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Note: This was originally posted to my LiveJournal account on August 6th, 2019, in preparation for the 2019 Worldcon in Dublin, Ireland. Mike Glyer reprinted the article at File770 with my permission, which is where most comments occured: http://file770.com/how-notability-still-matters-would-have-affected-the-2017-and-2018-hugo-long-lists/ The proposed amendment was defeated at the 2019 Business Meeting. I am copying the text over to my Dreamwidth account to preserve it here in 2022, since I'm not sure how long LiveJournal will stick around given the current world situation.
One of the proposed WSFS constitutional amendments up for ratification this year in Dublin is C.3, "Notability Still Matters." What it would do, if ratified by this year's business meeting, is allow the Hugo Award Administrators to omit from their report on the nominations any entry that got less than 4% of the nominating votes in that category, unless there is a previous entry getting more than 4% of the votes that was eliminated in an earlier round which was reported. (Currently, the Hugo Administrators are supposed to report the last 10 rounds of eliminations in their report).
While it is true that the Hugo Administrators are allowed to voluntarily publish more information in their report than the constitution requires, the constitution is the primary way the business meeting can give the Administrators binding instructions, and there's not much point in amending the constitution if we expect the Administrators to routinely ignore their instructions. Therefore, I've taken a look at how this amendment would have affected the Hugo Long Lists in each category for 2017 and 2018 (the previous years for which EPH was in effect) if the amendment had been in effect and the Administrators had followed it strictly.
I took the nomination data from the following published reports:
2018 (pp 20-26): https://www.worldcon76.org/images/publications/2018DetailedResults.pdf
2017: http://www.worldcon.fi/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/HugoReport2_nominations.pdf
http://www.worldcon.fi/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/HugoReport3_nomination_details.pdf
For 2017, most of the necessary information is in Report2, although the details of the eliminations are in the tables in Report3. For 2018, both the total nominations and the % of the nominating vote each entry got are presented in the original tables, making it much easier to see the effect of the amendment. One further note: in 2017, the last 10 rounds of eliminations were presented in each category, yielding 16 entries in each long list. In 2018, only the last 9 rounds were presented in most tables (except Novelette), so most long lists only had 15 entries. Thus the effect of the amendment would likely be even greater in 2018 than what I present here, if the #16 entries were also considered.
Here is my summary of the number of entries that would have been deleted from the long list for each category if the amendment had been strictly observed, followed by the details of what would have been omitted:
In Best Novella, we would have lost Chimera in 2017, and In Calabria in 2018. In the Best Novelette category, we would have lost Tansy Rayner Roberts' Kid Dark against the Machine in 2017. Best Short Story would have been most affected. In 2017, we would have lost Lavie Tidhar's Terminal (Tor.com), Seanan McGuire's Ye Highlands and Ye Lowlands (Uncanny), Cat Rambo's Red in Tooth and Cog (F&SF), Aliette de Bodard's A Salvaging of Ghosts (BCS), Rebecca Ann Jordan's We Have A Cultural Difference, Can I Taste You? (Strange Horizons), Peter S. Beagle's The Story of Kao Yu (Tor.com), and Aliette de Bodard's Lullaby for a Lost World (Tor.com). In 2018, we would have lost Mareen F. McHugh's Sidewalks (Omni), Naomi Kritzer's Paradox (Uncanny), Nick Wolven's Confessions of a Con Girl (Asimov's), and Nancy Kress's Dear Sarah (Infinity Wars).
The 2017 Related Work category would have lost Rob Hansen's THEN: Fandom in the UK, 1930-1980, Diana Pavlac Glyer's Bandersnatch, and André M. Carrington's Speculative Blackness. Graphic Story was another category that would have been heavily affected. In 2017, we would have lost Clean Room, Vol. 1; Injection Vol. 2; Lumberjanes Vol. 4; Pretty Deadly, Vol 2; Decender, Vol. 2, and Oglaf (Bodil Bodilson). In 2018, we would have lost Unbeatable Squirrel Girl, Vol. 6; and Above the Timberline. The 2017 Dramatic Presentation Short Form would have lost Chapter Seven: The Bathtub and Chapter One: The Vanishing of Will Byers from Stranger Things, along with Salvage from The Expanse. 2018 didn't lose any Dramatic Presentation entries, but Game of Thrones: The Spoils of War came pretty close with only 4.03% of the vote. In the Best Editor categories, 2018 would have lost Gillian Redfearn from Long Form, and Marguerite Kenner and Trevor Quachri from Short Form. In Pro Artist, 2018 would have lost Likhain and Dan dos Santos.
Fanzine and Fancast are also categories that would have lost significantly: 2018 Fanzine would have lost Camestros Felapton, Quick Sip Reviews, Ansible, and SF Commentary. 2017 Fancast would have lost Vaginal Fantasy, while 2018 Fancast would have lost Kalanadi, Fast Forward, Get to Work Hurley!, and Eating the Fantastic. In Fan Writer, 2017 would have lost O. Westin and Cora Buhlert, while 2018 would have lost the memorable Chuck Tingle. The 2017 Fan Artist category would have lost Liz Argall, Lauren Dawson aka Iguanamouth, and Simon Stålenhag. Finally, the 2018 Cambell Long List would have lost Annalee Newitz and Erin Roberts.
Comments and Opinions:
Having looked at what the impact of the amendment would have been, I think this amendment would do significant harm to the value of the current long lists, and should be rejected. I don't know how many other people look at the long lists, but I do and I value the information that is there. This value can take several forms:
First, for those who nominated entries on the long list, knowing how your entry placed gives you a form of validation that other Hugo voters also found that entry worth of nominating, and a sense of how close you came to getting that work on the ballot. I nominated two of the short stories that would have been left off under the amendment, and I appreciate having this information.
Second, it should be apparent from the Short Story results above that we are not just talking about omitting minor works from artists very few voters care about, but significant stories from some major names in the field. While many of these stories were published online, there were also several stories first published in traditional print media, unlike most of the finalists. Keeping such stories in the long list helps others seek out these stories, and may help make a case for splitting the category in the future, if there is a persistent bias against print media with our current categories.
Third, particularly in categories where entries tend to repeat from year to year (e.g., Editor, Artist, Zines, Fancast, Fan Writer, Graphic Story), presence in the long list can help an entry find an audience for future years. In 2017, I made a point of trying to listen to at least an episode of each fancast on the long list, in order to be able to better appreciate and nominate fancasts in the future, and I found several fancasts that I now listen to regularly. I did not do the same for 2018, but I see at least one entry from the list of potential losses that I would like to check out further.
Fourth, those who have nominated long list entries that are ultimately eliminated have an opportunity to audit the results of the EPH implementation by seeing if the change in points when that work was eliminated are consistent with the rest of their ballots.
Finally, there doesn't seem to be any compelling reason to make this change for the normal Hugos. The system we have now seems to be working well, providing good information to those members who choose to read it. The minutes last year mention the tail of the retro-Hugo nominations having relatively few votes in some categories, but most future years are not going to have retro-Hugos. It doesn't make sense to me to make such a drastic change just to shorten the rare retro-Hugo report a bit.
One of the proposed WSFS constitutional amendments up for ratification this year in Dublin is C.3, "Notability Still Matters." What it would do, if ratified by this year's business meeting, is allow the Hugo Award Administrators to omit from their report on the nominations any entry that got less than 4% of the nominating votes in that category, unless there is a previous entry getting more than 4% of the votes that was eliminated in an earlier round which was reported. (Currently, the Hugo Administrators are supposed to report the last 10 rounds of eliminations in their report).
While it is true that the Hugo Administrators are allowed to voluntarily publish more information in their report than the constitution requires, the constitution is the primary way the business meeting can give the Administrators binding instructions, and there's not much point in amending the constitution if we expect the Administrators to routinely ignore their instructions. Therefore, I've taken a look at how this amendment would have affected the Hugo Long Lists in each category for 2017 and 2018 (the previous years for which EPH was in effect) if the amendment had been in effect and the Administrators had followed it strictly.
I took the nomination data from the following published reports:
2018 (pp 20-26): https://www.worldcon76.org/images/publications/2018DetailedResults.pdf
2017: http://www.worldcon.fi/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/HugoReport2_nominations.pdf
http://www.worldcon.fi/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/HugoReport3_nomination_details.pdf
For 2017, most of the necessary information is in Report2, although the details of the eliminations are in the tables in Report3. For 2018, both the total nominations and the % of the nominating vote each entry got are presented in the original tables, making it much easier to see the effect of the amendment. One further note: in 2017, the last 10 rounds of eliminations were presented in each category, yielding 16 entries in each long list. In 2018, only the last 9 rounds were presented in most tables (except Novelette), so most long lists only had 15 entries. Thus the effect of the amendment would likely be even greater in 2018 than what I present here, if the #16 entries were also considered.
Here is my summary of the number of entries that would have been deleted from the long list for each category if the amendment had been strictly observed, followed by the details of what would have been omitted:
Number of Nominees Lost from Long List with 4% Notability Threshold
| Category | 2017 | 2018 |
|---|---|---|
| Novel | 0 | 0 |
| Novella | 1 | 1 |
| Novelette | 1 | 0 |
| Short Story | 7 | 4 |
| Series | 0 | 0 |
| Related Work | 3 | 0 |
| Graphic Story | 6 | 2 |
| Dramatic Long | 0 | 0 |
| Dramatic Short | 3 | 0 |
| Editor Long | 0 | 1 |
| Editor Short | 0 | 2 |
| Pro Artist | 0 | 2 |
| Semiprozine | 0 | 0 |
| Fanzine | 0 | 4 |
| Fancast | 1 | 4 |
| Fan Writer | 2 | 1 |
| Fan Artist | 3 | 0 |
| Young Adult/Lodestar | - | 0 |
| Campbell | 0 | 2 |
In Best Novella, we would have lost Chimera in 2017, and In Calabria in 2018. In the Best Novelette category, we would have lost Tansy Rayner Roberts' Kid Dark against the Machine in 2017. Best Short Story would have been most affected. In 2017, we would have lost Lavie Tidhar's Terminal (Tor.com), Seanan McGuire's Ye Highlands and Ye Lowlands (Uncanny), Cat Rambo's Red in Tooth and Cog (F&SF), Aliette de Bodard's A Salvaging of Ghosts (BCS), Rebecca Ann Jordan's We Have A Cultural Difference, Can I Taste You? (Strange Horizons), Peter S. Beagle's The Story of Kao Yu (Tor.com), and Aliette de Bodard's Lullaby for a Lost World (Tor.com). In 2018, we would have lost Mareen F. McHugh's Sidewalks (Omni), Naomi Kritzer's Paradox (Uncanny), Nick Wolven's Confessions of a Con Girl (Asimov's), and Nancy Kress's Dear Sarah (Infinity Wars).
The 2017 Related Work category would have lost Rob Hansen's THEN: Fandom in the UK, 1930-1980, Diana Pavlac Glyer's Bandersnatch, and André M. Carrington's Speculative Blackness. Graphic Story was another category that would have been heavily affected. In 2017, we would have lost Clean Room, Vol. 1; Injection Vol. 2; Lumberjanes Vol. 4; Pretty Deadly, Vol 2; Decender, Vol. 2, and Oglaf (Bodil Bodilson). In 2018, we would have lost Unbeatable Squirrel Girl, Vol. 6; and Above the Timberline. The 2017 Dramatic Presentation Short Form would have lost Chapter Seven: The Bathtub and Chapter One: The Vanishing of Will Byers from Stranger Things, along with Salvage from The Expanse. 2018 didn't lose any Dramatic Presentation entries, but Game of Thrones: The Spoils of War came pretty close with only 4.03% of the vote. In the Best Editor categories, 2018 would have lost Gillian Redfearn from Long Form, and Marguerite Kenner and Trevor Quachri from Short Form. In Pro Artist, 2018 would have lost Likhain and Dan dos Santos.
Fanzine and Fancast are also categories that would have lost significantly: 2018 Fanzine would have lost Camestros Felapton, Quick Sip Reviews, Ansible, and SF Commentary. 2017 Fancast would have lost Vaginal Fantasy, while 2018 Fancast would have lost Kalanadi, Fast Forward, Get to Work Hurley!, and Eating the Fantastic. In Fan Writer, 2017 would have lost O. Westin and Cora Buhlert, while 2018 would have lost the memorable Chuck Tingle. The 2017 Fan Artist category would have lost Liz Argall, Lauren Dawson aka Iguanamouth, and Simon Stålenhag. Finally, the 2018 Cambell Long List would have lost Annalee Newitz and Erin Roberts.
Comments and Opinions:
Having looked at what the impact of the amendment would have been, I think this amendment would do significant harm to the value of the current long lists, and should be rejected. I don't know how many other people look at the long lists, but I do and I value the information that is there. This value can take several forms:
First, for those who nominated entries on the long list, knowing how your entry placed gives you a form of validation that other Hugo voters also found that entry worth of nominating, and a sense of how close you came to getting that work on the ballot. I nominated two of the short stories that would have been left off under the amendment, and I appreciate having this information.
Second, it should be apparent from the Short Story results above that we are not just talking about omitting minor works from artists very few voters care about, but significant stories from some major names in the field. While many of these stories were published online, there were also several stories first published in traditional print media, unlike most of the finalists. Keeping such stories in the long list helps others seek out these stories, and may help make a case for splitting the category in the future, if there is a persistent bias against print media with our current categories.
Third, particularly in categories where entries tend to repeat from year to year (e.g., Editor, Artist, Zines, Fancast, Fan Writer, Graphic Story), presence in the long list can help an entry find an audience for future years. In 2017, I made a point of trying to listen to at least an episode of each fancast on the long list, in order to be able to better appreciate and nominate fancasts in the future, and I found several fancasts that I now listen to regularly. I did not do the same for 2018, but I see at least one entry from the list of potential losses that I would like to check out further.
Fourth, those who have nominated long list entries that are ultimately eliminated have an opportunity to audit the results of the EPH implementation by seeing if the change in points when that work was eliminated are consistent with the rest of their ballots.
Finally, there doesn't seem to be any compelling reason to make this change for the normal Hugos. The system we have now seems to be working well, providing good information to those members who choose to read it. The minutes last year mention the tail of the retro-Hugo nominations having relatively few votes in some categories, but most future years are not going to have retro-Hugos. It doesn't make sense to me to make such a drastic change just to shorten the rare retro-Hugo report a bit.
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