Community wiki questions don't accrue rep and have a lower full editing reputation threshold. Questions should be manually converted to community wiki when they are marginal fits or 'list of X' questions that contain enough value to avoid deletion. This affects the question and all answers.
The main reason for CW is that these questions/answers can be contributed to by anyone, posts should be made community wiki when there aren't any definitive answers and people are just sharing opinions and not hard facts or where someone sees that more information can be added.
CW can also be triggered by the system if a user makes several edits to their post in a short period.