Why frozen and locked topics becomes community wiki

Question

So here is what the locked and closed question banner say.

Locked questions:

locked by <username>♦ <date> at <time>

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closed as <blah blah> by <username>♦ <date> at <date>

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Probably some of the most loathing notification for the asker.

So moderator lock a particular question because the question is not considered a good, on-topic question for the given SE site then why locking the question transfers the question in community wiki? I mean I used to thought that community wiki have a collection of good questions.

Answer 1

The locked and community wiki status of a question are completely independent, and it is perfectly possible for a post to be locked without being community wiki. An example of this is

• Creating an ammeter? (currently locked and attributed to MathsStudent).

On the other hand, this doesn't mean that they're not correlated, and it is indeed true that many posts which are locked are also community wiki. A good way to see this is to google the lock banner text for this site. There are indeed a lot of such results; on example is

• Books that every layman should read (currently locked and community wiki).

The reason for this is that 'big-list' questions were indeed allowed early in this site's history. However, they generate a lot of hits and therefore a lot of reputation for answers which may in themselves not be really that valuable (i.e. their main merit is being posted in the right thread at the right time), with the addition of a large snowball effect. This was deemed undesirable so most of these threads were put on community wiki.

Later on, though, big-list posts were deemed off-topic, which is still the policy today. (Roughly, it's because those posts are the fast food of Q&A sites. They're entertaining for a while but they're perennially active and they detract attention from more valuable threads.) Closing them is a bad half-measure because edits can keep them active. Deleting them is too much because they do have valuable content. Hence they were put on historical lock.

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Other than that, your question is a bit confusing and it's hard to know what you mean without the specific examples that made you ask this.