Help:Screen:EditAward

This page is a help or manual page for the ISFDB database. It describes standards or methods for entering or maintaining data in the ISFDB database, or otherwise working with the database. Other help pages may be found via the category below. To discuss what should go on this page, use the talk page. If, after exploring the Help system, you still have a question, please visit the Help desk and let us know. We probably know the answer, but we need your help to know what we left out of the help pages. If you are new to editing the ISFDB, please see Help:Getting Started. For more on this and other header templates, see Header templates.

The Edit Award editor allows you to edit existing award information. In order to access the Award Editor, you have to be on the Award Details page and select the "Edit Award" option in the navigation bar.

Important note about award types supported by ISFDB:

ISFDB supports two different types of awards. Although they are entered and modified using the same Web pages, they are quite different and it's important to understand the difference before you start entering or editing awards. The two award types are as follows:

• Title-based Awards (including Cover Art): Most awards are given to individual ISFDB titles, e.g. novels, non-fiction, short stories, cover art and so on. Note that these titles MUST already exist in ISFDB before you can add awards to them. If you want to add an award to a title that is not in ISFDB, then you have to enter that title first, wait for the submission to be approved and then enter the title's award(s).
• Other awards: ISFDB also supports awards given to individuals beyond their specific works, e.g. Lifetime Achievement awards. In addition, it supports awards given to publishers, editors, title series, and non-ISFDB items such as web sites, movies, graphic novels, and never-published stories (such as runner-ups in various "new story" awards). These awards are referred to as "Untitled Awards" because they are not associated with ISFDB title records.

When you access the Edit Award page, you will see the following fields:

• Title: This field will be pre-filled by the application.
• Author: This field will be pre-filled by the application.
• Year: This should contain the year (as YYYY-00-00) of the award - not the year of publication. The award year can be somewhat contentious; sometimes the year of eligibility is used, and in other cases the year the award is handed out is used. If you are pulling in awards information from an external source, sync on a year that the ISFDB already has data for and make the year for the new data consistent with the current year usage.
• Award Name: This is a pulldown menu which is fairly explanatory (except for the part where you don't confuse the John W. Campbell Award with the John W. Campbell Memorial Award).
• Category: The category is the title of the award, such as "Best Novel", or "Best SF Novel", or "Best Novelette". When the awards are displayed for a particular year (say 1993 Hugo Award), they will be grouped according to categories. Note the categories within a particular award (like the Hugos) may officially differ from year to year. One should differ to the official titles as found in the press release for the award.
• Award Level: Okay, this one can be a bit complicated. In general, awards come in two major flavors: those with winners and nominees (such as the Hugo awards), and those with enumerated poll numbers (such as the Locus Poll). For nominee-type awards, data can be entered when the nominees are first announced (that is, there are no winners yet), and changed when the winner is announced at a later date. In these cases, select the radio button for either Nomination or Win. For poll-type awards, enter the award ranking in the field called Level. At one point we entered Preliminary Nominees that showed up on the long list, before the final short list was selected. My best advice is: don't worry about those anymore. You can't edit the ones already in the database, and you can only enter new ones if you are very clever (hint: you would have to examine the display source code).
• Movie URL: The movie URL link is intended for linking dramatic presentations to the IMDB. Since this particular screen requires the title to be in the database, and we don't track movies in the database, you probably shouldn't use this particular field.