Forum:SH:A retrospective on the 2012 Short Story Contest

As you may have seen by perusing the recent changes or the Wiki Activity, I have canceled the Summer 2012 Short Story Contest rather than letting it reach its conclusion. The alarmingly low amount of participation does not justify handing out awards. Let me give you a run down of the stats for this contest:


 * Total nominations: 31
 * Unique nominations: 21
 * Total votes: 17

Those are decent stats. If you just looked at those, you'd think that wow, this was a fairly successful contest, at least in the way of nominations. However, that would not be accurate. Let's look beneath the surface:


 * Total nominators: 4
 * Total voters: 4

This is pitiful and I was not inclined to let this reach its conclusion and then fake pomp and circumstances by saying "Congratulations! Your story has been selected as one of the best of the wiki by the community." The community, or what's left of it, couldn't be bothered to participate, so such a statement would have been a lie.

Let's look at this another way, just in terms of the nominations. I nominated 26 of the total (not unique) nominations. 26 out of 31. I nominated 84% of the nominations. I was the host. That is insane. The community could only be bothered to nominate 16% of the total nominations. If I hadn't nominated those 26 nominations, there would have only been 5. FIVE total and FIVE unique. Three of them would have come from one person. I, and someone else who I won't mention in case they don't want me to, noticed this. These nominations were our attempt to salvage this contest, but it's clearly not worth salvaging.

This is part of our greater community and participation problems. If this isn’t proof that the community has been driven away and that we only have people who don’t really care to participate anymore, which is not at all how things used to be, then I don’t know what is. If you just want to work on your own pages, that’s fine. More power to you. If you just want to sit around and delete people’s pages and hand out warnings and blocks, whatever. If you don't think it can or should be fixed, I don't care.

This problem needs to be fixed, and this problem can be fixed, so either get out of my way or go away. This issue is intolerable. - Brandon Rhea (talk ) 17:59, September 14, 2012 (UTC)