Talk:Awards

Well, this seems to be becoming an "Official" page so let's start the discussions on how to use it. BLongley 17:11, 28 May 2011 (UTC)

Stoker Awards
I've spent several days on these and they're mostly whacked into shape I think. I'll recheck after the next backup (or maybe the one after, I'm not sure I've completed my work in time for this week's.) Thoughts so far:


 * 1) We were very inconsistent about the award categories. You have to stay consistent within the same year or the categories are obviously split, but across years it's less obvious. I've standardised on the "Superior Achievement in XXXX" format for most awards and corrected some that just said "Novel" or "First Novel". And "Non-Fiction" rather than "Nonfiction". Still to do: "Life Achievement" or "Lifetime Achievement"? BLongley 17:26, 28 May 2011 (UTC)
 * 2) Some of the special awards like the Richard Laymon Award and the (Silver) Hammer Award are still inconsistent about award year. And as those aren't for anything literary, should we even include them? BLongley 17:26, 28 May 2011 (UTC)
 * 3) Some awards are still given to what we would consider "pseudonyms". BLongley 17:26, 28 May 2011 (UTC)
 * 4) Movie URLs are lost in the Screenplay adds, and there are bugs with apostrophes in various fields.  BLongley 17:26, 28 May 2011 (UTC)
 * 5) We stopped adding Preliminary Nominees sometime ago. Do we want to make it possible/simpler to add these for later years? BLongley 17:26, 28 May 2011 (UTC)

Sturgeon Awards
I've brought these slightly more up-to-date. Compare 2003 and 2004 though, and see the differences in ordering. 2005-2010 have had the "Winner", "Second Place" and "Third Place" entered (by me) and those display in the order that makes most sense to me. But entering them in the right order should not be necessary to have them display in the "right" order. BLongley 19:57, 28 May 2011 (UTC)

And again, the question of whether we really want/need the preliminary short-lists or long-lists arises. I haven't done those for this award. BLongley 19:57, 28 May 2011 (UTC)

2010 John W. Campbell Award
The website now says "Writers known to be ineligible due to prior sales: Gail Carriger". But we don't know of anything earlier than 2009 and the Hugo Awards voting report shows her nomination was counted. Does anyone know what happened? BLongley 13:50, 30 May 2011 (UTC)

Asimov's Readers' Poll
It seems that Al did enter the position of each title, but it won't display: e.g. "Novella (Nomination)" rather than "Novella (Place: 2)". BLongley 14:39, 30 May 2011 (UTC)


 * "Asimov's Readers' Poll doesn't display place" created and fix submitted. BLongley 16:55, 30 May 2011 (UTC)


 * And the Award Categories sometimes contain redundant information: e.g. "Asimov's Reader's Poll -- Novella" whereas later years just say "Novella". BLongley 14:46, 30 May 2011 (UTC)


 * The early poems don't link either. Do we need a "Link Award to Title" option like "Link Review to Title", or are people happy to add and delete as a workaround? BLongley 16:55, 30 May 2011 (UTC)


 * I think a "Link Award to Title" would be a reasonable feature request, but I think it should be a fairly low priority, since the workaround is pretty easy. Chavey 02:17, 31 May 2011 (UTC)

Aurealis Awards
Small bug: There's a fair number of "honourable mentions" in these lists. It's possible to enter such (Award level "93") and they'll display as such at title level (well, without the "u"), but not on the Awards by Year pages. BLongley 15:28, 31 May 2011 (UTC)


 * And "highly commended" isn't an option. BLongley 15:51, 31 May 2011 (UTC)


 * And "No Award" just leaves a line "". BLongley 15:58, 31 May 2011 (UTC)


 * I'm giving up for now, let the Antipodeans fill in the rest. Our software can't cope with "(please note: the author declined to accept this award)". BLongley 23:07, 31 May 2011 (UTC)

Standardizing formats for the awards
I've been working on standardizing the appearance of the individual award sections on the Awards page. (Aside: In the process of doing this, I discovered that two years of "Deathrealm Awards" had been lumped together with the "Ditmar Awards". I have separated them.) The main changes I've made to the awards page are:  Included mini-sections (several empty at this point) for award descriptions, categories, etc. Converted all of the links to "annual pages" to the standard table format we're using. Replaced the "Home page" and "Wikipedia" link sections to a single section on "Exterior links", including those two types of links, and links to the appropriate Locus award page. Entered links to (AFAIK) all Wikipedia awards pages, and all Locus award pages. (For the awards that we list, of course.) The only award we list that Locus doesn't is the SFBC award. Searched for award home pages, and added those links. Re-ordered the awards so they are in alphabetical order by award name (they had been ordered by the award page acronym). With awards named after people, I used their last name. Taking a tactic from Locus, I bold-faced the last name for those people, to indicate why it's in the order it is. Unfortunately, that bold-facing doesn't propagate to the index at the top, so it's not clear there's any real value to that tactic. For now, the "Status" statement we have is more for editors than for readers, so I wanted it to appear differently. I've put it after the annual links table, and block-quoted (indented) it.  Please let me know if any of these were bad choices, or bad implementations. Some elements I expect to do soon on this standardization effort include: Fill in missing award descriptions and categories. For each award description, start with an appropriate award category type, e.g. "International Award", "National Award", "Thematic Award", etc. I think there would be value in standardizing on how a cell in a table should appear in the 3 different circumstances of: (i) No award given that year; (ii) Data not yet entered; (iii) Reserved for awards yet to be given (e.g. 2012 awards).  Suggestions on any of these points would be appreciated. Chavey 16:04, 31 May 2011 (UTC)


 * The grids look good, thanks for those - but I don't like the Retro Hugo Award "awarded in" or the James White Award "No award" and "No competition" entries. But at least one of those is on your to-do list, I see, so carry on! BLongley 22:07, 31 May 2011 (UTC)


 * Here's a tentative proposal for "non-award" years:

I add a "Years Awarded" mini-section to the standard template listing above the grid of annual links. Years prior to when the award was given, or after an award has stopped being given, are lumped together (using colspan), using empty cells.  ? Years in which the award was skipped are handled as with the previous rule. ? <li>Years after the most recently posted award are left as separate cells, with a dash as the content. <li>Years in which the award existed, but for which we currently have no award page, contain the year itself, with no attached link. <li>Years in which the award existed, but for which the committee chose not to give an award (as opposed to not having a competition), contain the year itself, with no link, and an explanation in the "Years Awarded" mini-section. </ol>
 * For examples of how this would look, see the awards for Analog down through the British Fantasy Awards, plus the James White award. Does the "lumping" of the blank years seem useful? Other comments? Chavey 13:29, 2 June 2011 (UTC)


 * I've rarely visited this page, so I wasn't familiar with how it looked before. Regardless, I like what you've done here. I do have a couple of suggestions: remove the formatting of the first paragraph (Awards) so that it's not listed with the awards themselves in the header menu.  Also, I think the Status line should be moved above the "Annual Winners by year" table so as not to be confused with the award below it.  This would streamline the page as well (those indented Status lines really stick out, and not all of them are indented.) Still, a rather well-designed and very useful page now that award-editing has been implemented. Mhhutchins 00:07, 3 June 2011 (UTC)


 * Since no one objected, I've implemented those two changes. The only way I could find to have the "Awards" general description appear without being in the "Table of Contents" was to have it appear above that ToC. It seems to me that it's appropriate to have it there, so long as the wording there stays concise. Chavey 19:15, 4 June 2011 (UTC)


 * Looks much better. Thanks for the changes.  I'll tweak it so that the opening paragraph doesn't butt up against the ToC. Mhhutchins 19:26, 4 June 2011 (UTC)

Ampersands in Award categories
Don't try and enter things like "Lesbian and Gay Science Fiction, Fantasy & Horror" - they error out on the Submissions screen. BLongley 12:28, 4 June 2011 (UTC)


 * Does "&amp;amp;" work for such submissions? I've used that elsewhere. Chavey 14:22, 4 June 2011 (UTC)


 * And apostrophes kill submissions too, e.g. "Mythopoeic Fantasy Award for Children's Literature". BLongley 13:23, 4 June 2011 (UTC)


 * I've submitted a fix for these. Might take quite a bit of testing though. BLongley 16:26, 13 June 2011 (UTC)

Ordering of Award Categories
How does the system decide in which order to list the categories? For example, the World Fantasy Award starts off with Novel, Novella, and Short Story, as if it were alphabetical, but then it switches to some "lesser" awards. So what's the algorithm it uses? If I were to add categories to an award, could I predict in what order they would appear? Chavey 17:52, 4 June 2011 (UTC)


 * If I'm reading the code right, it seems to go in this order:

"Best Novel", "Novel", "SF Novel", "Best SF Novel", "Best Fantasy Novel", "Fantasy Novel", "Best Horror Novel", "Horror Novel", "Best Horror/Dark Fantasy Novel", "Best First Novel", "First Novel", "Best Young Adult Novel", "Novella", "Best Novella", "Best Novella/Novelette", "Novelette", "Best Novelette", "Short Fiction", "Short Story", "Best Short Story", "Best Collection", "Best Anthology", "Best Non-Fiction", "Best Art Book", "Best Editor", "Editor"


 * After that I guess it's random. BLongley 18:11, 4 June 2011 (UTC)

Purpose of this page
It would probably be best that discussions on this page limit themselves only to concerns about the Awards page itself, i.e. its design & layout, links from the page to the db, adding or removing awards from the page, etc. Any discussions or questions about Award entry from the database interface should start on one of the Community Portal pages, possibly the Help desk, Rules & Standards. or to get the attention of one of the moderators on the Moderator Noticeboard. (That is standard Wiki talk page procedure.) Thanks. Mhhutchins 18:14, 4 June 2011 (UTC)


 * Given the presence of the "Status" sections, I think we're also using this as a "project page" until we bring things up-to-date. Although someone could create such separately if they're so inclined, to keep things more standard. However, we're not that good at getting people to report bugs and Feature requests in the right places, so maybe some Wiki pages for those would also be in order for those not development-minded. Although you can usually just bug me for help in creating those, even if they're beyond my skills to complete. BLongley 18:42, 5 June 2011 (UTC)

Prix Utopia
Hi guys,

I'm a newbie here, so I hope I won't intrude. Is it OK if I add a section for the "Prix Utopia"? It was a (short-lived) award given at the Utopiales (one of the biggest French SF conventions), where writers were awarded for their life's work. Between 1998 and 2005 were thus awarded Jack Vance, Brian Aldiss, Frederik Pohl, Christopher Priest, Robert Silverberg, Norman Spinrad, Michael Moorcock and finally James Morrow. Here, you know it all! Regards, JuggleDan 18:05, 5 June 2011 (UTC)


 * Fine by me. If you can point us at any authoritative webpages we can check with that would be helpful. And it will take some time to make it an "official" award in ISFDB terms - we're still catching up with the other 43! BLongley 18:24, 5 June 2011 (UTC)


 * Here's a link to the Locus list. It appears to be a single award given annually from 1998-2005 to one individual. Mhhutchins 21:03, 5 June 2011 (UTC)


 * A larger discussion of which awards to add is beginning down 3 topics from here. Chavey 20:03, 7 June 2011 (UTC)

Filling out award mini-section contents
I've completed filling in (at least tentative versions of) the mini-sections on Award Descriptions, Award Categories, and Years Awarded for all of the current awards. This complete the basic population of all fields on the Awards page. In doing the "Years Awarded" field, I couldn't help but notice that we still have several discrepancies between whether the year of the award is the year in which it was announced, or the eligibility year. Is that supposed to have been standardized? And what should I do about those that disagree with whatever our standard is? Chavey 03:16, 6 June 2011 (UTC)
 * Great job. About the year of award, we (meaning the ISFDB) shouldn't have a standard. It should be based solely on the standards of the awards themselves, which will vary from award to award.  Mhhutchins 03:38, 6 June 2011 (UTC)
 * There are some awards where, for example, the Locus "year of the award" is different than that shown on the award home page. In those cases, I presume, we should then go with what the award home page shows, right? Chavey 05:59, 7 June 2011 (UTC)


 * I don't get the drift of your meaning here. Does "award home page" mean their own website? Looking at Locus's home page, I see that the 2010 Locus Awards are given for 2009 achievements (the "eligibility year").  I entered most of the 2010 awards and they were all for works in 2009.  Again, I think we should label the awards the same as that given by those who administer the awards. If you click on "2010" in the Locus Awards table, you're sent to an ISFDB page that lists the 2010 Locus Awards (for work done in 2009).  Are you saying that the link should be labeled "2009" because that's the year the works were published?  Or are you saying that some of the ISFDB award listings mistakenly link to a different year than are labeled on the link?  06:18, 7 June 2011 (UTC)


 * We probably need to explain the Year for each award. And I agree with Mike, it's not up to us to choose: those who arbitrate the awards should be allowed to say what the year means. If in doubt, then Locus might be the standard to follow, although there are alternatives. One thing we do need to do is review some of the pre-ISFDB2 entries where the stub record for the award was created assuming that awards were given for things in the previous year. This is often not true - a lot of Stoker awards have incorrect years still. And some awards like the Mythopoeic Award cover things over three years, and the Prometheus Hall of fame Award seems to go to the same titles year after year after year.... BLongley 12:35, 7 June 2011 (UTC)

Awards "added" to the list
I've added various "named awards" that are either special categories within other awards, or else have been grouped with them because they're given at the same time. This allows someone to look up, say, the "Ray Bradbury Award" and find it, without having to know it's awarded with the Nebulas. Generally I've given a basic award description, the years it's been awarded, and a link to the award under which we include that named award. (This does mean that the table of contents is getting longer, and as we add additional awards, we may want to go to something like a 3-column ToC.) The awards added, and the containing or referenced award, are: William Atheling Jr. Award (Ditmars), Australian SF Achievement Award (Ditmars), Ray Bradbury Award (Nebulas), Eleanor Cameron Award (Golden Duck), Hal Clement Award (Golden Duck), Dell Magazines Undergraduate Award (Asimov's Undergraduate Award), August Derleth Award (British Fantasy), Andre Norton Award (Nebulas), and Edward E. Smith Memorial Award (Skylark). Chavey 06:30, 7 June 2011 (UTC)


 * Looks useful. As we get closer to finishing off our current backlog, we might want to start looking at other Awards we want to cover - Locus lists more than twice as many as we currently cover. And SF Awards watch has some others too. BLongley 12:17, 7 June 2011 (UTC)


 * Funny you should mention that! My initial steps in this direction follow in the immediately next thread. Chavey 20:05, 7 June 2011 (UTC)

Awards we should consider adding
I've gone through the Locus list of awards, various SF&F lists of awards on Wikipedia, and the awards listed on Science Fiction Award Watch, SF Signal, FantaFiction, AwardWeb, and a few other places. I believe I have a comprehensive list of awards that we should consider for inclusion. I have excluded from this list awards that are limited to dramatic presentations (TV and movies), comics, graphic novels, websites, podcasts, and other SF fora that we do not cover in the scope of the ISFDB. I have excluded a few awards that clearly haven't achieved much recognition (although I think a few of the ones below could be dropped on those grounds).

In the tables below, I have listed a link to Locus, if it covers the award, and a link to Wikipedia or other page about that award otherwise. I suggest that we should include all awards that Locus includes (with the exclusions noted above), but should discuss the other awards. (Adding all 99 is probably too much.) I suggest that we should be more inclusive than Locus on international awards, which they only include when they have a category for translations from English (or a similar English-based award).

Of course I realize that this means I'm volunteering to do much of the work to set these up. Fortunately, I have SF students who read many of the languages of the International Awards when I don't, and one of the Japanese awards was founded by a friend, who I'm sure will help me with the Japanese awards. On the other hand, I'm not volunteering to do it all :-) And someone else has to do the coding to get these awards added. Chavey 20:05, 7 June 2011 (UTC)

Primarily English Language Awards

Inter-National Awards


 * Two awards which are maintained by the Science Fiction Awards Database are devoted to SF web pages. Since this is outside the scope of the ISFDB, I recommend that we not include them. Those two awards are: Wooden Rocket Award and ASFA Web Award. Chavey 20:08, 10 March 2014 (UTC)

Now for the discussion of which to throw out! Chavey 20:05, 7 June 2011 (UTC)


 * I think (but after some recent mistakes, am not sure) that I could add the ability for Moderators to add new Awards when we get a volunteer (or several) for entering such. I definitely don't think we want to add all of the above at once, and it may be that Ahasuerus (final arbiter of all software changes) would prefer us to fix the current problems first. Maybe we could let one or two new ones in as a start - Carl Brandon was your top priority wasn't it? BLongley 21:40, 11 June 2011 (UTC)


 * Yes, I'm on the Carl Brandon Advisory Committee, so getting them listed is a high priority for me. But with my ISFDB hat on, my goal is also to deal with the process of adding new awards consistently. Of course if that involves me doing some testing of adding new award categories, I'd be glad to do that. :-) I'm certainly willing to work on some of the other awards, including some of the non-English categories (esp. French, Spanish, Italian, Croatian, Finnish, and Japanese). Chavey 02:58, 13 June 2011 (UTC)


 * As I'm getting tired of mere data entry/fixing in this area, I think I'm going to go back to coding in the hope that some improvements will get through. My attention is mostly on Fiction still, and I'd like to add the other English Fiction awards that I can cope with. I think I could add other awards (or allow moderators to create other awards) in other languages, but those would need 1) someone to code them (which I think I can do), 2) someone to test them, 3) someone to submit them and 4) someone to approve them. Any Volunteers? BLongley 22:51, 12 June 2011 (UTC)


 * Alternatively, if someone really wants to work on Artwork awards, then a quicker ability to link awards to titles would be useful - add/delete is a pain. BLongley 22:51, 12 June 2011 (UTC)


 * In the longer term, we probably need to make "Authors" of Untitled awards into "real" authors with the ability to add biographical details etc. And Publishers and Editors of Collections and more Artists and Fans and TV Show/Film producers.... or maybe we just want to lose some "media" awards. BLongley 22:51, 12 June 2011 (UTC)


 * My inclination is to omit "media" awards; that's largely outside the scope, IMHO, of what the ISFDB does. (Although awards for books converted into films/TV can probably justify being listed here.) For similar reasons, I'm inclined to at least postpone awards that are strictly for Non-Fiction and those strictly for art -- they're not quite as central to our mission. Chavey 02:58, 13 June 2011 (UTC)


 * Ultimately, I think we want to list as many awards as possible including YA/regional awards like the Tir na n-Og award, non-genre awards like the Newbery (when applicable), etc. I am less than enthusiastic about "media" awards, but we already have a fair number of them on file and there is limited software support in place. It's a lower priority for me personally, but tastes differ. Ahasuerus 05:20, 13 June 2011 (UTC)


 * I'm more than willing to set up similar "sections" for as many of these various awards as I can, if others want to include these awards as well. Since this will make the "Awards" page quite long, we might wish to consider breaking it into multiple pages, e.g. "Non-English Awards", "Regional Awards", "Genre Category Awards", "Career Awards" or something like that. I agree about the "big name" non-genre awards, limited to when they're awarded to speculative fiction. I wonder if they should be handled differently than the way we handle other awards though, since only a modest number of the entries will be speculative fiction. For example, the "Wole Solinka prize for African Literature" (the "African Nobel" in literature) has only gone to a work of speculative fiction once (so far). It seems inappropriate to set up a "year grid" for that award. Some of the awards may be difficult to put into our model. For example, the Nobel Prize to Doris Lessing was for her body of work, much of which was speculative fiction, so it makes sense to include that as a speculative fiction "career award" (again, probably the only Nobel Prize we would include). The "MacArthur Genius Award" given to Octavia Butler may be a little harder to decide how to include. It was almost surely given to her based on her book "Kindred", but the award committee never explains its "why", so we could argue that it be listed as a "career award". Of course all of this is moot until we get the capability to add new awards. Chavey 15:42, 20 June 2011 (UTC)


 * Well, I've submitted a stack of changes to allow for new awards, but there's even more changes (improved language support) taking priority. Is there any chance you could try setting up a local development system and see if my changes match your expectations? I presume as a Computer Scientist you have the ability, but you may lack the time. But more eyes on my changes before Ahasuerus has to do final checks would be good. BLongley 17:38, 20 June 2011 (UTC)

Imaginaire Awards 2010
OK, how should we best cope with TWO sets of awards for that year? BLongley 21:28, 11 June 2011 (UTC)


 * Do you know what happens if we catalog an award date using the month as well? If the code distinguishes the two, we could handle the two sets of awards that way. The first set of awards (eligibility dates July 2008-June 2009) was awarded on October 30, 2009; the second set of awards (eligibility dates July 2009-December 2009) was awarded on May 22, 2010. If using the month separates the awards, I would suggest listing the date of the first set as "2010-01-00" and the date of the second set as "2010-05-22". If that doesn't work, we could use one year page and distinguish the awards by the category title, e.g. "Francophone Novel (2010-A)" and "Francophone Novel (2010-B)". Chavey 05:24, 15 June 2011 (UTC)


 * The code appears to be inconsistent. You can enter a YYYY-MM-DD date but displaying awards by year is definitely fixed to 2-Character Code + 4-Digit Year. I think we're some way off from making that more flexible - just allowing for new Award types has led me through 14 separate modules so far - so I guess we need a workaround. We could create an "Etonnants Voyageurs" Award type just for that extra one-off? BLongley 16:01, 15 June 2011 (UTC)

SFWA Grand Master Award
Currently, we list the SFWA Grand Master Award with the Nebula Awards. It is not a Nebula Award. The Andre Norton and Ray Bradbury awards are, to some extent, not Nebula awards either, but they are voted for on the Nebula ballot, so we can probably continue to include them within the Nebula. But the SFWA Grand Master, the SFWA Author Emeritus, and the Solstice Award are all separate awards that are presented during the Nebula ceremony, but are not on the Nebula ballot. As such, we should probably separate them into their own award categories. Eventually. Chavey 23:51, 1 January 2014 (UTC)


 * As supporting "evidence", I'll mention that I was just looking at these awards, and our "Nebula Awards" had omitted including any of the Grand Master awards since 2004. This is, presumably, because the sources used for entering these awards did not include the Grand Master awards, so our editors had not included them either. It would be helpful to avoid this in the future. Chavey 00:14, 2 January 2014 (UTC)

"Rocheworld" vs. "The Flight of the Dragonfly"
We have an Analog award for "Best Serial" in 1983 listed as "The Flight of the Dragonfly". That was the title when the serial was released as a full book in 1984. But the serial itself was called "Rocheworld". As such, it seems that we should list it as an award to "Rocheworld". But my understanding is that we always assign the award to the canonical name of the book, which in this case isn't the name of the story that was given the award. Any suggestions as to how to resolve this? Chavey 01:04, 5 January 2014 (UTC)

Updated Locus links in the Award Directory
The previous Award wiki page had links to all of the older Locus Index to Science Fiction Awards page. These links were all pulled into our Award Directory, as part of the links for each of the award overview pages. As of 2011 awards, the Locus page is no longer being maintained, and all data has been transferred to the Science Fiction Awards Database. To make it easier to update our awards, I have replaced all of the (outdated) Locus links to equivalent (updated) links to the Science Fiction Awards Database. Chavey 18:14, 10 March 2014 (UTC)


 * I also updated all of the Locus links in the tables above of "awards we should add". While doing that, I removed a couple of awards that have been added to our Award Directory, and added a few that Locus did not include when I last updated that table. Chavey 20:11, 10 March 2014 (UTC)

Award levels
Just in case I, or anyone else, needs to know the meanings of the various "Award levels", here they are. This lists what would show up in the author's Summary Bibliography if they were given an award at that level. Levels 2-69 all count as "Nomination" for most awards, but are available for poll-based awards and, in some special hard-coded cases (such as Locus polls), are shown as poll positions in the author's Bibliography, e.g. as "Place: 11" for award level 11.

For awards that are not poll based, but that have multiple levels (or special names) for the categories below "Winner", these levels can be used with the "Chavey trick" to separate and distinguish the levels. For example, with the Hemming Award, one can use category 2 for "Honourable Mentions" by making an untitled award at level 2 containing that name, awarding the recipients of the award in that category the same level, then using a higher numbered category for "Other Short List". (And similarly with whatever name that particular award uses.) To see the details of the trick, "Edit" the award labels in the Hemming Award page, copy those titles, then modify as necessary for your own untitled awards. The alphabetical ordering of the titles within an award level category will put this name above the recipients. This allows the listing of the award "nominees" to be assigned whatever name you wish to give them, showing up as such on the Award page. However, due to software limitations, the author's bibliography page will still list the award as a "Nomination" (unless you use one of the later acceptable levels). Chavey 02:00, 16 March 2014 (UTC)