Anniversary contest?

Question

January 12^th marks one year since we came out of beta:

WOOOOOOO...ok, that's enough

Other sites have done miscellaneous contests to encourage participation, and our anniversary seems as good a time as any to try one, assuming we have any clever ideas. There are two things to come up with -- the contest itself, and the prizes for the winners

Contest ideas

Since other sites have held contests in the past, we might be able to steal one of their ideas:

• Super User has done this several times. At 1 year they had a four week contest, where they rewarded users each week based on performance that week:

  • Highest rep gain from a new user
  • Highest rep gain in general
  • Best post that week
  • Most useful post that week (this is different from #3? Apparently)

  They did a similar thing this year, but changed the categories a bit to cover things other than just Q&A (editing, tagging, blogging, cleanup, etc.). Jeff warns that it's important to incentivize the right thing

• Gaming has had much success with giving top users free copies of a new game, on the assumption that they'll ask questions about it and other people playing that game for the first time will search for the question and find the site. Science Fiction did the same thing with Star Wars. Most of our software is already free, but we might be able to adapt the idea to Unix and Linux anyway.

• Gaming also had a contest centered around two popular games that came out around the same time, tracking which game was getting more posts on the site, and rewarding the top question and answer for each

• Android picked a number of good questions that had gone unanswered for a long time, tagged them all, and entered all the accepted/top voted answers on those questions in a drawing to win Kindles. They also had a twitter-related promotion, but I don't think I would call it a contest. They've talked about doing an SU-style contest as well, but I don't know that it's happened yet

• Philosophy is in the second week of picking a philosopher and rewarding users who ask questions about that philosopher. Android is discussing the same idea with Android versions, apps, hardware, etc., and History is doing it with wars

Obviously we're not limited to these -- if somebody comes up with something Unix-y that would be even better

Prizes

There isn't any Unix and Linux-specific stuff yet, but the Stack Exchange store has the usual fare, and is common for lower-level prizes (although WA happily used it for everything). It'd be nice if we could come up with some *nix-specific prizes. For example, membership in the Linux Foundation, an LWN subscription, things of that nature. Maybe Linux-y hardware, if anyone has ideas. I can't make any promises, but if we come up with clever prize ideas I'll see if Stack Exchange is willing to pay for them

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Personally, I like SU's second contest (rewarding specific activities on a weekly basis), Android's Kindle contest (picking good unanswered questions and rewarding people who answer them), and Philosophy's weekly themes. What are everyone else's preferences? Any other ideas for contests/prizes?

Answer 1

I don't think we need as much cleanup as SU does, but we have a good number of unanswered questions. I estimate that 10% of them are troubleshooting questions with not enough information (→ close as not a real question) and the rest deserve an answer. There are badges for that (revival, necromancer); however such late answers can slip through the cracks (I've only been using /questions?sort=newest for quite a while now, I just don't have the time to go through all new answers). Can we organize some sort of drive to answer old stuff? Perhaps a real-life prize for Revival and Necromancer badges obtained in January, together with some form of publicization of the candidate answers?

It would be nice to have better promotion of good, late answers as a more general matter, but I don't know what form it could take. In the meantime, our chat room doesn't see much action; it can be a place to pimp late answers.

Answer 2

Seeing as we don't have a lot of time, I'll kick one in.

I'd like to see a prize awarded (monthly?), for the question that elicits the most Gilles-ian answer (obviously, anyone is eligible to answer the question); ie., an answer that is both encyclopaedic in it's breadth and depth, but also quite approachable for the novice or intermediate user and laced with a goodly amount of links to encourage further reading.

Gilles' answers already elicit plenty of upvotes (deservedly), so it would be nice to recognize those community members who work hard to frame up the sort of questions that provoke these answers.

It would also focus the community's attention on more investment in asking good questions and in providing more detailed and referenced answers.

As to prizes: I imagine that, for many some additional rep would be enough incentive, but if you are able to scrounge up some resources or sponsorship, then some kit to run *nix on would be nice.

Bonus suggestion¹ One other thought I had was that a unique aspect of our community that is worth celebrating is the people that spend their time writing and supporting the software we use. You could run a question that seeks nominations for the best new—as in the last 12 months—free and open source software that people have discovered, and their rationale for the nomination. This serves to both promote the efforts of those developers, and allows the community to share new and interesting software that they have come across this past year.

1 I know that under the normal terms of the site, this sort of question would be closed, but it is more of a special event-type deal...

Answer 3

As the site is getting bigger, some recurring questions are beginning to emerge, and we don't always have a good canonical answer for those. We tried to write a canonical answer once — How do I run a command as the system administrator (root) — and the result is not very good. I think that's because we tried to cram too much in one question. We should carefully review the kinds of questions that are asked and give enough information, but not too much, in the answer.

Here are a few topics that come up often:

• Rename a bunch of files
• Understanding disk usage (aka why do du, df and fdisk -l give different sizes)
• How do I install software that's not in my distribution?
• How do I change my PATH?
• How do I execute a command when I log in?
• How do I choose a Linux distribution? (shudder)
• some canonical question where the answer is “use type (and not which)”
• some canonical question where the answer is “put double quotes around variable expansions”
• how can I attach a running process to another terminal?

I propose prizes for asking and for answering such questions. Again, choosing how much to cover is an important part of obtaining an awesome canonical Q&A.