Have questions about (any kind of) writing? Want to help my site graduate?

[cellio]

On Stack Exchange, new Q&A sites start out in "beta" until they prove themselves and get to be full-fledged sites. That's the theory, but because of the metrics SE uses, sites can stay in beta for years and years, way longer than what you'd expect from a "beta" label. To me, at least, "beta" means something is provisional, might change drastically, might get yanked entirely... but for our long-running beta sites, none of that is true. SE isn't going to shut us down.

Writing is a site about all kinds of writing. Lots of questions are about fiction, but we also have questions about technical writing, academic writing, poetry, screenwriting, game manuals, journalism, blogging, and more. The site was started in 2010, and we would like to be able to "graduate". (Even Gmail wasn't in beta that long!)

We've got a strong community, quality answers, many good questions...but not enough. We need to attract more questions -- real questions that people have, not fluff to pad out numbers. We don't want to waste our users' time answering questions that nobody cares about, after all. We don't want to dilute site quality; we want to reach more people.

So we're having a contest to attract more questions particularly in tags other than our very top ones (for more breadth). Do you have questions about dialogue, API documentation, citation format, translation, essays, software tools, ebooks, punctuation? Do your questions fit the Q&A format, meaning that they're answerable questions rather than discussion topics or opinion surveys? (Also, not critiques of your own work, though you can use your work as an example to show the problem you're trying to solve.) If you have questions, this would be a great time to ask our community of experts and amateurs for answers. The purpose of all of SE's Q&A sites is to build repositories of useful knowledge, so we can help not just the person who asked the question but the next person who has the same question.

You can browse the top questions of the last year or so to get a sense of what works well there. A little closer to home, you can look at all the questions I've asked -- please don't blindly vote for them all; I'm just pointing to them because if you're reading this you probably know me already.

This contest runs through March 23. Mostly people are competing for bragging rights and to help our site, but I have some small prizes to hand out (provided by Stack Exchange), and I'm planning to add a little something that should be of interest to folks who don't necessarily care about SE swag.

You'll need to create an account on the site, which is pretty lightweight -- sign in with a Google ID if you like or use an email address. I've found Stack Exchange to be quite non-evil when it comes to using your private information: they don't spam, they don't share your information with third parties, and while moderators can access it, all such access is logged.