Pegasus Nomination Reminders

[maverick_weirdo]

It is that time of year again, to consider nominations for The Pegasus Award for Excellence in Filking and the Brainstorming Poll Results are up, however these suggestions are an unedited list which may contain people/songs who are Ineligible for awards this year. (Note: I am not an official part of the Pegasus Awards; I am just trying to remind people of some of the rules that can affect nomination.)

Anyone who has won Best Composer is ineligible to win again for 5 years. The last five years winners are:
Tom Smith
Cynthia McQuillin (who is also ineligible for an other reason)
Talis Kimberley
Seanan McGuire
Vixy & Tony

Also ineligible for Best Composer by the "2 years nominated, 1 year off" rule is:
Brooke Lunderville

We have an official ruling: Ju Honisch is eligible for the 2010 Pegasus Best Composer Link

Likewise anyone who has won Best Performer is ineligible to win again for 5 years. The last five years winners are:
Heather Dale & Ben Deschamps
Vixy & Tony
Dr. Mary Crowell and Seanan McGuire (tie)
Judi Miller
Jeff and Maya Bohnhoff

Also ineligible for Best Performer by the "2 years nominated, 1 year off" rule is:
Amy McNally
Wild Mercy

Comments

[billroper]

Sorry. It really depends on how much time that the person scrubbing the list has to spend on it and how encyclopedic their knowledge is being on any particular day. :)

For example, in 2009 I did the scrubbing of the brainstorming list and removed a couple of songs that are frequently performed by filkers, but which were actually written by mainstream folk artists. (Well, as much as there are mainstream folk artists. :) )

It turns out that sort of list scrubbing is harder than you might expect. And while I sort of agree that it really isn't too hard to get the list of "previous winner ineligibles" in the Composer/Performer categories, it's a bit harder to sift out all of the previous song winners or those that are ineligible due to two-on, one-off. I admit that I just check the songs that I'm planning on nominating as I type them into the ballot, because that's a much smaller set than the whole list of songs from the brainstorming poll.

[ladymondegreen.livejournal.com]

Bill, what if there was a script on the brainstorming ballot that would reject people or songs that were ineligible? It wouldn't clear up the non-filk songwriters, or songs, but it would be a start.

I suspect we could come up with the volunteer coding to get it written and implemented.

[billroper]

It's not impossible, but since I don't know how that's coded, I can't tell you whether it's simple there or not. :)

tarkrai maintains the site and polls, so he would be the one to check with.

[ladymondegreen.livejournal.com]

That's not a bad idea. Thanks Bill!

[katyhh.livejournal.com]

I have the impression that the site is really not that simple. Plus, Steve simply has NO time whatsoever to implement even more stuff there.
There isn't a lot of spare time, lately.
But feel free to check with him ...

[ladymondegreen.livejournal.com]

Does Steve want volunteer help? I've heard quite a few good coders say in my hearing recently that they'd love to find a way to contribute. Maybe we can put them in touch and take some of the heavy lifting off of Steve?

I suspect I'm on the long list of people who would love it if you guys had more free time and sanity.

[tarkrai.livejournal.com]

It's all plain text, received in normal mail.

The reason that it defies coding is that there are 15 ways to spell "McQuillin", "Kimberley", "Michelle", et.al. And there are a million different ways that a song is identified in the poll.

Therefore, on the first pass, you try to clean up as much of the spelling as you can, and try to create consistent song titles.

On the second pass, you find things you missed on the first pas.

On the third pass, you're starting to get some consistency, and standard unix tools (sort and uniq) become useful. However, if you are inconsistent in how you put spaces/tabs in names (and hyphenation, like Van Daele-Hunt); you still have to go through again.

Knowing who got married this year is important, too (we still get poll entries for Eva Wiest, for example); as well as gender changes, and random official name changes (Raul Benefiche to Blind Lemming Chiffon).

In general, there are between 600-1000 raw individual entries that have to be manually reviewed. Something *always* gets missed, regardless of how many people help with the review.

I agree that doing a comparison script of winners/ineligibles against the list just before it goes live is a good idea; and something I've been intending to do for a couple of years now. I just simply haven't had the time to code it when it's important; and when the Poll is out, i don't think about it again for another year... :)

[ladymondegreen.livejournal.com]

I know Ben Newman and a few others had some ideas about how to implement scripts for this, taking the multiple thousand spellings into account.

Should I point Ben your way?

Also, thank you, and *hug*

[akawil]

I've thought for a while that the Pegasus brainstorming could potentially work a lot better as a wiki page than its current system ("Steve gets a lot of e-mail that he has to deal with in his non-existent free time").

That would let people note ineligibles, correct and standardize spelling, etc., plus have the advantages of an actual in-person brainstorming session, where one good idea can lead to another.

The disadvantage of a wiki, of course, would be that you'd need someone to moderate it against vandalism, plus you'd lose anonymity. And it'd need to be hosted somewhere, which might or might not be the Pegasus site.