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The official big answer on Community Wiki at What are "Community Wiki" posts? says:

Moderators can remove it, when necessary. Once removed, the post will never automatically be given the CW status again.

But, it appears that our ongoing contest (Weekly Featured Image: Ongoing Contest) keeps getting converted. This appears to be a bug, given the quote above.

Alternately, I note that some sites have increased limits for the auto-cw conversion. If fixing the problem isn't easy, could we instead have the auto-cw limit bumped up to something large (1000?) for this site?

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That post is almost correct. A moderator removing CW status only protects the question from reverting back to it due to a high number of edits. The number of answers, however, will happily convert the question back to CW again and again and this is currently by design.

If you discount the deleted answers in that contest thread, there are currently 29 answers, so posting another one will auto-convert the question to community wiki. (And indeed, it did when I posted a test answer.)

That being said, why do you need to prevent the post from being a wiki? This is meta. The wiki status doesn't really affect much, if anything. Off hand, I don't think we should alter settings for a site just to support one specific thread, though I'm open to hearing arguments for or against either way.

After a few discussions with the folks here, we bumped up the conversion threshold to 200 answers (not counting the deleted ones) on meta only. Once you get to 200 answers, the post will likely be mostly unusable and hard to follow anyway, and I suggest you start a new thread if you hit that point.

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  • \$\begingroup\$ So, if the wiki status doesn't affect much, but isn't what we want for our site, can't we just turn it off? As noted above, that's been done for other sites. We certainly don't have any sort of case here where the auto-conversion provides a legitimate benefit. \$\endgroup\$
    – mattdm
    Commented Feb 13, 2013 at 14:56
  • \$\begingroup\$ @mattdm I think I'm still not understanding the issue here. What does the automatic conversion harm? We've adjusted the thresholds before on main sites where CW at least affects reputation. \$\endgroup\$
    – Adam Lear StaffMod
    Commented Feb 13, 2013 at 16:29
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    \$\begingroup\$ If it were just the question, that would be fine, but we'd like the answers to clearly belong to the entrants. Community wiki doesn't just remove reputation — it removes ownership. I guess we can live with that, but it's less than ideal. \$\endgroup\$
    – mattdm
    Commented Feb 13, 2013 at 16:44
  • \$\begingroup\$ Matt has pretty much nailed it on the head. We don't want anyone fiddling with the entries from other entrants, or opening up the contest to malicious behavior from low-rep users (i.e. 100 rep rather than 2000 rep). Lacking the trust of 2000 rep users, the contest as well as its rules are no open to pretty much any fairly new user to fiddle with at their hearts content... \$\endgroup\$
    – jrista Mod
    Commented Feb 13, 2013 at 20:40
  • \$\begingroup\$ @jrista How many low-rep users do you think would attempt to vandalize contest entries? (Each edit would bump the question and it would theoretically be easy enough to revert any actual malicious edits.) \$\endgroup\$
    – Adam Lear StaffMod
    Commented Feb 13, 2013 at 21:00
  • \$\begingroup\$ @AnnaLear: well, based on the history, the answer is sadly "more than zero". We could revert, but won't that make it "edited by three users" and even less ownership? \$\endgroup\$
    – mattdm
    Commented Feb 14, 2013 at 14:11

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