AwardAnnals:Policies and guidelines

From AwardAnnals

Key policies

Award Annals policies are similar to Wikipedia policies, but there are a few differences. You don't need to read every Wikipedia and Award Annals policy before you contribute, but these are particularly important.

1. Award Annals is not Wikipedia. Wikipedia is an encyclopedia. Award Annals is not about human knowledge; its most basic function is to document applied human judgement. No encyclopedic articles, please.
2. Don't infringe copyrights. Reproducing marketing copy from publishers, studios, and labels is considered fair use. The right to reproduce content from an affiliate (e.g., reviews from Amazon.com) has been granted to Award Annals. Beyond these instances, the contributor (that's you) must document the right to reproduce content.
3. Avoid personal opinion. This is a difficult policy to express, considering that Award Annals is all about human judgement. Reviews and analysis from reputable sources is welcome, and is useful insofar as it illuminates the reason for the judgement in question. (e.g., a book review reveals the qualities that moved the Pulitzer judges to select the book.)
4. Speak to the patron. Award Annals pages honor creative works and their creators, but its primary use is to allow patrons to find works comparable to those they know and love. It helps to keep this in mind.

Guidelines

There are five types of page that make Award Annals what it is.

• Creative work pages provide information about a work, such as synopses, reviews, related works, and links to other information.
• Person pages contain information about authors, directors, and artists. A facility for documenting awards given to a person rather than a work (e.g., the Nobel prize) is forthcoming.
• Award organization pages provide a bit of information about the award’s history, judging process, categories, and calendar of events. Links to annals and honor rolls should be provided.
• Annals are the heart of the site. The results of each award event is documented.
• Honor roll pages provide a ranked list of works in various categories. Works are ranked by a “score” determined by the honors it has received.

The interaction between these pages is more complex than an unmodified MediaWiki project, but is very simple with a basic understanding of templates and magic words. To illustrate the interaction, let us set about adding a fictional award to the site: The Lucius Prize for Cool Books. Say the first annual Lucius Prize ceremony is approaching, the shortlist of five books has been announced, and the winner will be determined sometime in the future.

Step 1: add creative works. The guidelines for adding a creative work page describe a format for the page, but the real trick is gathering information. If you have the books in your possession, then you probably have everything you need: the title, author, cover photo, and a synopsis or jacket copy. Search online merchants and libraries for information, but mind the copyrights! A review by Amazon or Barnes & Noble are allowed, as well as anything from the publisher.

If the work is closely related to another work like a film, soundtrack, sequel, or a newer edition, then add a page for that creative work as well. Link the two pages in a “related works” section. If the work is part of a series, consider adding a page for the series and some or all of the other works in the series. A series page is a short creative work page ending with a “series titles” section containing an annalentry for each work—usually in chronological order.

Step 1 might take a while. If there really are only five books to add, it might be done in an hour if the books are mainstream and you are practiced.

Step 2: add person pages. Each of the works entered in step 1 refers to at least one person: the author. If the author’s name in the infobox is a red link, find or create the appropriate person page. Please make an effort to find an existing person page: check for misspellings, middle initials, and titles such as “Jr.” appended to the name. It's simple enough to do: type the last name in the search box and click “Go”.

The format of a person page is intentionally not well-defined to allow for personalization. If the person is a creator with works in the Annals, please end the page with something like this:

== Works ==
{{honorroll:cw category|Works by Robert A. Heinlein}}

Properly constructed creative work pages belong to [[Category:Works by {Name}]] so that all of the works by a creator can be listed this way.

Step 3: add an award organization page. Finally, we're ready to document the illustrious Lucius Prize. An award organization page requires research on basic information concerning the award organization and the methods used to choose the shortlist and the winner. A bit of history is a nice touch. If those Lucius people are willing to provide some propaganda, put it at the end of the page and try to keep the preceding sections brief.

For each award category recognized by the Lucius, we must provide four links to pages that will be created in steps r and 5:

• the latest annal
• a wiki category of annals
• an honor roll of works
• an honor roll of authors

Finally, we simply must create and maintain an even calendar for this award. It would be a shame if we went to all this trouble documenting the Lucius Prize and it was forgotten next year. Setting the event calendar will ensure that Award Annals administrators will be reminded to check for announcements and update the Lucius annals.

Step 4: add annals. With steps 1 through 3 done, this most important of steps will be quite simple. An annal page sets the terms (e.g., call it a “shortlist” rather than “finalists”), and identifies and ranks the honored works. It also provides an annal navigator for flipping through the years, though the Lucius will only have one year to begin with. There should also be some links to relevant honor rolls.

A proper annal belongs in the “Annal:” namespace, which is restricted and can be edited only by certain users, so we will simply create the annal in the main namespace. The only difference is that the Lucius Prize will not appear on the honors list until an administrator moves the page “2007 Lucius Prize for Cool Books” to “Annal:2007 Lucius Prize for Cool Books”. Adding a few annals will clearly demonstrate to an administrator our knowledge of the Award Annals system, probably resulting in being granted access.

Step 5: add honor rolls. The final step is to create honor rolls for the Lucius Prize and any genres that have not already been created. Since the Lucius Prize is for Cool Books, they are probably all science fiction books, so a new genre is not necessary. The two honor rolls mentioned in Step 3 are:

• [[Honor roll:Lucius Prize for Cool Books]] provides a list of all works that have received the prize, ranked by all the honors they have received from all awards.
• [[Honor roll:Lucius Prize for Cool Books authors]] is a list of authors that have received the prize, but they are ranked only by the honors their Lucius-Prize-honored works have received. In other words, if Stephen King was nominated for a single Lucius Prize, he will not be at the top of the list due to the honor heaped upon him from the Stoker.