Should we have weekly or fortnightly topic challenges?

Question

As suggested by Suminda in this answer, I think a weekly or fortnightly topic challenge might be interesting, though I'm not sure how much participation would be generated.

Please read: How do weekly topic challenges work?

pick one of the proposed topics and post a question on meta challenging users to ask questions on that specific subject

This meta question, and this top level meta question from another SE site shows a good example.

Example topic list:

• Parents and children
• Brahmaviharas
• Speech
• Emptiness
• Riddles #1
• Mindfulness
• Nationbuilding
• Life of the Buddha
• Similes #1
• Monastic order and lay people
• Enlightenment
• Impermanence
• Buddhist traditions
• Intention
• Health
• Parables and anecdotes #1
• Happiness
• One sentence teachings
• Daily life
• Five Aggregates
• Similes #2
• History of Buddhism
• Finance, business and economics
• Samatha and jhanas
• Food
• Riddles #2
• Three Poisons
• Humour
• Social discrimination e.g. racism, sexism
• Actions
• Anatta
• Charity
• Time
• Parables and anecdotes #2
• Dependent Origination
• Renunciation
• Desire
• Teacher and student
• Precepts

Answer 1

One possible drawback to this idea is that e.g. Ven. Yuttadhammo said he's not enthusiastic about 'seeded' questions -- and this proposal might be (or might seem) similar. Not that you don't want to ask the question and increase the value of the site, but see for example this comment,

Religious questions are not "info only" questions. These questions are "life direction" questions. Every question, if possible, is crucial to the asker.

When I researched Proposal: Self-answering questions is welcome a consistent bit of advice was the questions should be well written:

• What's the question?
• What research have you done already to discover the answer?
• How was your research not enough?

This answer was well-written on that subject, and implies that it's good to know whether and why and how much a question is important to the person asking it -- it includes,

This is a fantastic quotation on how to judge whether or not to ask a question in the first place. "How much do you care about finding out the answer?", "Does the answer nag at you silently as you go about your day?"

Perhaps that kind of insight, into the intent of the person asking, helps to direct a good/specific answer (as well as providing a motive or incentive for answering at all).

See also Yuttadhammo's,

Personally, I find seeded questions irksome; it's generally easy to see that the asker isn't really looking for an answer, so there is no sense of accomplishment in answering.

So one thing that worries me about this proposal is that the following maybe aren't genuine reasons for a question:

• "Because it's a topic of the week"
• "Because I want to increase the site's average number of questions asked per day"

I mean they're not bad reasons but perhaps they're only interesting to meta-users who are interested in the site itself.

One the other hand I can see there's a possible counter-argument -- i.e. perhaps there's a good way to use the topics-of-the-week initiative, that is, as a way to encourage people to think of important, useful questions.