Instructions on Site Operation

Some Answers:

1. A "Community Wiki" is a question that does not have a specific answer, but contributes to the community knowledge as a whole, and in such questions there are no points gained or lost for either upvotes or downvotes (though badges are still earned), so everyone can speak and vote freely without any impact. For instance this question (and more likely, my question about "Who's using SQL Server 2000?") are examples of questions that down the road, would probably be turned into Community Wiki's (though I think that the OP can always set them up this way). The PR definition aside, the real need for CW's on sites like this is to control excessive pandering and "point-mongering". We will not see it right now (even with my Sql 2000 question) with only a couple dozen active users, however, once there are say a couple hundred or more active users, you will notice that some interesting, but "not real questions" will garner a huge amount of idle attention. Like say "What's your favorite new feature of SQL Server 2008?", which has no "right" answer and is encouraging everyone to just post their opinions, but is nonetheless worthwhile for the community to keep open for discussion. However, because these questions attract a very wide degree of low-level attention, they also garner an immense number of upvotes (because here, attention = upvotes), which would normally mean a huge number of points, for what is objectively a somewhat lame question. Without the community wiki, the site would quickly become polluted with increasingly lame attempts by members to be the first to come up with questions like this that others had not yet thought of ("What features do you want in SQL Server 2012?", "How should the ANSI/ISO committee be organized?" "Should PASS have a different name?" "What's the best Junk Food to Eat while designing data models?").

2. You need 500 points to edit the tags on a thread, and 2000 to edit the content of a question or answer (comments cannot be edited). When you get enough points for a new "power" the appropriate controls will be come visible on the pages.

3. To respond to an Answerer, you post comments attached to them. You need 50 points to do this, except that you can always do it for your own threads. (and I think for your own answers too, but not sure).

The site is based on the technology that powers StackOverflow. If you go there, there should be plenty of information already built up on how it works. The RSS feed is towards the bottom of the main page. You can also get an RSS feed for any tag that you are interested in by following the links to that tag and then similarly looking in the bottom right hand corner of the page.

If you check the community wiki box when asking a question, it will allow anyone, not just admins and yourself, to edit the contents of the question that you're asking, as well as just providing answers to it.