The Quills

Hi everyone,

I received a comment from a member that required a bit of a lengthy answer. Because it includes responses to questions I've occasionally received over the past several years, I invite anyone with questions about those issues to read my reply and let me know how we can continue to improve the process. (This was originally posted in "Preferred Authors' Forum"  and is reposted here so all members can see it.)

The Quills are NOT an official WDC contest and have never claimed to be. We have to work within those constraints, which unfortunately means we cannot have a simple check box or direct link like with awardicons or MBs.

I said last year that I hoped we could have a longer nomination process this year. Unfortunately, due to a variety of issues (some serious, some less so), a new job, and some disorganization on my part, I was not able to offer that. I have addressed that before.
          As I've also announced before, the survey format introduced this year will allow me to switch the information so that we can begin accepting nominations for 2015 immediately after nominations for 2014 close, allowing 11 and a half months of nomination time this year. Hopefully this helps!

A quick glance at the sitewide stats   shows that there are currently more than 560,000 active members on WDC, posting approximately 50-60,000 items each year (doing the math from the daily average). That's not counting the hundreds of thousands of interactive chapters, reviews, forum posts, and campfire additions. It is impossible to go through every single one of these and be "fully representative", but I think that despite dealing with such vast numbers, we do a pretty darn good job here.

On the issue of representation:
          The issue of diversity is one that I've addressed at least once in the past, to the satisfaction of the person asking. As has been pointed out by numerous people on several occasions, the trends from the past 7 years show that lower ranked ports do tend to be underrepresented in the Non-Static (Community) categories, which makes sense, given that a higher case color often indicates more community involvement. One begets the other.
          The same people, however, have pointed out the tendency of black cases and even authors on free memberships to be overrepresented among the Static items, and it is not at all a rare occurrence for little-known authors to be nominated, receive honorable mentions, or outright win awards. The Quills are judged based on quality, not popularity, to the best of our ability, and this has led to what I think is rather good representation.
          I've acknowledged before and want to acknowledge again that higher case colors are overrepresented in general among the nominees. On the whole, higher color cases do tend to win more often, and they are certainly nominated more often. I don't think, however, that this is because of an inherent bias. Rather, this is because (a) higher color cases tend to have been here longer and know more people, which means that (b) more people, generally speaking, have read (and liked) their items and are thus (c) more likely to have their items nominated. Furthermore, most of us on WDC have come to see how our writing stacks up and to get constructive criticism. Because they have generally been here longer and have had more of their work read, higher color cases on average tend to write better exactly because they have received this constructive criticism and improved their writing/contests/groups/etc. accordingly. This is not to say that yellow or blue cases are all better than black cases, but rather to say that taken on average, higher color cases do tend to be more familiar with the craft of writing and activity management, by sheer dint of experience.
          Higher color cases are nominated more often, but there are still many very high quality works by new and/or black case authors. Because of this, I deliberately go out of my way to read works by black case and/or new authors. I read dozens and dozens of these each year in the hopes of finding quality material, and often do. Several others have done the same and encouraged more people to help. We are improving every year we run the Quills.

"Let's together push this process along until Andrew and his team accept it and proved the process every day of 2015 and makes it work." I realize it may just be a question of phrasing, but this sentence makes it sound as if my team and I are unresponsive to community concerns and need to be "push[ed]" by others to correct issues with the Quills. Nothing could be further from the truth. I've said it before and I'll say it again: If you have any suggestions on how to improve the experience for you and other authors in the future, please let me know. I take all suggestions seriously and respond personally and in detail, as many members already know and I hope this demonstrates. Many of our finest improvements have come from member suggestions (including, for example, about half of the award categories and this year's new survey format).

Every contest that tries to consider art of any kind is subjective to some degree or another. But we do the absolute best we can to focus on quality while allowing enough audience participation to keep up engagement and excitement. I place a deliberate focus on diversity of all kinds and ultimately on quality, regardless of the source of the material. Winning a Quill Award (and even being nominated) often raises the profile of a work and its author, sometimes considerably. The system is not perfect, but I think that Ann's spirit of ensuring everyone has a shot is exactly what makes WDC such a magnificent community. I am humbled and amazed at the acts of friendship and support I see every year in running the Quills, and even though they're not perfect, I hope you will all help me continue to improve it to the best of our ability.

Yours in community and writing adventures,

Andrew

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