Talk:Wainwright Prize

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Format of the list

@Dumbledad: I see you have reformatted the list to use the "blue ribbon" format of the Baillie Gifford Prize. I agree that the previous version, with winners separated from shortlists, was not ideal, but I don't much like the "blue ribbon" approach either: it makes it much less easy to see the winners at a glance. There seems to be no agreed convention on how to present lists of winners of awards with shortlists, or lists of awards for books, but List of Women's Prize for Fiction winners is a Featured List so I would like to take that as a model for this one. But before spending time changing it I thought I would mention my plan here to sound out opinion. List of winners and shortlisted authors of the Booker Prize is another format, but I'm not sure we should rely on coloured background to identify the winner, though it's another well-established style (as in Featured lists like Aurealis Award for best fantasy novel). Any thoughts, anyone? PamD 12:38, 3 June 2020 (UTC) ( edited to add missing word "less", PamD 23:27, 5 June 2020 (UTC))[reply]

I've mentioned this at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Books and Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Awards, in case anyone has useful ideas. PamD 12:43, 3 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]

WP:Books doesn't have formal specific guidelines, just defaults to the general WP-wide guidelines. Some innovators have tried a few formats and some of the best of those have gained FA/FL status, such as the examples you listed. Moving to one of those formats would improve this article. I suggest, however, tailoring it to the award. Is this an award for best book or best author? I'm not familiar with this award, but from the website, it appears to be for the work, so an Aurealis Award-style list with an author and publisher would be more relevant. I don't like how the Women's Prize list labels the authors-column "Winners" (their website indicates it is the books that are short-listed and judged, not the authors). --maclean (talk) 19:34, 3 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for drawing attention to this -- there's a lot of valuable room for improvement here indeed. Based just on my personal preferences, I like List of Women's Prize for Fiction winners best of the ones you've linked here, as being both functional as a sortable table and clearly emphasizing the winners. To address maclean's concern (which I share), the "Winner" column could have the title of the book, followed by an "Author" column. And the "Shortlisted nominees" column could format items as "Title, Author" instead of "Author, Title". The main downside of the Women's Prize format, compared to the Aurealis format, is that you can't sort based on the shortlisted titles the way you can with the Aurealis. With the Aurealis, it's quite interesting to be able to sort and see who keeps showing up. So that might be a good way to tailor to the award: is this an award where there is likely to be repetition on short/longlists? If so, for functionality, maybe better to follow the Aurealis model. If not, the Women's Prize format seems best. ~ oulfis 🌸(talk) 21:44, 3 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Related to adjusting the column headings of the Women's Prize format in order to focus more on the books rather than the authors, perhaps using an image of the cover rather than an image of the author would be better. A quick sample of articles on the winning Women's Prize books shows that most of them have cover images. Since the Women's Prize is also partly about authors (that is, it is specifically for female authors), it doesn't seem inappropriate to focus on authors over books for that particular prize (presumably one of the goals of the prize is to make the authors themselves more well-known). But for other awards a focus on books seems more appropriate. ~ oulfis 🌸(talk) 19:40, 5 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Book cover images are usually non-free images uploaded only for use in the one article about the book itself, so couldn't be used in an awards list, as I understand it, so that's probably not an option. PamD 23:24, 5 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Ohh, that makes sense, I forgot about fair use non-free images. Yeah, in that case, maybe author images just because it's visually appealing. Good catch. ~ oulfis 🌸(talk) 05:04, 6 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Totally agree, converging on a style will help a standard emerge and the tabular format of List of Women's Prize for Fiction winners looks good. (N.B. Unlike the list you cite, I do prefer having the most recent years at the top.) Dumbledad (talk) 15:13, 5 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]

I've just seen that this year (and presumably for future) there will be two prizes:UK Nature Writing and Global Conservation! Complicates matters, needs thought: a unified sortable table would still be good but might need another column. (And am on phone, which emphasises how problematic the tiny "blue ribbon" is, especially when I went into "desktop" view). PamD 05:46, 6 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Oldest first or newest first? Checking a few Featured lists for awards, all of them seem to be oldest first, so let's go with that. PamD 10:37, 7 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Have now found Wikipedia:Featured_lists#Literature_and_theatre, which has an "Awards" section. Pretty typical is Arthur C. Clarke Award, so I think that's probably what we should follow. PamD 10:43, 7 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]

@Dumbledad, Oulfis, and Maclean25: The conversation seemed to draw to an end, so I've now converted the list to more or less the format of the Featured List Arthur C. Clarke Award, except for including the reference in the first column, and having a column for "notes" which would be good to fill out on the lines of the Lakeland Book of the Year, with a comment on what the book is about etc as appropriate. We could usefully add the publishers too, as in the ACC Award, and even ISBNs as for Lakeland - allows the reader to go direct to full publisher/availability info. I'll draft the 2020 entries too, allowing for the fact that there will be two different shortlists for the two prizes now - to be announced on 30 July, winner announced 30 August. PamD 16:48, 3 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]

See User:PamD/wainwright for how I think we should handle the split prize: it does mean that if you sort by any field the entries are multi-line, but the alternative to be to have something cryptic like "2020N" and "2020G" with an explanation. PamD 16:58, 3 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]