Ouch
Yes, in our case that would work. Essentially this gives the desired tiers of permission within a given Category.
In most cases yes. However the problem is that this is a site wide permission. If I have 5 Categories, and a user is qualified to edit the wikis in one of those categories, they should not be able to edit the wikis in the other four categories.
How frequently are users in the reply category editing wikis? I can completely see the advantage of your approach, but if someone isn’t considered qualified enough to create a topic, then isn’t it a risk when they have the permissions to edit the entirety of the topic which is created? I see this as essentially a permissions backdoor.
In our use case the overhead is actually an advantage. It ensures that the users who are not qualified to edit the wiki, request their changes as a reply, and their desire for modification is discussed publicly. It essentially provides a peer review system for changes to the wiki.
In our case trust levels have been disabled. When using Discourse inside a company, there’s an additional level of liability that needs to be considered. A system that automatically lets someone edit something tomorrow, which they couldn’t edit today, and are not qualified to edit, can cause incorrect information to appear as it were official, causing other people to act upon such information, resulting in faulty products, which results in casualties for customers 