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Proposal: Weekly Topic Challenge
As we’re building up this community, I thought it would be a neat idea to feature a weekly topic challenge, similar to when MY was getting started (see here). The idea would be as follows:
- A new category, dedicated to the challenge, would be created (analogous to the Writing, Outdoors, Photography, and Cooking challenges), to keep the weekly challenge thread from cluttering up Meta.
- Each week, the community votes on a topic. On each week’s post, add an answer with your suggested topic for the following week, and upvote any topic you’d be interested in seeing implemented. Your proposed topic can be as broad or as narrow as you’d like, but don’t make it too broad or too narrow.
- Whichever topic has the highest answer score by the designated evening (say, Monday nights) will be the chosen topic, and a new thread will be posted in the challenge category summarizing the previous week and introducing the new week’s topic.
- Over the course of the week, think of questions related to the topic and post them – and, of course, look for answers to others’ questions as well!
Questions for the community: Is this a good idea? Do you have any suggestions on tweaking the concept?
Questions for the mods and coders: Is this the best way to go about implementing this? Do you have any ideas on implementing an easier way to carry out asking for community input – perhaps a way to embed some type of poll, but one where you can add your own answer for others to vote on?
1 answer
I like the idea of returning to our weekly topic challenges!
Instead of collecting new suggestions each week, which would mean either lots of repetition or suggestions getting dropped, I suggest reusing a single post to collect suggestions for a while, and each week the person running the challenge picks one. Usually this would be the top-voted one not already used, but if there's something seasonal that makes more sense that particular week, that should be ok too. When a topic is chosen, the answer suggesting it gets edited to say it's been used (and linking to the challenge).
I said "for a while", because if there were only one suggestion post then over time it would become hard to manage (and hard to find the still-unused topics). Maybe make a new topic-collection post each quarter? Resubmitting things would be fine but this way it wouldn't be every week.
If I recall correctly, on Mi Yodeya we made a new meta post for each challenge, with each question that was asked as part of the challenge being linked in an individual answer. (So you'd ask a challenge question on main and then add a meta answer linking to it.) We could do that, but I wonder if we'd rather have a single post that collects all the links? The individual posts don't need to be votable on meta, after all. A downside of this approach is that we don't have the "anybody can edit this specific post" concept like SE does (community wiki), so some people will have to propose edits. But approving those edits should be pretty easy and pending edits are pretty visible, so this doesn't seem like a big problem for this case.
Update: On request and confirmed by our moderator, I've created a new Challenges category. I have enabled both Question and Article post types; if Article doesn't work out we can always remove it. I suggest that you use questions to collect suggestions and articles for individual challenges; in the latter you'd describe the challenge and then the community can edit it to add links to questions that were asked in response to that challenge.
On links, we don't have the SE link-magic that turns raw links into the titles of their posts, sorry. So editing will be a little more work than it would have been otherwise, at least for now.
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