AwardAnnals:How to document an award

From AwardAnnals

Let us pretend that there is a new award in town. “The Lucius Prize for Cool Books” just announced its first annual shortlist of books, and will announce the winner at a really spiffy banquet to take place a few months from now. I, an average Award Annals user, want to add the Lucius to the annals. It is obvious that this new award will go on for hundreds of years, so I want to start it off right.

What follows is a simple simple narrative for accomplishing this.

Overview of pages

There are five types of page that make Award Annals what it is. Each of them is directly associated with an award, and each award needs all five to be considered fully documented.

• 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.

Each of these is an article just like every other in a MediaWiki project, but there is some hidden complexity. Several of these pages interact with the Award Annals database using special codes, and all of these pages are interrelated. It is not “complicated”—merely more complex than a simple article. You will find it simple enough if you have a basic understanding of templates and magic words.

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 I had the books in my possession, then I would have everything I need: the title, author, cover photo, and a synopsis or jacket copy. Since I do not have all the books, I must search online merchants and libraries (minding the copyrights, of course!) for all of this information. A review by Amazon or Barnes & Noble are allowed, as well as anything from the publisher. There is a special page for helping with this: Special:CWhelper.

If the book is closely related to another work like a film, soundtrack, sequel, or a newer edition, then I am going to add a “related works” section to so I can provide links to them. I will have to create pages for each of these works if they don’t already exist. If the book is part of a series, perhaps I will add a page for the series that lists some or all of the other works in the series—that means adding even more book pages. A series page is a short creative work page ending with a “series titles” section containing an AwardAnnals:annalentry for each work—usually in chronological order.

Step 1 might take a while. If there really are only five mainstream books to add, I might be done in an hour because of all the practice I have had. If the Lucius Prize has added an obscure title to the shortlist, I might spend hours gathering information.

Step 2: add person pages

Each of the works I documented in step 1 refers to at least one person: the author for books. If the author’s name in the infobox is a red link, I must find or create the appropriate person page. I always make an effort to find an existing person page: I 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. I always add a link to the author’s official website if I know what it is. If the person is a creator with works in the Annals (they all are, at this point), I 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, I am 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, I put it at the end of the page and try to keep the preceding sections brief.

For each award category recognized by the Lucius, I must provide four links to pages that will be created in steps 4 and 5:

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

Finally, I simply must create and maintain an even calendar for this award. It would be a shame if I went to all this trouble documenting the Lucius Prize and then forgot about it next year. Setting the event calendar will ensure that I and everyone else 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. I also provide links to relevant honor rolls.

A proper annal belongs in the “Annal:” namespace, which is restricted and can be edited only by certain users. Since I am just an average user without special rights, I 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”. After I add a few annals and clearly demonstrate my knowledge of the Award Annals system, I intend to ask for extra editing privileges.

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 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

This provides a list of all works that have received the prize, ranked by all the honors they have received from all awards. I will start the page with a sentence explaining this, followed by a list of other honor rolls that might be of interest to anyone viewing this one, especially the genre honor rolls and the authors honor roll described next.

After the introductory text, the honor roll is simply:

{{honorroll:annals|Lucius Award for Cool Books}}
[[Category:Honor rolls|Lucius Award for Cool Books]]

Notice that I included this honor roll in the “Honor rolls” wiki category.

Honor roll:Lucius Prize for Cool Books authors

This 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.

The format for this page is identical to the one described in the previous section, except for the code used:

{{honorroll:annals|Hugo Award for Novel|creators}}