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'You were pigged'

This linked question has two parts:

  • Any idea as to when to be pigged was coined?
  • Is the phrase also used in the US? If not what would be its equivalent? Prank doesn't seem to cut the mustard.

I answered the part 1 alone, about the possible origins. My answer is not fully answering the question. I made it CW (Community wiki) in that I don't get any reputation or lose any.

My answer is subject to all the usual community moderation, votes, reviews and comments. If it's a bad answer, downvotes and flags can handle it.

It appears that I have upset a few users by that. A comment under my answer says: wait a couple of hours before posting a CW, if no one posts a single comment, or no one posts any answer I might understand but this is ... a misuse.

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    That kind of answer should be a comment. I know you hate comment-answers and are desirous that no question go "unanswered", but this situation that you're in is precisely the motivation so many people leave comment-answers. Having said that, you can answer if you like, but if you do so, do so under your own banner. Don't use CW as a shield. If your answer is wrong, your score on EL&U should go lower - that is, after all, what rep is attempting to measure. Permitting this CW-shielding as a blanket rule will only encourage low-value, poorly-thought-out, or under-researched answers. – Dan Bron Oct 9 '17 at 13:47
  • @DanBron As always, good to hear from you. Here's my way of thinking: If it's a bad answer in the comment, nobody can do anything about it other than hope it gets removed eventually when the threads are cleaned. 1/2 – NVZ Oct 9 '17 at 13:55
  • @DanBron 2/2 - If my CW answer is VLQ or NAA, users can deal with it as always with flags and votes. If it's simply useless info, downvotes work on them, and will get sent to the bottom of the page, as is the way it should work. Yeah, I get your point though. :) – NVZ Oct 9 '17 at 13:56
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    People can flag comments as easily as answers, and comments, being definitionally ephemeral, are more easily removed. And if you really still want to post it as an answer, you should stand behind it. Saying people are welcome to downvote, flag, and delete come across as a bit a bit toothless if you’ve marked the answer CW. Community wiki isn’t a license to post garbage; in fact, to the contrary, it was originally introduced as a way to share credit, when giving it to one user instead of everyone who contributed was seen as improper. – Dan Bron Oct 9 '17 at 14:18
  • @DanBron Oh, but here's the thing though.. users who know what CW is and how to apply that are mostly the higher reps, and us higher reps know better than posting rubbish marked with a CW. I wouldn't want rubbish shielded with a CW either. I don't see CW being misused on ELU. At least, not yet. :) – NVZ Oct 9 '17 at 14:26
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    My take, based on some recent experiences, is that while some folks don't like "answers in comments" many of the more experienced users hate all the alternatives more, other than simply maintaining silence (assuming that a truly complete and expert answer is not possible). – 1006a Oct 9 '17 at 14:26
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    But you're literally here encouraging it to be used as such! – Dan Bron Oct 9 '17 at 14:26
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    Now that you've changed 'rule' to 'guideline' my inner autism has been assuaged. But now to the new title... isn't this gen ref of the SE FAQs? Reread the CW stuff there and tell is if your pig answer is appropriate for CW. Intuition tells me no. – Mitch Oct 9 '17 at 14:39
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    Sigh... if you wanted to write up a CW answer then write one up for the question I put a bounty on. There are no good answers there... there aren't any answers. But my "pigged" question stood a good chance of being answered by Josh, or Sven, or any newcomer who happened to be familiar with the expression. – Mari-Lou A Oct 9 '17 at 14:42
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    And I'll repeat it for the third time, ask the mods to reverse the ownership, they can do it, and I will happily upvote it. – Mari-Lou A Oct 9 '17 at 14:44
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    @NVZ You take things too literally with respect to 'answering in comments'. What you take to be 'answers in comments' are not intended to be answers. They are just guesses or recommendations or help for the questioner or there is an expectation that the answer is LMGTFY or otherwise closable for good reasons and you don't want them to go away with nothing. usually just throw-aways as they are meant to be in comments. – Mitch Oct 9 '17 at 14:44
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    You posted a CW answer after 7 minutes! You robbed Josh :) :) (and anyone else) – Mari-Lou A Oct 9 '17 at 14:50
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    NWZ: OK, you're again being too literal. I just read the FAQ about community wiki. It doesn't say explicitly "don't do what you just did" because frankly you can read between the lines. most of those things are literally also true of non-CW things. So you are supposed to understand implicitly that CW is even moreso, when you really expect a bunch of people to edit (eg the meta.ELU questions on resources). – Mitch Oct 9 '17 at 15:17
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    NWZ: also, because you seem to be falling back on the past, before you read this meta question "my said CW is a success, imho". no, no that is not the case. It was not a success. You were not even wrong to use CW on the question. It's like you think you saw a horse, called it brown, and in fact what you see is a beagle. – Mitch Oct 9 '17 at 15:20
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    @NVZ you can boldly do whatever you like, but there are usually consequences. And next time, try your experiments on your own questions, or at the very least inform the OP and see if she agrees. – Mari-Lou A Oct 9 '17 at 17:32
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Your use of CW seems like you don't know what the purpose of CW is for.

CW is in a sense to not get any rep for something, intentionally to expect lots of users to share in the creation so that no one is favored.

But for the question and answer content here, there is no expectation of many editors (beyond the usual common expected editing practices to improve q's and a's).

What you gave is entirely your answer. You shouldn't be CW'ing it.

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  • Fair point. I like these learning experiences. I learn new things with every step I take, unlike those who are afraid to take steps or ask questions. Thanks for this answer, instead of giving mere shots in the comments section here. +100. – NVZ Oct 9 '17 at 14:35
  • I gave a mere shot in the comments section, too. – Mitch Oct 9 '17 at 14:37
  • I noticed. LOL. Updated question. – NVZ Oct 9 '17 at 14:37
  • From Colleen's link, this CW answer on EL&U is a rare example of a true community effort I'm trying to teach Non-English kids the alphabet. What is a good list of words starting with A-Z? Posted in 2010, the question was closed for not being constructive, today it would be closed within hours (if not minutes) for being too broad. – Mari-Lou A Oct 10 '17 at 6:47
  • @Mari-LouA Or POB ;) – Dan Bron Oct 10 '17 at 12:53
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You might find the article The Future of Community Wiki helpful. Some relevant snippets

The intent of community wiki in answers is to help share the burden of solving a question.

Community wiki is like a cheese knife: it is a specialized tool to be used sparingly.

Community wiki is for that rare gem of a post that needs true community collaboration.

My interpretation of that is that community wikis are not there for me to write a partial answer and have other folks to fill it in instead of writing their own answer, or for me to take a comment left by someone else and post it as CW answer so I don't get reputation for it.

A CW is appropriate when a complete answer to a question is a large effort that would benefit from the community working together to fill out and refine it. A good example is this canonical answer on ELL. Another situation where a CW might be appropriate is the subject matter is controversial (but on-topic) and voting is likely to be emotional. The wording of the answer might need to be refined to be as neutral/objective as possible. The problem with that is that there could be conflict among the editors that isn't particularly constructive.

In my opinion, using CWs for reputation consequence avoidance is counter to their purpose. If a comment can answer a question thoroughly and well, the question isn't a very good fit for the SE model. It shouldn't be difficult to take a comment and flesh it out by adding supporting references and discussion. When you make the effort to expand the comment-answer into a real answer, you deserve the reputation that comes from it. This isn't a quiz show where the first person to buzz in gets the points. If all you're doing is copying and pasting a comment into a CW answer, I think that's bad practice that places statistics and rules over actual value.

If you want to write a partial answer, just say it's a partial answer. If the community strongly dislikes partial answers and down-votes them ruthlessly, then the solution isn't to avoid the reputation consequences by making a partial answer a CW. The solution is "don't post partial answers". If I felt the community was opposed to partial answers (which I think are OK), I would come to meta to try to change folks' minds, not post them anyhow and try to nullify the primary mechanism the community has for discouraging things outside of the norms that they've settled on.

I took a quick glance at the highest scored answers in a list of community wiki posts on EL&U and I remain convinced that CWs are rarely needed.

So I got some help, and Rene worked out this query for CWs with multiple editors. I haven't looked through the data in detail yet, but thought it might be interesting. Of the 577 wiki answers on EL&U only 87 of them have multiple editors.

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  • Good points. And thank you for the input. :) – NVZ Oct 9 '17 at 16:42
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    Unfortunately, I must disagree because I read the opposite consequence into the first sentence you quoted. Why would we elect to share the burden of answering a question with the rest of the community if we can shoulder the entire burden of answering ourselves? Regarding the cheese knife comment, it's important to consider the broader context of the post was addressing community wiki questions, which were since then discontinued due to abuse. This reads like advice to never use the tool we have been given to keep. – Tonepoet Oct 9 '17 at 18:52
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    @Tonepoet I have tools that I have only used once, but I have no intention of throwing them away because they were very necessary in that one situation. Just because we don't often have the need for a cheese knife doesn't mean we should re-purpose the one we have for something other than slicing cheese. It is a rare question that is actually so involved that it would need community collaboration to answer it beyond the typical spread that you get with multiple answers. I'll see if I can find an example somewhere. – ColleenV Oct 9 '17 at 19:24
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    There's an active question at Science Fiction & Fantasy right now with a good example of a Community Wiki answer. The main use I see for them here is when trying to establish common terms for the same thing across various English dialects. I don't know of another resource for that kind of information, and it's the kind of thing that is probably best answered by multiple users, so it seems like a good fit here. Unfortunately, the one or two examples I've seen did not really get much community participation. – 1006a Oct 9 '17 at 21:22
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    I have to comment on the cheese knife analogy: What if you don't need your cheese knife, but could use a fish knife? How bad would it be to repurpose the tool? (In fact, in looking at pictures of fish knives and cheese knives, I've realized that what I always thought was the latter in my flatware pattern is in fact the former—apparently, I've been serving cheese with a fish knife for my whole marriage. Mortifying.) – 1006a Oct 9 '17 at 21:27
  • @1006a I'm not opposed to repurposing, as long as we are doing it because there is a need. We got this really cool "multi-tool" in a set of cordless tools we bought, and now I just roam around the house looking for something to do with it... No good is going to come of it. Sure I could take a 1/4 inch off the bottom of all my doors, but is that really the best use of my time and energy? – ColleenV Oct 9 '17 at 22:08
  • It's worth noticing that in the second link, some (I didn't check them all) CW answers were originally "normal" answers but the author had edited their post at least 20 times and the system automatically converted those answers into CW posts. Example So.... many of the listed CWs were involuntary. – Mari-Lou A Oct 10 '17 at 6:57
  • @Mari-LouA Yep, and I think some of those, like your covfefe answer, probably should be CWs. In situations where the voting is likely to be more emotional, making an answer a CW is probably a good thing. It's always a judgement call, but I think that CW use should be rarer than it is. – ColleenV Oct 10 '17 at 11:42
  • The ELL example is wholly inappropriate, it is not a large community effort by any stretch of the imagination, there was one edit by a mod robot that fixed two links, and another user fixed a couple of typos. The user StoneyB is 100% the author of said post. Why he changed his post into a CW I have not the slightest idea. I have quickly scanned his other answers and I don't see any joint community effort, the legendary canonical "present perfect" etc. posts are the result of his toil and sweat and of no one else's. – Mari-Lou A Oct 11 '17 at 0:22
  • @Mari-LouA I'm saying that is the type of post that should be a CW, not that it is a shining example of the type of collaboration that a CW would have ideally. – ColleenV Oct 11 '17 at 0:28
  • It says "A good example is" it's not a good example if it shows only one other human user intervention, which was fixing a couple of typos. The link I posted beneath Mitch's answer is a good example. – Mari-Lou A Oct 11 '17 at 0:30
  • @Mari-LouA The blog post I linked says There are even times where a question looks like it’ll need a massive effort, but one gallant user steps up to the plate with an impressive and comprehensive answer. While my example doesn't demonstrate community collaboration because StoneyB did a wonderful job, it is a Q&A that is in no danger of being closed, and illustrates what I think is the proper scope for an answer that could benefit from community collaboration. – ColleenV Oct 11 '17 at 2:42

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