A few months ago we discussed ideas for a Purim publication and followed that up with more discussion in a dedicated chat room (which anybody is welcome to join). There were two main proposals: a book like last year's haggadah, and a smaller publication, perhaps printed on large paper and folded, suitable for use in shlach manot baskets.
I like both of these ideas and they are not incompatible -- both could be worked on. We kind of bogged down on implementation details for the latter -- how to format it, how to get them printed, etc. So, while I still hope that somebody will carry that idea forward, for this post I'd like to talk about a book like the haggadah.
The plan
As we did last year, we (= some folks in chat) propose to collect suggestions for questions, enlist the community to edit selected questions into the book's format using a markdown template to be supplied, import the results into a nicely-formatted document, and produce a PDF for download. We have some volunteers and would love to have more. We expect this to be no bigger than last year's haggadah (quite possibly smaller), and based on feedback from last year, we'd like to be a little more selective about the questions.
The first step is to collect suggestions from the community for questions to include. Please link your favorite Purim-related questions in the answer to this question. Currently we envision three sections/types of questions (let us know what we missed):
questions about the Megillah
questions about Purim mitzvot and customs
Purim Torah
We'd like to get this started early so that if we need to winnow the list or go hunting for more questions in a neglected area, there's time for that to happen. Please use this post to brainstorm!
While you're looking at candidate questions, please improve them. We want the source question and its answers to be the best they can be. The only editing in the book should be book-specific considerations.
Once we've built up a list of suggestions we'll move on to the next step, book-specific editing.
Time to start editing!
We have several questions (in an answer below) that are ready for book editing, and more that are awaiting review (please help and update the answer with your assessment). It's time to start editing! Add your submissions to the following posts:
I've set an arbitrary deadline of Wednesday, February 26 for drafts, so we have time to edit into a book, proofread that, and have the results out in enough time for y'all to share the book with all your friends. Please let me know if you see problems with any of this.
Also...
For reference, last year's analogue of this question (and from there you can use the tag to see the other posts for that project).
If you're willing to help with editing (see last year's posts for an idea of what that entails; it doesn't have to be a lot of work per person), please leave a comment on this post saying so. Feel free to delete that comment after leaving it if you don't want to commit publicly; moderators can see deleted comments.