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Let's ask more questions! More questions will allow more answers, and good, answered questions make our site even more awesome. More good questions can also help in our quest to graduate. Plus, asking and answering more questions can earn you valuable reputation points and badges!

While we're asking more questions, let's try to fill out some of our under-served tags. Did you know that when our top 40 tags each have 200 questions, people can earn the Generalist badge? This is kind of a site milestone (not just about individuals earning badges) -- can we do it? Let's find out!

Contest Rules

Here's how it will work:

  1. From now until the end of March 23 UTC (that's 30 days), you earn one point each time you ask a question that:

    • uses a tag that has at least 10 and fewer than 200 questions (full tag list), and

    • has a score of at least +1, and

    • is open at the end of the contest

  2. You get one point per qualifying question, regardless of how many tags it uses. You can use tags as often as you like.

  3. Tags are an ever-moving target (and some curation is happening). If a question qualified at the time you asked it, that's good enough -- we will not yank points out from under you with housekeeping retaggings.

  4. However, if you add a clearly-bogus tag just to get a contest entry, judges reserve the right to disqualify a question. This rule is here for rules lawyers, not because I think it likely that our community members are going to game this.

  5. We probably haven't anticipated all wrinkles that might come up. We reserve the right to modify the rules during the contest if need be. Our goal is to be reasonable and, within that, err on the side of giving points -- we're here to have fun together and help our site.

We're setting a minimum of 10 questions on a tag because we've got some noise down at the very bottom of the tag list, and so that new tags get some vetting from the community before they count for contest entries.

Mechanics

Please record all entries by the end of Sunday, March 24 UTC so I can post a final tally. (They still need to have qualified by the deadline, but I can't assume you'll jump over here immediately to add them, hence this buffer space.)

When you have a new question with qualifying score, edit the community-wiki answer here with your name, a link to the question, and the tag(s) you're invoking. (You only need one tag, but feel free to list all that qualify so we can all see where we're building.)

If you don't have enough reputation to edit the answer, leave a comment on the answer with the information and someone will edit it in for you.

If you see an entry you think doesn't qualify, leave a comment on the answer explaining the problem.

Prizes

What do you get? More good questions for the site! Bragging rights!

Ok, I also have some prizes. :-)

Stack Exchange has donated some swag (thanks!), so in addition to those other benefits, we'll award physical prizes to:

  • the top three point-getters
  • and some randomly-selected entrants with at least three points

(To claim a swag prize, you must be willing to privately share a shipping address that will be deleted as soon as your package is in the mail.)

The very best prize, of course, would be for Writing to graduate, but that isn't under our control. Nice notebooks, though, I can send you! And some pens looted from another site, because all of our users are super, too! And there just might be some other things in your box too -- we'll see!

swag

For the winners and wrap-up, see this announcement.

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  • 4
    I got a question about this, so in case anybody else is also wondering: the question needs to be open at the end of the contest; it doesn't have to stay continuously open. If you ask a question, it gets put on hold, you fix it, and it gets reopened, that's fine. The goal is good questions for the site, which might involve some bumps along the way. We're not going to penalize people for a question not being perfect in the first version.
    – Monica Cellio
    Commented Feb 21, 2019 at 14:43
  • Small cheat: One of my tags on my most recent question has 10 questions asked because mine was the 10th. But there are other qualifying tags. Full disclosure :-D
    – Cyn
    Commented Feb 27, 2019 at 17:06
  • 7
    This contest seems to be working. Our questions per day has been trending upward since it started.
    – linksassin Mod
    Commented Feb 27, 2019 at 22:41
  • 2
    @linksassin agreed. Some really great questions too. I was afraid the contest might increase the amount of questions for questions' sake but, in general, that hasn't happened. I'm finding too that 1) I'm getting much better at asking questions and 2) even though I've put up legit questions, they weren't things I was necessarily needing input on, but it turns out the input has been really useful and I'm incorporating some of it into my book. Win-win all around!
    – Cyn
    Commented Feb 28, 2019 at 15:22
  • 2
    We're really pumping up the question-per-day score on Area-51. Hopefully we will be able to push it to promotion-status.
    – Liquid
    Commented Feb 28, 2019 at 15:41
  • What happens in the case of ties? For example, at the moment Cyn, Liquid and I are all tied for 2nd place. If it were two of us, it would have been fine. But there's 3 of us, and bruglesco in 1st.
    – Galastel supports GoFundMonica
    Commented Mar 22, 2019 at 18:10
  • @Galastel we'll resolve ties in the direction of being more generous, don't worry.
    – Monica Cellio
    Commented Mar 22, 2019 at 18:19
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    I checked all of the questions that are below me on the entry list, with no closures.
    – Summer
    Commented Mar 24, 2019 at 0:58
  • 1
    @bruglesco thank you! I just checked the rest (also no closures).
    – Monica Cellio
    Commented Mar 24, 2019 at 2:05
  • Not just closures! Some of the questions listed may not have 1+ points. While it may be hard to judge the timing of that, in most cases it's pretty clear. Also to check if there is at least one tag with the right number of questions on it (with allowances for changes over time...like anything that went over 200 during the contest still counts).
    – Cyn
    Commented Mar 25, 2019 at 0:02
  • @Cyn I was checking tags as they came in, but you're right -- I didn't check scores. (Update: have checked; disqualified one entry after checking its vote history.)
    – Monica Cellio
    Commented Mar 25, 2019 at 0:39
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    I just went through them all. 327 questions!! I did not open any questions, only looked at the question list. I also found the disqualified question (no downvotes or upvotes so this was not a case of it qualifying then losing it). While some people reported all their tags even if they didn't qualify, every question on the contest list did have at least 1 qualifying tag. I did not bother to write down questions that would have qualified for the contest if only the authors chose to enter. BUT I did find two authors who did enter the contest but left out questions I'll put them down below.
    – Cyn
    Commented Mar 25, 2019 at 1:01
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    @April listed 3 questions in the contest but also had 3 qualifying ones not in the list: writing.stackexchange.com/questions/43927/… and writing.stackexchange.com/questions/43426/… and writing.stackexchange.com/questions/42664/…
    – Cyn
    Commented Mar 25, 2019 at 1:03
  • @Prasad_Joshi listed 2 questions in the contest but also had 2 qualifying ones not in the list: writing.stackexchange.com/questions/43698/… and writing.stackexchange.com/questions/43691/…
    – Cyn
    Commented Mar 25, 2019 at 1:04
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    Thanks Cyn! I know last Friday I added one that I should have put here, but I was too busy at work. I guess I forgot about a few others.
    – April Salutes Monica C.
    Commented Mar 25, 2019 at 13:21

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
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Entries

Add entries to this list in the following format:

  • Username, , link to question

Or, when you have more than one entry (which I hope lots of people will), use sub-lists (follow Cyn's lead).

One entry per question, not one entry per tag.

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    @April go ahead and add questions when they meet the other criteria even if you think they might get closed. If they're closed they might be reopened, after all. We'll do a check for closed questions at the end of the contest, but we're not trying to track fluctuations in the meantime.
    – Monica Cellio
    Commented Feb 26, 2019 at 15:24
  • @Prasad_Joshi done. You now have over 100 rep, so you should be able to edit in future entries yourself.
    – Monica Cellio
    Commented Mar 19, 2019 at 14:18
  • @Shokhet, looks like your edit broke the formatting. I'm going to roll back and re-add your entry.
    – Monica Cellio
    Commented Mar 20, 2019 at 22:28

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