an answer to me. And when we scroll up, the question is closed as Primarily Opinion Based (it also has 4 reopen votes, so who knows what will happen next). If a question does not have an answer, carefully think about whether it is closeable. Not all questions with no answers should be closed, but many of them can and should be. If you're confident that this question should not be closed, then your there's-no-answer answer does not need to be CW because it's a perfectly good answer (and, ideally, it cites specific sources where an answer could have been found but wasn't).
We should also note that downvotes are -2 a pop. It takes hundreds of downvotes or more to make a small dent in the average high-rep user's total. An answer can receive five times as many downvotes as upvotes, and still have no overall effect on the author's rep. Answers need to be overwhelmingly downvoted before they start losing you rep in large enough quantities to matter. Case in point: the linked answer has, at the time of writing, +1/-2 votes for a net rep gain of +4 (if it were not CW, that is). Even without that upvote and with an extra downvote, it would only impose a penalty of -6 rep. What difference would that make?
Does this mean I can now use the Community Wiki to avoid gaining rep on poor quality answers?
Yes, but you probably wouldn't be gaining all that much rep from a poor quality answer without said answer being CW in the first place (see next part), so it's a bit of a moot point.
If you would have gotten a lot of upvotes even without checking the CW box, then maybe it isn't all that bad of an answer.
Does this mean I can now use the Community Wiki to encourage upvoting or discourage downvoting on poor quality answers?
In theory, no. In practice, maybe.
As I said above, people should vote the same on CW answers as they do on regular answers. "The author won't get rep for this" is a terrible reason to upvote anything. It has nothing to do with the quality of the content, and so it will not cause good content to rise to the top (which is the whole point of voting in the first place).
However, people have an annoying tendency to vote more leniently on CW answers than on non-CW answers. This causes them to clutter up good questions and make them look like they have been addressed when in reality they still need a real answer. My preferred solution to this problem is to actually write a real answer (or ask someone else to do so), and let it outscore the CW answer. But this is often impractical for a variety of reasons.
I don't have any good solutions here, aside from consciously and deliberately changing our voting culture to stop favoring CWs. In the short run, people with deletion votes should consider using them where appropriate, and the rest of us can make do with flags (again, where appropriate). All of us could downvote these a bit more heavily.
Does this mean I can now use the Community Wiki to avoid rep notifications on poor quality answers?
I suppose, but you do still get comment notifications, and downvoters can and should leave comments explaining their downvotes. Rep notifications are not a particularly effective way of communicating with authors, so this is a Good Idea for any kind of answer, not just CWs.
(Anyway, there's always the nuclear option of contacting Stack Exhange and telling them to dissociate your name from an answer... that will stop you from getting any notifications and disown the post in a far more thorough way than CW does. No amount of arguing on meta will take this loophole away, it's baked into section 4(a) of the copyright license.)
