Or, “The Nodies…”

Awhile or so ago I came up with a suggestion that I called the Most Valuable Noder in order to try and provide our contributors with some incentives to keep plying their trade and keep us all entertained, informed and educated. I didn’t get all that much in return in the form of feedback or endorsement so this being the time of year when I’ve got too much time on my hands I thought I’d try and look at it from another perspective.

As we meander towards year end I notice one thing that most industries have in common and that’s some kind of award. In fact, there’s almost too many to count when you throw in such categories as film, television, music, theater, literature, sports and all of the sub-categories that fall under each of them. So here goes.

If Site Trajectory 2 is to be believed (and I see no reason why it shouldn’t) as of this date in 2014 there have been 2,523 new write ups contributed to E2 by 638 contributing users. What I’d like to propose is something along the lines of “The Node of the Year” award for each write up type that we currently allow with the exception of definition and dream since there are so few contributions to those that the voting would be unfair. For some quick reference, here’s the write up types that I would include.

  1. Essay
  2. Event
  3. Fiction
  4. How-to
  5. Idea
  6. Log
  7. Opinion
  8. Personal
  9. Place
  10. Poetry
  11. Recipe
  12. Thing
  13. Review

Unfortunately, I don’t have tools at my disposal to find out how many write ups are in each write up types so maybe some of those would also have to go due to lack of competition.

The envelope please…

I’m still trying to figure out how the criteria for judging the write ups should be calculated. Should it be just the total reputation or should the number of cools also be taken in to account? Do writes ups submitted in January have an advantage since they have been around longer and hence, might attract more votes? What about hidden write ups? What about works of fiction that span a number of nodes? Most importantly, what about prizes for the authors who have contributed their blood, sweat, and tears into their work for the benefit of us all?

For the record, I don’t know how much coding this might entail so maybe I’m biting off more than we can chew but I figured it was worth a shot.

So I’ll throw it open to you to offer up your suggestions by either shooting me a message or contributing to this node. I’m open to any and all and hey, what have we got to lose?

On the flip side of the coin, maybe we could also come up with our own version of the Golden Raspberry Awards to also pay homage to those write ups and authors whose work managed to survive but just barely.

One last thing, if anybody has a better name for the award other than "The Nodies", I'm open to suggestions for that as well.

Feedback

corvus says: re Node of the Year: I think this is a fun idea and really promotes continued write-ups. I would fully support this. You could even do a short list that got posted and give everyone a week to read them all and submit their picks. This could be a neat thing like iron noder.

Jet-Poop says: re Node of the Year: That sounds really cool, but also really, really difficult...

go ahead I'll listen says: re Node of the Year: I don't know if there's a sensible judgment/criteria system that wouldn't be at least 50% arbitrary. So it probably shouldn't be left in any one person's hands. Maybe a nomination/ballot/voting system? But for all 13 that might get cumbersome. Phew, good luck with this one

Bitriot says: re Node of the Year: This is a great idea. When E2 really aimed for quality it was like nothing else on the internet... anything that makes us want to do better work is a plus, I say.

etouffee says: re Node of the Year: good idea.

I think this is an excellent idea. However, I don't think it should be based solely on votes or C!s, since as borgo pointed out this preferences writeups submitted earlier in the year, and also is subject to the whims of who logged on when, how many other writeups were submitted around that time, how many C!s people had, etc.

So here's what I think we should do...

First, borgo should select a committee of willing participants to go through all the nodes and select the "nominees," just as with a real awards show. Some categories will have far fewer than others, so maybe those people could do more than one. Each category could have, say, 5 nominees.

Second, we should get somebody to make a simple superdoc tool to sort writeups by type first, and then by either reputation or C!s. This should be very simple for somebody with the coding chops to work up (in10se? DonJaime?). The nominating committee can then use this tool to scan for promising candidates (rather than blindly reading every single writeup).

Third, we can use the everything user poll to have everyone read and vote on the five nominees in each category! Each category could have, say, a three-day window to be voted on, and then borgo can writeup the results!

We should aim to have the nominations finished by mid January, and then vote in the second half of January, I think.

Update, 12/21/2014 - I made a tool for narrowing down the best candidates for each writeup type, with invaluable assistance from jaybonci and DonJaime! It's publicly accessible over at Nodes of the Year. You can also use it to find forgotten gems of yesteryear!

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