User blog:Wikikinetic/SFW Awards Voters' Guide

Hi everyone! In light of the Summer 2018 SFW Awards's Nomination Phase starting, I've decided to write up a quick guide to how to vote in the SFW Awards and not either 1) fail to fulfill the requirements or 2) let it stress you out no end. As a person who failed both 1 and 2 when I tried to vote last time around, I thought that it might be helpful to new voters to explain how to work the awards properly.

First of all, there are two important things to note: Keeping these two important things in mind, I want to point something out: Assuming that the amounts of time for each phase and the number of articles are the same as last time, if you start voting at the beginning of the Voting Phase, you have an average of about 2.25 articles per day to vote on. On the other hand, if you start voting at the beginning of the Nomination Phase, you have an average of about 1.6 articles per day to work on. And, on the non-existent third hand, if you only vote on 20 articles and plan to do the rest in the last ten days—something that I saw happen all too commonly—you have an average of about 3.5 articles per day to vote on. As a result, if you're planning to get everything done during the awards, just remember that the workload is going to increase significantly if you wait a while, so you might as well start amassing votes as early as possible (possibly in a private document, if you start before the Voting Phase starts).
 * 1) You're probably going to have a lot of things to vote on. For an idea of the order of magnitude, the Winter 2018 SFW Awards had 81 articles and 8 images, making 89 items in total.
 * 2) You have a little over a month between when the Voting Phase starts and when it ends (last time, this period was 38 days long), but you have more like two months between when the Nomination Phase and when the Voting Phase ends (last time, this period was 54 days long).

One last thing to note is that there are different qualities of voting. Going through the votes from last season, I can see two main kinds of voting (although I should note that these are by no means the only ones available). The more common (and less-time consuming) variety is to write a sentence or two about the article giving a very high-level assessment, something like this: "Jane the Doe: I've always thought that her design was kind of cool, and her powerset is amazing!" The less common (and far more time-consuming) variety involves writing a paragraph giving a detailed analysis of the entire article. I can't make up an example out of nothing for either of these styles, so I'll refer you to Haunted's Votes from the Winter 2018 Awards season.

If you're wondering why I'm explaining all this about the different styles, it's by way of saying that putting more or less detail into your work is a factor that 1) can be modified (some people don't even maintain the same style throughout their voting) and that 2) should be weighed against when you're starting voting (if you want to keep up higher quality, you might need to start earlier).

Hopefully, this information should be helpful to deciding whether or not you want to vote and, if you do want to vote, how you should go about doing it. If you have any questions about how to make use of this information or even of how to fix this guide itself, please let me know.