Revisit question "Best Collection of Code for your functions.php file"

Question

I'm referring to this question: "Best Collection of Code for your functions.php file". This question if I can call it one, was raised towards the end of 2010 as was quite active till the start of 2012 when it was closed as not constructive by @Rarst.

I would like to revisit that as most of the snippets don't work anymore because of all the changes in Wordpress since the start of 2012.

The problem here is, if I do add this as a question, there are a couple of issues that I'm thinking about.

In order to keep it constructive (which is by far the most important consideration here), there needs to be strict rules for posting snippets. In the mentioned question, most users dumped code as answers, others simply copied code from somewhere, untested.

It is no problem to explicitly add rules in the question stating that no dumping of code will be allowed, and that all code needs to be explained/described properly, most of all, before posting any code, it must have been tested for bugs, syntaxes, etc and it must be working with the latest version of wordpress which is currently 3.9. Also, if that code is not the code written by the user posting it, proper credit must be given to the original author. One other rule might be, no linking allowed, unless in it really necessary for example if the link is used for crediting an author of the code. I was also thinking of keeping this question open for a week, after which I will close it.

This is all fine, but all said and done, I know that there will be some users that will simply ignore this rules and will simply just dump code or claim code to be their own. How are we going to deal with this. I know down votes and flagging can be used for poor quality answers, but you as moderators also have a guideline that you need to stick to before deciding to delete an answer. Although I have set a couple of rules in the question as mentioned above, these are also just guidelines to what is a proper answer and what is not to keep the question constructive.

Is there a way or any means to keep this kind of question constructive? Most of all, will this question be allowed in the first place? How are we going to deal with poor quality answers.

Any thoughts will be welcomed in this matter. Just one more thing, how do I post a question as a community wiki. Feel a bit stupid about that one.

Answer 1

Is there a way or any means to keep this kind of question constructive?

No, there isn’t. There is a very simple check to judge that: can the topic be used as a target for another question closed as duplicate?

That’s impossible for this kind of questions.

The only reason this question wasn’t deleted is that we haven’t closed it soon enough. Now there are many backlinks, and we don’t want to break those. So the question stays, but nothing can be added anymore.

See also What types of questions should I avoid asking?

You should only ask practical, answerable questions based on actual problems that you face. Chatty, open-ended questions diminish the usefulness of our site and push other questions off the front page.

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About outdated code: That is OK. We have many answers with code that doesn’t work anymore. That’s inevitable on a site with a topic like ours. On real questions, we can just add a new answer when something has changed. That would be pointless on such a collection question.

What you can do: flag outdated or broken answers on closed questions, and we will just delete them. If you have a new, better solution for one of the snippets posted there, open a new topic and answer your own question.

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Just one more thing, how do I post a question as a community wiki.

You cannot mark a question as community wiki. Only moderators can do that, and I see no reason to do that here.