Interesting idea. Probably hard to rate a "site" though. Take the most extreme case: CPAN. If you look, you could probably find some really bad coding practices there, yet rating CPAN as "not promoting good coding practices" would be disingenuous. You'd probably have to rate articles or some other more fine-grained structure instead of entire sites.

I think another difficulty is that a substantial portion of the "good" content out there is probably created by monks. So we have kind of a conflict of interest if we start handing out awards.

If merlyn writes a good article about Perl, as he has been known to do, and we all vote to give it an award, that's fine. But like I said, monks create a lot of good Perl-related material on the web. Over time, as every Perl article that a monk writes gets the PM Seal Of Approval, it starts to look like we created an award to give to ourselves.

I think another difficulty is that a substantial portion of the "good" content out there is probably created by monks. So we have kind of a conflict of interest if we start handing out awards.

Well, that's kinda too much of an assumption IMVHO. Speaking of which I wonder how many monks also spend some time on other renown online Perl communities: I know some, but I only have a partial view of the thing. However as an issue it's OT here. But now that you make me think of it, it may constitute the subject of a poll suggestion. Whoa! The second in just few days...

Nah.

I know there are quite a few monks here that I'd be happy to buy beer for, either for helping out in a pinch, posting fascinating questions or meditations, helping develop cool modules, work on Perl 6, or even for responding to a post by posing The Right Question which illuminates the subject matter and allows the answer to become self-evident.

I will admit to regular visits to Selected Best Nodes for some good reading and for occasionally upvoting undiscovered gems. But an award seems a bit too formulaic for this near anarchic community (and I mean that in a good way, really).

I don't believe giving merlyn a Perlmonks award would be useful -- we already know he's got a tremendous grasp of the language and is in demand to write about and teach Perl.

All we really need to do is to say 'Thanks'. every time someone in the community helps out. Sometimes that's all that's necessary.

Updated in response to AnonyMonk below OK, OK, I guess I was responding to Re^2: Should there be a Perl Monks Award?, not the original post.

I get the feeling I should have been a bit clearer.

I wasn't saying that we need to give merlyn an award, or that he doesn't deserve an award, or really anything specifically about him. I was just using him as an example of why giving a PM award for Perl sites or Perl articles could be a bad idea. He happens to be both a prominent PerlMonk and the author of a ton of Perl books and articles. Substitute the name of any other monk/author if you'd like.

My argument was this:

The "best" Perl articles that I have read (i.e. the ones that get printed and put in my Perl Stuff binder) are often written by people who happen to be members here. I was speculating that there could be enough monk-generated content getting these awards that it would look like we just invented an award to give to ourselves. But I could also be wrong about that. No assumptions, no suggestions, just another thing to think about if you're considering giving out an award.

I didn't know that merlyn was a Perl-related site (I think you might have missed the use, in the parent node, of that last word).

If you want to tell your opinion about sites, you could petition the gods to make a category in Reviews.

Reading the post below by Anno, it occurs to me that since PerlMonks collectively can be considered a major authority on Perl, why not issue our own award to Perl related sites? The voting system could possibly be used for approving nominees.

I'm not really sure. You see, the point is that the voting system is a strange beast. Which is the reason why in this section often people post "suggestions" proposing changes to it. (Mostly downvoted on the basis that the current system works well enough and changing it constitutes a risk not worth any possible gain.) For example, nodes tend to "decay" and very good answers even addressing points not touched by other respondents tend to get very few votes if not posted early enough, and I don't mean a year later, just a few days. Similarly, that's what happens when a node is a deep reply in the thread or comes below other ones. My own experience is that some nodes of mine into which I put many efforts and much care gained a lower reputation that ones that I judge to be more superficial. But that's the way it is and I just don't complain. Only, I'm afraid that basing the attribution of an award on the reputation system would be biased. OTOH the poll mechanism would come closer, but it's optimized for fun and wouldn't be really reliable either. (I knew that you could vote multiple times if posting from several different IPs, I don't know if it has been patched, but I don't think so, since there's no real need for such a thing.)