Do we want to require CW answers on (any? some? all?) mass-ID questions?

Question

We've had a number of questions on this site of the form "Here's a picture with dozens of characters/items from sci-fi and fantasy - can you identify them all?" Such questions have generally been welcomed by the community as a chance for everyone to work together and have fun.

In that spirit of working together, what often happens is that a single massive Community Wiki answer emerges where many users make small contributions, sometimes amounting to hundreds of edits before everything is correctly identified. If there were other non-CW answers posted, the answerers sometimes self-delete those in favour of cooperating on the big CW answer.

It's not always the case that a CW answer is posted - e.g. here and here a single user did most of the legwork and retained ownership of their post - but in some cases, after a CW answer rises to the top, there's been debate in comments over whether or not others should delete their answers.

Today I just realised that there is a mod tool available to restrict the thread to one CW answer!

If it's what the community wants, we could use this in certain circumstances, on certain posts, to restrict people to editing an existing CW answer instead of posting a new one. But first we need some community consensus on how, when - and indeed if - this should be done.

EDIT: the "wiki lock" for questions doesn't work as I'd thought. If we don't want to prevent the question from being voted on, then this isn't an option. I'm slightly re-scoping this meta: feel free to discuss the possibility of forcibly CW-ifying answers as well as wiki-locking questions.

Should we begin forcing CW answers to some/any mass-ID questions? If so, which ones?

Answer 1

In the case of a mass id question I think it is almost always favourable to have a community wiki answer that everyone can contribute to. After all one big comprehensive answer is always better than dozens of partial ones. That isn't to say we haven't had cases of a single user doing almost all or all of the work but a big community effort is generally what makes this cases so good. Therefore, I propose the following:

An answer should always be posted as a community wiki that everyone can contribute to.

That isn't to say an existing answer should always be converted into one just that we should post one as soon as possible, probably with a heading/disclaimer describing why it is a community wiki.

To note though this shouldn't be applied blindly and there can be exceptions to the rule. If a user familiar with the policy comes across the post and it has not community wiki but is largely answered by a sole user we probably don't need one: just user your common sense.

But what is a mass id?

This is going to be subjective but I'd say it generally falls somewhere in the starting range of 10-100+. Again use your common sense, if it looks like there is potential for lots of people to post partial answers just make a CW answer.

Answer 2

YES!

But evaluated on a case by case basis...

Having been involved in asking and answering a few of these questions I find that there end up being lots of one line/item answers that can quickly add up. Judging from the review queues these answers are not well received and are down-voted and often times deleted.

To be fair to the poster of the answer, a moderator should not immediately/automatically apply the CW, but leave a comment and see if they are open to the idea. Have a discussion and nudge the answerer in that direction gently. I bet most of the time that works.

If that doesn't work a moderator should use their CW ability only if there is a certain number of one line answers (my suggestion would be 3) that have been removed.

The only thing we might have a little trouble on is where we draw the line... Is 10 ID's enough to require a CW? 50? 100? 500? etc. etc. (My suggestion would around the 50 mark).

The only other thing I could think of is that since those posting the large ID questions are typically regular users of the site, is to create the CW answer when asking the question (i.e. use the "Answer your own question" check box). The OP would need to add some basic detail and maybe a disclaimer on what is going on. Then any other answers posted could be removed if necessary.

Answer 3

I'm not sure if this would be overkill or not, and I'm really only active on a few tags here, so if this suggestion doesn't fit, feel free to downvote to oblivion.

I feel like these questions would be well handled by making a tag for these types of questions, and requiring, as a policy, that they be made into a community wiki. I basically stole this idea from Physics SE, where they have a very similar rule applied to Resource Recommendation questions (i.e. can anyone tell me books that cover this topic).

In those, obviously it is a fairly different problem, but they seemed to be running into similar issues with questions that had the potential to generate large list-like answers or multiple single-line responses to a list question.

(more info on the physics policy https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/4698/127931)

Given the nature of the questions, and the extreme differences in how answers would be received based on when the post them, how many characters are identified and how many of those have already been identified, it seems pointless to separate answers into multiple incomplete lists when we can instead work on a single comprehensive list.

The only downside that comes to mind is the lack of reputation gains; but given the collaborative nature of the question, it isn't a major concern in my eyes.

Answer 4

No, we definitely should not require it.

Sometimes a user answers a mass-ID question practically alone. The most notable examples are Jack B. Nimble identifying all the superheroes in the pictures hung on the wall behind the Justice League, and Ducky Momo identifying over 200 wedding guests (Rand points out the latter case in his post). In these cases, the user who answers should get the post on their own.

Even apart from that, I don't think we should require CW answers. If someone posts a non-CW answer, then another user can post a CW answer instead. The first user will lose badges, but that's their problem.