Yahoo Forum Archive

Hey guys,

I've been falling down a bit making these announcements. Blame it on
an inordinately busy offline life, plus the fact that most of my
fannish time has been taken up by helping with categorization. But no
excuses; I apologize, and I'll try to better in the future.

Toward that end, I'd like to say a brief word about categorization and
check ballots. I'll actually post the first check ballot in a few
minutes.

When their story is nominated, every author fills out a form
describing their story. They give us loads of information, often more
than most archives, but only some of that is actually shown to
readers. The rest is set aside for categorization and helps our
intrepid volunteers sort all the nominations into groups of the pieces
they will be competing with. The 'A' in MEFA stands for Awards, and we
do need some way of choosing which stories will win at the end of it.
With so many hundreds of nominations every year, we also need to break
it down into groups that readers can read through, if they want to
read all the storiesthat will be competing together before voting for
any of them. We don't require that, but some people prefer to.

Categorizers look at several pieces of information:

1. What main categories did the author choose? (Every author chooses three.)
2. What story type did the author select? (full-length story, WIP,
poetry, non-fiction, or drabble/drabble series)
3. What categories, setting, events, sources, and subgenre did the
author choose *for categorizers*?

The second option is arguably the most important. Pieces only compete
against pieces with the same type (so poetry won't run head-to-head
with a drabble series), so the first thing we do is separate out the
stories by that. If a piece has the type "story" - meaning it is a
finished, non-drabble prose piece, anything ranging from a 1,500-word
vignette to a 150,000-word epic novel - we then look at that second
item, what main category the author had selected. We do our best to
put pieces in their first-choice category, though really the author
should be fine with it competing in any one of those main categories.

We do occasionally have to move stories around to their second or
third choice categories, usually for two reasons: we need to in order
to have the category compete, or the author has too many pieces
competing in a certain subcategory. if only four stories select
"mystery" as their first choice, we may move two stories that had
mystery as their second-choice category, because otherwise we couldn't
have a mystery category at all and that would mean moving *four*
stories into their second-choice category. Also, sometimes there's no
way to divide up an author's stories between subcategories, given the
number of nominations in a certain category and the way we divided
them up. If you had three stories in the same subcategory, we might
move one of those stories into your second-choice category. (Two
stories is okay, though we tried to avoid it where we could.)

That brings us to the subject of subcategories. Each "heat" (the group
of stories competing together) has to have 6-12 stories. So if there
are fifteen stories nominated that all selected First Age or Prior as
their first-choice category, they need to be broken down yet again.
Here's where we look at option #3. If seven of those stories were set
in Gondolin, we might set up one "First Age or Prior: Gondolin"
subcategory and one "First Age or Prior: General" subcategory. Every
main category has a General subcategory. If there's only the one
subcategory, it will *only* have a General subcategory.

Now for the non-full length stories. We generally have many more
nominations with the type "Story" than we do for the other kinds. In
the past, we tried to set up special *sub*categories within the main
categories (like Men: Incomplete or Pre-Ring War: Drabbles), but that
didn't work very well. There just weren't enough nominations, and we
also had to "force" things more than we did normally. So instead this
year we are setting up a *main* category for each of those special
types. You will find a Drabbles, Incomplete, Poetry, and Non-Fiction
main category, and *within* that you'll find subcategories that have
the names of main categories. So instead of Men: Incomplete we now
have Incomplete: Men. This lets us set up a "General" subcategory, for
all the incompletes that don't fit anywhere else. It worked much
better than the old system, from a categorizer's perspective. I hope
it works as well for readers and authors as it does for us.

I'm about to post the first check ballot. Check ballots are your
opportunity to see where your story is placed and catch any mistake we
made. Mainly, I'm looking for cases where the categorizers made a
mistake - where you selected Humor and ended up in Horror because one
of us clicked the wrong button somewhere along the lines. I'm also
willing to consider cases where *you* made a mistake - where you
*meant* to click Humor but clicked Horror by mistake. I will move
stories if I can in the latter situations, but it's really up to my
and the other categorizers' prerogative. I am less likely to move
pieces where your categorization was based on information you provided
but you now see a better place for your piece. I will *consider* those
requests, but *only* if it won't make any of the subcategories too
small or too large - including if someone else requests a change
because of a genuine error. That last kind of move is always
provisional, and if someone requests a move later on I may have to
move you later.

Still, if you think your subcategory is inappropriate for any reason,
now is the time to ask for it. after check ballots are over, the only
stories that will be moved are Incompletes, if they are finished.

Check ballots to follow in the next post!

Marta