[Discussion] 7K Retrospective
Mirro
Alright since people started talking about 7K in retrospect and it led to some interesting discussion, let's have it here.
7k - what can we learn, what didn't work, etc etc.
[Discussion] 7K Retrospective
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» [Discussion] 7K Retrospective
Summary:
High & low & new & old & stop & go & hot & cold
Overall, a very solid and tightly-run contest. Very little drama, some solid work, just nicely done all around. I do agree with some other folks that it felt like the excitement kind of died down a tad or wasn't as present throughout the contest, though I'm unsure how that could really be resolved.
Smells like success.
some thoughts:
-i'd like to see future xkons go through some of the remaining genre themes. i tend to enjoy those more.
-i understand the complaints re: too many entries and people near the bottom not getting a lot of eyes on their stuff, but there's no staff action to resolve this that i would support. i think it's on the readers to have higher standards and seek out more lesser-known work.
-i agree that the voting period felt a little long and my interest was waning towards the end, but shortening it would probably exacerbate the attention problem that lesser-known authors struggle with, so i'm split. i feel like this is just an unavoidable consequence of the site getting larger, and something we're gonna have to live with to some extent for as long as the wiki is popular.
I think it might help to have a shorter posting period, and a correspondingly longer time between the announcement of the theme and the start of posting. With a long period, the works that get in near the beginning possess a advantage over those that arrive near the end. If the posting period was shorter, and the writing period equally longer, there’d be less time between the first entry and the last one, which would hopefully even out the attention given to them a bit.
I support this. I wasn't as present for 7k as i was with 6k but i feel like this would be a step in the right direction.
(account deleted)IV
where we landing? not tilted! ッ
Fifthing (?) would spread concepts out for critters, and increases visibility for articles universally.
(I am replying to myself instead of editing in case all the people that already nth’d my original statement don’t agree with this one)
A shorter posting period would also remove the temptation to go ahead a post it as soon as possible, instead of maybe waiting a week to iron out a few more details. I know I jumped in a little earlier than I really should have.
Two thoughts.
Firstly, I can see why y'all are reluctant to put restrictions on numbers of entrants. But, if you don't put some kind of restriction in place, then in a few kcons' time we are going to get to a place where a huge chunk - or the majority! - of a block-of-a-thousand is made up of kcon entries. If that sounds like hyperbole, take a look at the numbers.
Secondly - and this one's not going to be universally popular! - I think there should be a wordcount / length limit for kcon entries. Reading through well over a hundred entries, many of which were very lengthy, was a significant time sink and a lot of people simply won't have been able to do it.
If there was ever going to be a length limit, it should be for contests. I don’t support that, though, because all it does is force some of the best articles we’ve got out of the running, and discourage people from reading them, but from writing them in the first place. A good compromise might be to require that the info module (or whatever that little thing next to the rating is, where the content warnings go) include a word count, so people can accurate gauge the length of an article before starting, even if it uses collapsibles or listpages. That way people can still write them and those who don’t mind the length can still read, but those who don’t want to read a long article can click away.
Ah, good ole 7K. Here lie the thoughts of a non-participant, non-author who hasn't experienced any other Kcons:
All in all, as most folks have said, I think this was a very smoothly-run operation. No drama, no hiccups, no unsportsmanship from what I'm aware of. All I have are a couple of minor concerns and some suggestions to go along with them.
- Rounderpage:
I wanted to give a huge thanks to Rounderhose does not match any existing user name for turning their Author page into a scoreboard for the contest. It took a lot of coding to put up, and clearly a lot of effort. I embarrassingly only found out about the page halfway into the posting period through the memes going around SCPD.
* My recommendation here is to have any future similar page featured on the main page, and/or made into its own page so that Rounder or other future go-getters don't need to sacrifice their author pages for something temporary.
* Granted I don't know Rounder's thoughts and opinions on this, and I don't intend to speak on his behalf, so my apologies if any of this came out wrong!
Critters:
Speaking from my own experience as a critter during 7K con, I was quite swamped with entry idea/concept requests. Especially since a lot of first-time authors were participating and wanted help with their pieces. There's a few solutions to this I'd like to propose:
* Extend the time between announcing the theme and the posting period, but cap the number of entries and/or the posting period. Granted, this may not be the best solution because a lot of people (including me) love to procrastinate). But spreading out the number of crits over a longer time period would certainly have helped with reducing burnout.
* Have hand-selected Xkcon-based flights: It may be a good idea to assign a larger number of flights to get more critters on board for this sort of thing? It would certainly help reduce the workload to have more folks giving crit. Perhaps 1-2 crit flights could be assigned per week of the contest to allow said critters time to work on their own drafts? As an incentive, said flights could be given a spot on a special Xkcon features page for specific entries.
* Crit-trading thread/hub: Authors looking for crit-for-crit do help reduce the workload on critters since they would be able to receive and give valuable advice without involvement of critters. Unfortunately, I don't see too many authors using this method. Having a megathread exclusively meant for authors to seek crit-for-crit could help promote that, even outside of Kcons. Plus, it helps folks to build their crit skill!
* Create a separate, temporary Xkcon forum/thread to get more informal advice: The current crit thread is a very formal, with a certain template that needs to be filled out, and getting reprimanded for providing too short a critique. My advice? Create a separate ideas-based discussion hub meant exclusively for running basic concepts and/or narratives past other people. You'd still need to use the idea crit forum for greenlights and lengthier crit, but it would be nice to just have somewhere that just deals with informal ideas.
That's about it for this monster of a post.These were very minor nitpicky concerns, bit in all, congrats to everyone who participated, and great job to staff for having this run so smoothly!
I'm personally really not a fan of scoreboards like the Rounderpage during the contest. There will always be ways to find the best entries, but I'd rather have this practice banned from the wiki during the contest.
Seconded. It was cool, but I’m not sure if I feel great about unofficial leaderboards floating around. We have enough of a cult of popularity here as it is.
The truth of the matter is that there are going to be unofficial leaderboards on and off site during these kinds of contests. Their main impact on the site is how they sway discussion around the contest- which means even if you ban them people are still going to find one and sway discussion as a result. I’m just not sure it’s really something we should worry about, especially when there are benefits to them.
For example, I used Rounder’s listing to find middle of the road articles to read and vote on. It was much easier with the listing than it was grabbing at random from the contest page.
EDIT: I still find the ‘cult of popularity’ argument to be quite weak. If this was truly the case, Locke and Rounder would’ve swept the contest. Sloth would’ve never come near top 10 during 6k. Even with Rounder’s listing, the ‘big names’ didn’t gain any particular boost from name alone.
I still find the ‘cult of popularity’ argument to be quite weak.
I mean, it’s been a known issue on the wiki for years and years now, so I’m not really sure how anyone can think it’s not a thing. (Also, Harry is one of the hottest authors on the site right now, and the whole #wettlesweep meme and other people literally plugging the entry daily likely had a significant effect. This is the exact sort of thing that can happen when an author has a certain cachet socially on the site.)
I do wish that amount of time and effort spent plugging didn’t have the effect on rating that it does, but idk how/if that can/should be fixed. People will inevitably talk about articles they like, after all.
Hell, last year the entire contest off-site was swamped with "ROUNDERHOUSE vs DJKaktus" memes, which almost certainly swayed the voted at least a little
Those are fair points, but we do already have an official leaderboard, so I don't see too much harm in having others that go more in-depth about each article by providing more stats. If anything, wouldn't having more articles being shown in the rankings probably cause people to seek mid or low-level entries, and upvote them?
we do already have an official leaderboard
Not true actually, there was never an official leaderboard during the contest.
My bad! I think I just got confused with the leaderboard present at the end of the contest.
Crit feedback here is wonderful and I will be noting it down for the future!
Awwl thank you! You're too sweet Fable, let me know if you need help with setting anything up!
Create a separate, temporary Xkcon forum/thread to get more informal advice: The current crit thread is a very formal, with a certain template that needs to be filled out, and getting reprimanded for providing too short a critique. My advice? Create a separate ideas-based discussion hub meant exclusively for running basic concepts and/or narratives past other people. You'd still need to use the idea crit forum for greenlights and lengthier crit, but it would be nice to just have somewhere that just deals with informal ideas.
I second this. I found my inbox during the KCon flooded as well, and I think making a dedicated forum thread for events like this would be a good way for active contest participants to engage with each other when the critters aren't able to fully address the increased activity.
As for the scoreboards, while I do understand the viewpoint for the whole cult of popularity argument, I think, at least in the case of contests, the scoreboard could actually help viewers find under-read/rated entries should they choose to seek them out (it certainly helped me find some). People who want to still vote for their favorite authors (i.e. those with already high popularity), would do so regardless, and promote them as such.
getting reprimanded for providing too short a critique
General note for clarity, the length of feedback is irrelevant when it comes to judging the quality. Reviews are addressed by staff if the content is overly vague or otherwise unhelpful, not if the wordcount is too low.
I keep seeing people saying that the reading period was too long, and I vehemently disagree with this. I know 4 people including myself who read every entry, and all of us took very nearly the entire reading period to do so. Frankly, I was disappointed by the reading done in this contest. Far too many excellent entries were entirely ignored, and of the people I saw talking about reading entries, the vast majority had read less than half of the 7k articles. I hate to say it, but those talking about the too long reading period appear to have not read as many entries as others. I completely understand that that is a LOT of reading to read them all, but I also believe that entry into a contest like this brings with it a duty or even obligation to read the other entries. Since the number is so high and enforcement of the issue is basically impossible, I'm not sure if there's a way to fix this, but I feel like a goal of reading even half the entries should be at least tried for.
Shout out to the folks who read every entry (I was one of them, too) - it did take a very long time. But we also don't want a super long reading period. I think, at some point going forward, restrictions on entries (even in the form of whittling down to finalists in advance) will be inevitable, even as many of staff reject the idea right now.
I totally agree, I had a lot of free time during the first week of the contest and read a lot, but I still didn't read everything. The longer contest timeline gave me a chance to come back and read some stuff I'd missed the first time around, if the voting period was shorter I think it would exacerbate the problem of people only reading the highest rated entries.
Maybe there could be some kind of reward for reading all or half the entries? Maybe your entry gets featured somewhere, or one of your choice. That would incentivize more reading.
How would we track that?
Yeah, I don’t guess we could track just reading. But voting and/or commenting should be easy to count.
/forum/t-15143222/discussion-7k-retrospective#post-
page revision: 2, last edited: 15 Jan 2023 15:06
