The 6 Week Challenge, first launched in 2011, is a challenge to upgrade your language skills in one language from beginner to something more worthwhile, and to see if you can find more time to study languages when competing with other participants in a global highscore. 6 Week Challenges start on February 1st, May 1st, August 1st and November 1st every year, so there is a rough 6 weeks on / 6 weeks off pattern. Note that you can only do the 6 Week Challenge with a language in which you're a beginner or lower-intermediate at most. This allows for a more just comparison between participants.
The score is based on minutes. Any minutes, i. e. it doesn't matter if you're studying a textbook, using Anki, reading intensively or the like. However, please consider whether you are focussing on the language. If you're doing something where the language is not your one and only focus (e. g. ironing while playing a podcast in the background, or watching a TV show where you mostly focus on the native-language subtitles and don't intently listen to the target-language audio), please only award yourself a fraction of the minutes, corresponding to the percentage of your attention that you gave to the target language. For 60 minutes of studying to count as 60 minutes in this scoring, you have to be 100% focussed on learning your target language.
If you tag your studies (e.g. #textbook, #reading, #anki, #class), the statistics page will be able to tell you how much of your time was spent on what activity. This is non-standardized across participants and for your own information only.
There are two rankings: one for hours spent on your target language and one for all hours that you spend learning languages. So if you have to do some maintenance, you can still make it count. The number of maintenance languages is not limited. In exchange, everyone can only designate ONE language as main target.
Get Good Scores
When you have studied something, or at the end of the day, you should immediately log it here, so that it can update your score and your rank. Additionally, this will keep other 6 Week Challenge participants informed. Maybe you even want to post something that you just read in/about your target language.
Work done on your target language contributes to BOTH the target language score and the overall score. Work done on other languages only contributes to your overall score, so you will be tempted to do more for your target language. Think carefully about which language you really want to push ahead this time. You must at most be lower-intermediate in it though, better to be a complete beginner. This is your chance to make huge progress in one language in 6 weeks.