Prompted by the recent questions about negative voted questions and inspired by the actual most negative question on meta.
Because it's obvious that unless Jon, God forbid, would lose interest or capacity to participate in StackOverflow, none of us will ever have a chance to make it to #1, I propose a contest. Each person, other than Jon Skeet, who answers a question and receives an upvote in the month of May, 2010 on StackOverflow will be entered into the contest, one entry per upvote. At the end of the month one name will be drawn from the pool of entries at random and their reputation will be set to Jon Skeet's repuation + the difference between Jon's reputation gained during the month and that earned by the user (but no less than 1). At the end of June 2010, their reputation will be reset by subtracting the amount added as a result of winning the contest.
The contest has a four-fold result: the winner gets to be the #1 user on SO for some indeterminate amount of time until Jon catches up, Jon gets a little competition to spice up his participation, people who whine about how much reputation others have can be told "you've had your chance, now bugger off" and the rest of us get to watch Jon's race back to number one unfold -- will the lucky winner be able to keep the title for an entire month of June?
Caveats:
- I don't think privileges are revoked once granted. In this case, the user's privileges would be reset to their original state.
- The user's actual reputation would appear on their SO careers CV, if they have one.
Alternatives
If you're not comfortable handing out unearned privileges, the contest could be restricted to those who have reached one of the significant milestones -- say the ability to edit at 2000 or close other questions at 3000.
i-d-forget-it-by-friday
tag.