I've recently come across an excellent question (How to create ArrayList (ArrayList<Integer>) from array (int[]) in Java) with excellent answers.

I feel the question is well formed and all the answers add important relevant information to the discussion.

I wonder if this would make a good candidate for a Community Wiki page, but don't know if there is a specific procedure for making all the posts and question a Community Wiki in a single move.

Should I add an answer that incorporates all the information in the other answers and mark it as a Community Wiki? How do I give credit to the other authors who have taken time to answer? (just +1 for each?) What about the accepted answer, will the user lose any votes, get any extra rep from his question being made a Community Wiki? I don't want to retract the effort and contribution of the others, which I think is useful, relevant and should be recognised as such.

What should I do?

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    Only a moderator can convert a question to CW; flag the post for moderator attention to request the conversion. – Martijn Pieters May 27 '15 at 16:37
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    @MartijnPieters Do we really want to be encouraging people to randomly flag stuff for CW? CW should mostly be a thing of the past now. – Mysticial May 27 '15 at 16:44
  • @Mysticial maybe I have miss understood the point of CW? – DaveM May 27 '15 at 16:46
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    @Mysticial: automatic CW conversion is a thing of the past. There is still a use for manual CW posts. – Martijn Pieters May 27 '15 at 16:47
  • @MartijnPieters cool, I'll flag the post. What about my other concerns? – DaveM May 27 '15 at 16:51
  • @Mysticial People often misuse CW inappropriately, so a concerted effort was spent to make sure that people knew when it should be used, and to make sure it's not used when it shouldn't be. As a result, you end up seeing it much less often as it was being abused more often than it was being used. As Martijn said though, there are still appropriate uses of it. – Servy May 27 '15 at 16:52
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    @DaveM It's largely just a rep-denial tool for posts that are (truly) collaborative. If you want you can post a CW answer that incorporates everyone's answers. But forcing CW on other people's posts is IMO, bad taste. – Mysticial May 27 '15 at 16:52
  • @DaveM: sorry, a little low on bandwidth to go into detail right now. :-/ – Martijn Pieters May 27 '15 at 16:52
  • @MartijnPieters no rush.... You guys have far too much work to do anyhow. I've flagged the question. – DaveM May 27 '15 at 16:56
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    @DaveM That question should not be a CW. And if I was a moderator, I would decline that flag. None of the individual posts on that question are collaborative. By making it CW, you are denying all those contributors rep from future upvotes - which undermines the rep system. If you want to put together a canonical answer, feel free to do it. But don't take everyone else down with you. – Mysticial May 27 '15 at 17:00
  • @Mysticial. That sound like an answer. Post it and I'll +1. – DaveM May 27 '15 at 17:04
  • @DaveM sphanley hit the point much better than I did (and in a more positive tone :P). So I'll leave it at that. – Mysticial May 27 '15 at 17:06
  • @Mysticial: blog.stackoverflow.com/2014/04/… – Martijn Pieters May 27 '15 at 17:09

The fact that you're asking how to convert someone else's question and all answers on it to a community wiki indicates that you may be misunderstanding what Community Wiki is for. (Nothing wrong with that - it's not inherently totally clear!)

Marking a question as Community Wiki doesn't inherently mean it's "better" or "more official" than anything else. Rather, it's meant to indicate that the author either doesn't deserve or doesn't want primary credit for authorship of the post - that it's made up of content primarily created through a significant community wiki-style editing process, or some other form (perhaps a post comprised of primarily external citations) that the author does not feel should be credited solely to their name.

The fact that you simply think a question and its answers are all high quality doesn't mean they should all be converted to CW - everything here is (broadly speaking) owned by the community, and ideally, all questions should be well formed with answers that add important relevant information to the discussion. If you want to give a question or answer more "weight", so to speak, you should simply upvote those posts!

  • Ok fair enough. I'll go give +1 to all the answers. I got the impression that CW posts worked differently. Hence my question about what to do for user rep etc. – DaveM May 27 '15 at 17:03

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