We Should have a QotW (Question of the Week)

Question

When I first joined around ~1.5 years ago there were ~10-20 new questions per day! Everyone had plenty of stuff to answer and there was plenty of variety... I think we need to bring back incentive to question writing because new users aren't doing it as often.

Some suggestions of how to implement QotW:

• Create a thread that is a sandbox of sorts for a "QotW (Question of the Week)".
  • This thread will be a basic sandbox for people to submit questions.
  • The questions submitted will be voted on, and at the end of Sunday (or any specified day) the highest voted question will be posted by a moderator.
  • This question will also receive and immediate bounty (of whatever).
• Have a moderator choose a question from the current sandbox to post themselves (with permission from the original author).
  • The author is awarded X reputation points for being chosen.
  • The author is prominently mentioned in the QotW.
• Other ideas?

Let me know what you think... I really do think we need a reward for filling our sandbox. Our sandbox is overflowing, and a lot of that overflow will die.

Answer 1

A similar idea, weekly topic contests

There exists a similar idea which has been tried multiple times across the stackexchange network. Here is a post on mother meta describing it.

An "implementation" of this idea can be found in this post on the puzzling.stackexchange meta (which is actually how I came to know about it). It was a fortnightly contest there and it seems to have stopped some months ago¹. I think we should also do this with a fortnigthly cadence in order to give more complex challenges the time be posted and appreciated by people.

How could it work for PPCG

• We make a post on meta asking for topics for these kinds of contests, people can post answers (one per topic) and can vote on them.
• Every fortnight we take the highest voted topic and make a post on meta challenging people to write challenges about that topic. This post could work as a mini-sandbox where each challenge whishing to participate to the contest needs to get a net score of at least 5 (this number can be tweaked) before posting it on main. Only challenges which have followed this procedure will be considered for the contest; this rule is to avoid spam of low-quality questions and encourage the use of the sandbox. Challenges posted on main should include a note stating that they are participating to the contest and a link to the post on meta.
• At the end of the fortnight the meta post for the contest is edited to include the list of all posted questions and a link to the question that received the most upvotes on main. The author of that question could be awarded some reputation, as suggested by Magic Octopus Urn, but I don't know how this could be managed (who should give them this reputation?).

I think we could try this idea and see how it goes, it can be a fun community event and we don't really have anything to lose doing this.

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¹ Yes, these kinds of contests sooner or later run out of ideas or people participation and die... It can still be fun while it lasts, though! On Puzzling, even with some skipped weeks, it went on for two years and nobody says it won't be revived in the future.