Where is " Wiki " ? ( was Wiki wonky, Taggy waggy - Menu venue? )

Question

[Edit 8OCT13 - clean up and trim down to reflect the helpful answers.]

• Where is the (community) wiki - Is it really a place in each stack exchange site, like wikipedia stands on its own, or is it merely an abstract concept ?

• Why is there little (or no) mention of it (under ELL main or meta) help link ?

There's a tag called 'wiki' and a tag called 'community-wiki' (on meta, but not, AFAICT, on main).

Search for wiki, community wiki, or community-wiki --- all you get is questions about wiki topics, not the 'wiki' itself. Ditto under the help->search page.

• Trying to "filter" by a "wiki" tag returns questions about wiki matters, not wiki entries, or am I using this wrong ? (Try adding a favorite tag, then put in one of the variants above.)

Answer 1

You can't find “the wiki” because there's no such thing.

Each tag has a wiki associated to it. Tag wikis are so called because there is no sense of ownership to them, they belong to the community in general. If you hover on a tag, you get so see the wiki excerpt — that's a short paragraph that summarizes the role of the tag. If you click on the tag, the wiki excerpt is displayed above the link of questions. If you now click on “learn more…”, the full tag wiki (also called tag wiki body) appears. The tag wiki describes the meaning and purpose of the tag, addresses some common concerns, provides some generally-useful links about the topic delimited by the tag, etc. For more information about tag wikis, see New tag info pages and Redesigned tags page in the Stack Exchange blog.

There is no separate section for tag wikis: you normally reach a tag wiki via its tag. You can reach all tag wikis from the tag list.

“Community wiki” is a feature of a post (an answer, or rarely a question). It is used for posts for which the original poster has no strong ownership, typically because many others have edited that post. Don't worry about them unless you encounter one naturally. If you really want to know about them, see What are “Community Wiki” posts? on the main meta site.

There is no separate section for community wiki posts: they're still questions and answers.

Answer 2

First I want to make clear what I understood from your question before proceeding because I am not sure if I understood you correctly (Yeah,yeah! I know you tried to be funny). I think you want to know the following points:

1) How can you search community-wiki?

2) Why is there no details about community-wiki in the help page?

3) Is there any separate existence of Community wiki in SE?

4) Should not wiki be a separate link so that it is reachable in one click?

Ooh, pretty long list of questions in just one question, I reckon! Coming to all your questions point-wise.

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1)You can search community-wiki posts easily by this way:

https://ell.stackexchange.com/search?q=wiki%3Ayes

i.e. type wiki:yes in the search and you would find all community wiki posts. (Credit: How can I find all the posts marked as community-wiki?)

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2) Oh, there is details in the help page. All you gotta do is search. Like I did:

https://ell.stackexchange.com/help/search?q=wiki

and I found out:

What is community wiki and how does it work?

Here you can find all the details.

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3) There is no wikidom in SE sites. Posts which have potentials and members feel that they can be improved more, they wikify the post. This way some posts are merely stamped as wiki, nothing more. SE historically does not in it's way to create a separate wiki world. If you feel this should be done, upvote this feature-request.

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4) Like I said, SE never thought to give community-wiki that importance you think it deserves at all. Wikifying posts are just an added bonus kind of feature in SE, SE is not about creating Wiki posts.

One more thing you should know, community wiki and tag-wiki are not the same.

Read about community-wiki in the link I provided and tag-wiki here- What's tag-wiki and who can approve the edit requests.

Last but not the least and perhaps very relevant to mention, you can't add too many questions in a single post anywhere in SE. Split the questions into more than one posts, so that they can be answered objectively.