Quite a while ago we had a so called Topic of the Week where users were encouraged to ask questions about a specific topic and compete for the best question. In an effort to revive this kind of challenge, I'll try to follow Jon Ericson's excellent guide and would like to ask for topic ideas here.
The general procedure will be as follows:
- Users propose some interesting ideas for topic challenges as answers to this question (one answer for one topic) and vote for the topics they like most.
- Once we have a little stock of topics, we'll start a weekly challenge for this topic, accompanied by a respective meta question. Jon suggests a period from friday to friday, which sounds like a good idea, but maybe this can also be controlled on a topic by topic basis. Maybe one could even make it a two-week challenge, or only in specific cases. As to the technical problem of nomination, the topic will be bound to one or more specific tags. While Jon suggests a single tag for each challenge, I don't see any problem with multiple tags (e.g. for multiple movies of a series or director), this will prevent inappropriate agglomeration tags as happened with the last challenge.
- Once the challenge is over, we can list all the questions asked and the specific winners by question and answer votes (hopefully the Hot Network Questions won't destroy the statistics completely ;-)). At the moment there aren't really any resources for actual material prizes, but well, for whatever reasons you're here, wealth isn't one of them anyway.
- After the challenge we can start a new one from one of the other proposed topics, or we can wait for a better moment, or for more topics. Nobody says we have to force any single topic on the community every week (something that might have broken the motivation behind the last topic of the week, I guess).
So what topics should we propose?
It's really up to yourself what topic you like to have represented more, be this from specific movies, general broad topics, the entire works of a specific director, or something totally abstract we don't have any questions about at all. Here are just some small hints (with absolutely no obligation to be followed):
- Keep in mind that it should be broad enough to gather enough traction in a single week but also specific enough to not have every question asked attributed to it and maybe encourage questions to topics we might not already have much about.
- It could be a good idea to tie it to specific theatrical releases in order to profit from the natural temporal attraction of those releases. But in this case it might be good idea to not tie it to a single movie, whose questions will come anyway. Maybe try to broaden it, e.g. by asking about the whole franchise/series (where appropriate), or the the whole works of the director (if significant).
- Feel free to include ideas about the technicalities in your proposal, like what tags to count, when to best schedule the challenge, or if it maybe would be better served as a two-week challenge.
