Trevor Owens

A quick update on the digital preservation stack exchange site proposal. As I mentioned before, there are a series of ways you can help make this proposal a reality, at this point the big task is to get 100 people to commit who have more than 200 reputation on another stack exchange site. We already have 32 people who have achieved this, so we are about a third of the way there.

This will likely be a bit of a long haul, but considering that we have managed to get this far in only about a month I think we are well on our way.

How you get reputation:

You get reputation by asking and answering questions on any of the stack exchange sites. I’ve pasted in a table from their guidelines on reputation below. You will notice that you really get reputation from having your answers or your questions voted up.

This can stack up very quickly,  for example, i’ve asked three questions on the Academia site and answered two, but those questions and answers were pretty good, so they got voted up multiple times and I ended up getting more than enough reputation to get over 200. You can see exactly what questions I asked and answered and what points I got for them here.

Where to get stack exchange reputation

I built up my 200 reputation on the Academia site, but you can do it anywhere. The important thing is that you pick a site and get 200 rep on that site (you need 200 rep on a single site so getting a little bit on a bunch of different sites isn’t going to cut it.) The full list of sites can be a little bit intimidating, so I figured I would point folks to a few sites they could think about.

• English Language and Usage Q&A for linguists, etymologists, and serious English language enthusiasts
• GamingQ&A for passionate videogamers on all platforms
• Board and Card Games Q&A for people who like playing board games, designing board games or modifying the rules of existing board games
• Travel Q&A for road warriors and seasoned travelers
• Photography Q&A for professional, enthusiast and amateur photographers
• CookingQ&A for professional and amateur chefs

Take a few minutes and look over the unanswered questions on any of the sites you think you might be interested in. Take a minute to try responding to a few. Then think up some questions you might have, search to see if they are already there and if not post them. In all seriousness, you can get 200 rep on one of these sites in a very short period of time and in the process you end up getting a better understanding of how this system works.