Talk:Hugo Award for Best Professional Artist

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Featured listHugo Award for Best Professional Artist is a featured list, which means it has been identified as one of the best lists produced by the Wikipedia community. If you can update or improve it, please do so.
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Main Page trophyThis article appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page as Today's featured list on October 1, 2021.
Article milestones
DateProcessResult
February 8, 2011Featured list candidatePromoted
August 13, 2011Featured topic candidatePromoted
Current status: Featured list

History of this award[edit]

  • "first presented in 1953, and with the exception of 1954, 1957, and 1958 has been awarded annually."

I replaced this clause with a brief explanation of the early history, relying on The Locus Index to SF Awards. I consulted its lists of winners by year before 1960 but added only one citation to the list of winners by category.[1]

What are the issues?

  1. 1953? Two awards for cover and interior illustration, which Locus sets outside the series. I daresay cover both in prose (done) and list both in the table (not done).
  2. Name of award. Locus lists "Artist/Professional Artist" from 1955 with exception 1957 only. Annually it names "Artist" 1955-56, "Outstanding Artist" 1958, "Professional" 1959 (alongside "Fan" from 1967).
  3. Years given. We say from 1953 except 1954, 57, 58. Locus says from 1955, except 1957. I say include both 1953 (two subcategory awards) and 1958 (variant name) --done in the brief prose history, not done in the table.
  4. Biographies. I say cover the details in biographies of Emshwiller, Finlay, and Freas --which I am revising, among all Science Fiction Hall of Fame inductees biogs (in progress) Done. Only in the table is there a real issue what to include.
  5. Retro Hugos. (I would delete this from the lead entirely.)
    1. It surprises me that Retro Hugo awards are "available" only for years when there was a convention.
    2. Our prose confuses me regarding "Fan Artist". It appears that no artist, pro or fan, was retrospectively honored for 1954. Is it true that fan rather than pro was "available" as a Retro Hugo category. [fixed by another editor]

Offhand I would break the lead paragraph where my factual revision begins, making a separate history paragraph, and delete the Retro Hugos entirely. Other editors may consider whether all Hugo Awards articles (leads) should be revised thus or similarly. My revision is limited to the early facts for easy comprehension (compare versions).

--P64 (talk) 20:00, 10 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Alright, I guess the first few years here were a bit of a mess. I went and cleaned up the lead bit you added, as I had a hard time following it- I think it makes more sense now. One name in '55 and '56, skip a year, another name in '58, Professional Artist since '59. I've adjusted the table to fit the lead, since I'm not sure how I managed to drop 1958 and add one of the 1953 awards but not the other. I've ended up removing 1953 altogether- I don't agree that "best cover artist" and "best interior illustrator" are functionally the same thing as "best artist", especially when they are both given in the same year. Currently, Discontinued Hugo Awards covers those two awards, and while I think they should be mentioned in the lead (and now are) I don't think they should be in the table.
As to Retro Hugos, while I admit that the rules are a bit strange (if the convention that year had awarded Hugos in the categories we have today, what would they be), it is a real thing that they do. I very much disagree with dropping it from the lead, given that it's 1 of 2 sections of the list proper. You can't just drop the whole idea of retro hugos from this list just because they're awkward- they're real and very much relevant, so they have to be here.
I'm confused what you mean in your point about the 1954 retro hugos- there were no Hugos awarded that year. Hugos only existed in 1953, and then 1955 on. In 2004, they awarded retro hugos for 1954, and they awarded them based on the categories that existed in 2004, since by definition there were no categories in 1954. If you check the Hugo site for the 1954 retro hugos, you'll see that they did give a retro hugo award for professional artist, which is why it's in this list. They did not give one for fan artist- there weren't enough nominations to make a ballot.
Finally, I'm not sure what you mean by biographies- if you mean include their biographical details here, I disagree- that's completely out of scope for here. This is about the award, not the people who won the award. If you mean that the biography articles of those three should mention that they won/were nominated for the award, well yeah, obviously. Every nominee/winner should have a mention in their article about it- it's a notable award. --PresN 22:38, 10 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
4. Biographies. In all four biographies of 1953 and 1955 artist winners (which happen to cover the 50-year retro winners for 1946 and 1951) I have now covered the basic details regarding 1953 and 1955 artist awards. The first three as listed here are credited with winning "one of the inaugural Hugo Awards ..." under a specification that was not continued --
Virgil Finlay#Biography (parenthetical prose)
Hannes Bok#Bok as an artist (ordinary prose)
Ed Emshwiller#Archives and awards (ordinary prose) --sectioning should change
Frank Kelly Freas#Career (ordinary prose with footnote)
-- and Freas is credited with winning "the inaugural Hugo Award for Best Artist in 1955 and the next three conferred—in 1956, 1958, and 1959 under different names.[7][b]", where the note explains the sense in which those were the first four.
5. Retro Hugos. "(I would delete this from the lead entirely.)"
Yes, delete from the lead, as adequately covered below, in a section that is in the Contents list. I would move much other material out of the lead, under headings such as History and Multiple winners, some above and some below the table.
Where Retro Hugos are explained I would say it more like this: Retrospective Hugo Awards or "Retro Hugos" in current categories have been authorized for 50, 75, and 100 years after Worldcons at which no awards were given. (namely 1939-41, 1946-52, and 1954 iiuc)
After reading the Retro Hugo coverage here (where Fan Artist confusion has been fixed) and at Hugo Award for Best Fan Artist, I infer that no Retro Awards were put on the program in 1997-2000 and 2002, whereas they were on the progam but 1996 2001 and 2004 but in the latter year the best fan artist of 1953 was "no award", in effect.
These matters --Retro coverage and section organization-- concern all the Hugo Awards articles and I do not plan to be involved further.
--P64 (talk) 20:05, 11 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Alright, well, good job with the biographies, there's definitely not enough quality articles written on SFF artists of any decade, much less the 50s/60s. I still disagree with you in that I think it's not enough to talk about the retro hugos in their own section but think that they should also be mentioned in the lead, but if you ever want to adjust the article to show me how you think it should be done, it's not like you need my permission. I mainly just want all of the Hugo lists to be consistent. --PresN 22:33, 11 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]

References[edit]

second new section posted at once

I reduced repetition across the Locus Index references (formerly two, now three); eliminated their archive data (unnecessary, all three originals load quickly); and updated the old accessdates (I didn't use them, feel free to restore 2010-04-21).

The laundry list of official Hugo Awards page references may not need any archive data. I think they may be replaced by one citation (perhaps with instructional note such as "Select year from menu") that is referenced many times. If the official website is too complicated, cite it once with a note how to navigate the Locus Index effectively.

--P64 (talk) 20:00, 10 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Ref archives are not there because the site is "slow to load". Ref archives are there because if the source website ever goes offline, or changes, they're not going to take the time to tell us beforehand so that we can adjust the references. This may not seem likely with Locus, but I've seen websites I've used for a decade just up and vanish for one reason or another- Locus may not be likely to go bankrupt, as far as I know, but there's nothing stopping, say, Tor from buying them up and "merging" the website with their own, dropping the awards database in the process. It seems farfetched now, but I've seen it happen- and since the archive links are there now, why remove them?
Also, while I agree that in this instance there's nothing that would hinder a reader from clicking on the year in question from one citation that goes to the main Locus Hugo Award page, why would we add that step? It's the same reason that we cite page numbers in a book when we cite it- to make the information as painless as possible to find. Doing extra work here to make it a bit harder to find the cited information just so the reference count is a bit lower... doesn't make any sense to me. --PresN 22:38, 10 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Visible bibliographic data regarding archives is useful if the site is no longer available or is known to be troubled somehow. When no longer useful it should be deleted from the article with a notice on the Talk page that links to a version including archive data.
When we (or print publishers) give different page numbers in different footnotes (or inline notes) we don't repeat all of the bibliographic data for the publication. "Hugo Awards, 1955." or "WSFS, 1955." is sufficient, with one link to the full citation and one to the page (if available online as in this case). For example see Jules Verne#References.
Other examples: Mary Shelley#References (unlinked), John W. Campbell#References (cautiously executed with long entries)
--P64 (talk) 20:28, 11 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Not sure where you're getting that the archive links should be put on the talk page rather than in the references if the site isn't "known to be troubled somehow", do you have a link to any guidelines on that? I just take issue with the "known to be troubled" bit- again, there's no guarantee that any given website will let us know beforehand that they're going to shut down or condense their content to remove the specific data we're sourcing.
As to the referencing style, yes, I know how Harvard style works (see Hugo Award). I tend to use it for books, but not webpages, as books are a single physical item while webpages are separate pages that are linked together- one can be moved or removed without affecting the others. There's absolutely no reason to go around changing the citation style in a featured list- Wikipedia does not enforce any style above any others, and you'll find pretty much any referencing style you can think of in an article if you look around enough. --PresN 22:29, 11 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]

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