Yahoo Forum Archive

Hey guys,

[Sorry this is a day late; I completely forgot to do my weekly
educational post yesterday.]

This week I want to talk about one of the topics that tends to confuse
people the most: how we sort stories into categories and subcategories.
With many awards programs stories are nominated specifically for some
grouping - Best Vignette, Best Slash, Best Ft. Aragorn, whatever. The
person nominating the story nominates it for one of these categories,
and then the nominated stories receive votes and are ranked within those
categories.

That's not quite how it works with the MEFAs. The nominator only tells
us the title, author, and a link where the story can be found. The
author supplies all the rest of the information. You're not telling us
that this is one of the best stories of a certain type, but rather that
it's one of the best story (period!) that you've read, at least since
the last year's awards.

The author then provides the information we use to sort the nominations
into manageable categories and subcategories. They give us three
important pieces of information:

1. Three main category choices.

2. The "type" of the story - that it's either a fixed-length ficlet;
poem; work-in-progress; or full-length, finished story.

3. Some basic information about the story that we can use to divide
larger categories into sub-categories: the characters involved, the
story's setting, pertinent canonical events/time periods, and any
sub-genres it fits.

Now, you may be wondering how we take these three pieces of information
and use it to assign stories to categories and subcategories. We start
by placing each piece into its first-choice main category. We then
divide each main category into the four types mentioned above: story,
FLF, WIP, and poetry. We look to see if there are enough pieces of each
type in a certain main category for those stories to compete together in
that main category.

If there are enough pieces, we have a sub-category. For instance, if
there are seven WIPs who all chose "Races: Men" as their first category
choice, then they'll compete in the subcategory "Races: Men:
Incomplete." If there *aren't* enough pieces for that subcategory to be
big enough (in MEFA terminology: viable), then we'll look at moving
stories around.

If there are nearly enough pieces, we may move pieces into that category
to try to make the subcategory viable. If there's only one or two pieces
of a certain type in a main category at this point, we'll likely move
them to their second or third choice category.

Maybe an example will make things clearer. Say that instead of the seven
WIPs with Men as their first-choice category, there were only four.
That's not quite enough for a viable "Races: Men: Incomplete"
subcategory, but it's enough to make me think that we could maybe make
the subcategory work with a little elbow grease. At this point I would
look for other main categories that either had a lot of
works-in-progress, or had so few I knew it would be nearly impossible to
set up an "Incomplete" subcategory for that category. I'd look to see if
any of those nominations had "Races: Men" as a second choice, and if so,
I'd move them into the "Races: Men" category. That way I could collect
enough stories so we could have a "Races: Men: Incomplete" subcategory.

Eventually we would sort things so that each nomination was in one of
its three category choices where there were enough other pieces of the
same type so that that could compete together. In other words, each
nomination is in a subcategory that's not too small. But some of them
may be too big! Last year there were twenty-nine fixed-length ficlets
that ended up in the "Races: Men" main category, and only nine in
"Races: Hobbits." This is probably just because there happened to be
more Men FLF than Hobbits FLF nominated that year. Or maybe authors of
hobbit-centric FLF chose other main categories as their first choice,
like Genres: Humor or Times: Late Third Age. For whatever reason, there
were over three times as many fixed-length ficlets in Races: Men than
there were in Races: Hobbits. Which means that (if we'd let this
situation stand) there would have been a lot fiercer competition in
Races: Men than there were in Races: Hobbits.

This is where that third type of information I mentioned earlier comes
in: the characters, settings, and so on. If there are a lot of
nominations of a certain story type (FLF, story, WIP, or poetry) in the
same main category, we'll divide them up based on character. Or
subgenre, or setting, or something along those lines. This means that
for each story type, some main categories will only have one main
category, where all of the (for instance) WIPs in that main category
compete together. But sometimes there will be enough that there will be
more than one subcategory for the same type of story, and we'll use some
other factor to divy up the stories. In the Races: Men example, they
were split into Gondor Drabbles, General Drabbles, and Other
Fixed-Length Ficlets (for longer FLFs and FLF series). By doing this, we
were able to come up with some subcategories for those Races: Men
fixed-length ficlets that were about the same size as the sub-category
in Races: Hobbits, even though there were a lot more FLFs in the Races:
Men main category than in the Races: Hobbits one.

So... that's how categories and subcategories work. If you have any
questions now's a good time to ask them!

PS - For "extra reading," here are some good FAQs to check out:

http://mefawards.net/MEFA2008/index.php?page=FAQcategories

1. "What are main categories?"
3. "What main categories are available?"
7. "Can my story be moved to a different subcategory?"
8. "Do you give awards for winners of a whole main category?"



Marta
(MEFA Admin.)