Wikipedia talk:Awards and accolades

I would suggest that instead of focusing on the notability of an individual award, that it should be a two-prong test, that the set of awards is notable, and that the individual ceremonies are notable. The numerous individual award pages that we have are barely notable as they just list out the net results (nominees and winners from the overall list), with some exceptions, and I would argue that if I really wanted to delete those pages, I could argue their non-notability-ness (no, I'm not going to). To avoid people gaming the system but making a stronger point, showing that the awards ovreall, and that the individual ceremonies or events that give out the awards are notable would be sufficient for any of the individual awards subsequent. This then would allow for an award group like iHeartRadio Music Awards where we don't have individual award pages but do cover the individual ceremonies 2019 iHeartRadio Music Awards to be allowed. Of course, if the individual award in that set is notable great, but let's not push people to be making pages just to support getting an award listed in a accolade table.

Mind you, this should also be a case that exists alongside awards that are handed out individually that typically come from the scientific/academic community, or military honors, or highest-level civilian honors. --Masem (t) 20:00, 30 April 2020 (UTC)[reply]

I believe "Award as a whole being Notable" is probably sufficient, and setting the standard any higher than that may hinder acceptance of this as a guideline. Even if individual award-categories or award-events are Notable we may not bother splitting off pages for them. I don't think we should be wasting time squabbling to establish whether a category is independently Notable.

I appreciate strong criteria to make it easy to eliminate crap (especially from a COI or over-enthusiastic editor), but I think requiring an award to be Notable is already pushing it. There are also non-Notable awards that would be expected to be mentioned in any non-Wikipedia biography. Of course the difficulty is how else we could try to meaningfully separate the reasonable from the crap. Alsee (talk) 13:45, 11 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]

@JzG: Hi! how about FHM!? FHM is the award that more related to the beauty list but the award is held every year (1995-2017) and there are 100 winners in each year of the sexiest women category so whether or not this can be considered an award, also this award is demonstrably notable. Saiff Naqiuddin (talk) 21:21, 11 May 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Saiff Naqiuddin, FHM is probably the single best example of the kind of "award" we should not include. Guy (help! - typo?) 11:59, 7 September 2020 (UTC)[reply]

@JzG:, I think it'd be good to have a WP:RSP list so editors can know what notable awards are that can be referenced just to the issuing organization. If a page says has a blahblahblah award, ref: blah blahblah, such a guide would be useful in determining if it should stay or not. Graywalls (talk) 11:05, 7 September 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Graywalls, in reality, nothing should be included if it is only available from the primary source. Guy (help! - typo?) 11:58, 7 September 2020 (UTC)[reply]

@JzG:, that maybe ideal, however realistically, I think having such a list would be of great help for editors not particularly familiar with specific awards. For example, one article I have been working on the last few days is a book publisher. It has an award from AIGA. Is that notable? I have no idea. If it was sufficiently notable, perhaps leaving it the issuing organization as the source is ok. Graywalls (talk) 13:02, 7 September 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Graywalls, I have no problem with a list of awards considered notable for inclusion in Wikipedia articles. I do have a problem with implying that this list permits self-sourcing of any awards. Do you see the difference? Guy (help! - typo?) 21:08, 7 September 2020 (UTC)[reply]

A WP:RSP like list would be a good start, because I think it would stock bickering between editors over their own perceptions about the noteworthiness of the award. For example, if I were to remove that from the article in question above Melville House Publishing, I foresee objection from editors saying "well that's notable in noble writing/bookselling circle". Personally I'm not familiar with the award and I have no idea if it's respected like getting Pulitzer Prize or if it's at the similar level of being put on the towns paper for a kid that gets on the Jr. High honor roll. Graywalls (talk) 21:13, 7 September 2020 (UTC)[reply]

On one hand I would say the best ref to confirm an award is to cite the official page the entity that granted the award. On the other hand this page proposes that the award must have been reported in a[n independent] reliable source. I find a rather awkward tension there:

• Do we prefer or accept the authoritative primary source ref, and say here that it merely needs to be sourcable to an independent source? That can be a recurring mess if the independent source isn't present on the page for later confirmation.
• Do we want to replace any authoritative primary source refs with a independent source refs, to establish that this criteria has been sastified?
• Do we want to double ref it? (Please no.)

Alsee (talk) 14:03, 11 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Alsee, there is no tension, in fact. We can include more than one reference. For example, we can source an Academy Award to both the Washington Post and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, or we can simply reference the secondary source, or, if the award is sufficiently notable that it has its own article (Academy Award for Best Actor) we can self-source it, because there is consensus that it is significant without reference to a specific secondary source for every instance. Guy (help! - typo?) 14:36, 3 May 2021 (UTC)[reply]

I wonder whether we need a list analogous to the list of perennial sources. There are a lot of articles on individuals out there which are based on lists of accolades and awards, and as @Celestina007: recently pointed out in an AfD, meaningless awards are an industry. There are oodles of vanity-awards run by businesses who accept any nomination indiscriminately, and whose business model is simply to charge the awardee and their friends a nice fat fee for an oscar-like ceremony and some glam photos. It can be difficult for the rest of us to work out which awards are meaningful. Even amongst reputable awards, there are subtler connotations that some editors will not know. For example, a senior civil servant in the UK will almost certainly get in the Queen's new years honours list on their retirement, even if their career has been quite unspectacular. The same award, given to a sportsperson, or a school-teacher, would be very meaningful. And a British Empire Medal, although of lower standing than an OBE, is generally much more indicative of notability because it is almost always given to people of lower standing who've done something outstanding, and never given to someone simply for existing at a certain level. Elemimele (talk) 07:17, 5 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Award reliability might be something we have consensus discussions about. There is an article on vanity awards and while there are a lot, I wouldn't say there are oodles (as determined by reliable sources). It can become a sort of witch hunt to uncover vanity awards, one needs to be cautious as where to draw the line is fuzzy. -- GreenC 13:11, 5 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, I agree, we need proper consensus on what's reliable and what isn't, not a witch-hunt. Thanks for the link to the article. I suspect it's the tip of the iceberg. For example most of those awards are European, and I'm pretty sure there are a lot of fake awards in African countries too - it's a global phenomenon. The line is indeed fuzzy, much the same as the line in vanity publishing. The reason I'm in favour of a list is that it would give a venue to gain consensus and spread the word, and avoid a lot of little individual witch-hunts (or at least time-consuming debates) every time an article lands up at AfD with one or two editors trying to sort out whether it's a self-published vanity article, or whether the person is genuinely a ground-breaking entrepreneur. There's also a risk of wildly different standards being applied, according to which particular editors take part in the discussion. Elemimele (talk) 20:56, 5 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Hi. I wonder if the Gold Derby awards for TV, movies and music should be added to these awards and accolades lists, as it is from a reputable website. Thanks. ManuelButera (talk) 22:34, 9 December 2021 (UTC)[reply]

This draft was brought to my attention via Wikipedia talk:Biographies of living persons. It is far far out of line with the standards for awards used by WP:PROF (particularly criteria C2 and C3) and would, in its present form, devastate our coverage of academics. In particular, WP:PROF#C2 speaks of a "highly prestigious academic award or honor at a national or international level". This is not the same as being a notable award. For instance, the detailed criteria for #C2 speak of "honors and prizes of notable academic societies", and while the society itself may be notable, this does not mean that there is independent notability for their honors and prizes. WP:PROF#C3 speaks of being "an elected member of a highly selective and prestigious scholarly society or association (e.g., a National Academy of Sciences or the Royal Society) or a Fellow of a major scholarly society for which that is a highly selective honor (e.g., the IEEE)". I note that even one of the specific examples given here, being an IEEE Fellow, does not have a standalone article, so this draft would forbid mention of it. Many of these honors, even at the level of National Academy of Sciences membership (much more prestigious than IEEE Fellow) are nevertheless only marked by sources from the society and from the academic's employer, and would again be forbidden by this draft from being mentioned because of the non-independence of those sources. I think that this must have been written by someone either totally out of touch with how academic honors work, or someone who wants to kill off Wikipedia's coverage of academics and focus only on celebrities and sportsballers, because that is the effect I think it would have. —David Eppstein (talk) 01:13, 6 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]

We can always say that academic awards -- at least those related to professional academic societies/associations -- are exempt from this guideline due to NPROF. --Masem (t) 02:27, 6 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Alternatively, update the draft to include criteria for academic honors where they differ from the general criteria. And this was part of what prompted my question on the BLP talk page for a list of awards and honors which, at their face, seemed to include smaller universities sourced to that university's newspaper or press release, and prompting the question of how we know where such a line of notability might be drawn. Presumably somewhere between Oxbridge awards always being notable, and community college awards rarely being notable.

I will note, lack of 'presumptive notability' through a blue link does not mean an award is non-notable, only that it would need to fulfill another criteria to be considered notable. Nor is the threshold for that makes every award winner notable enough for an article, necessarily equivalent to the threshold for mention in a notable academic's article (I'd argue there's a significant gap, with the former a relatively small subset of the latter).

Pinging Saintfevrier who is also interested in this topic, and prompted my initial questions of broader guidelines. Bakkster Man (talk) 15:52, 6 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you Bakkster Man for pinging me to this interesting discussion. I tend to agree that if notability criteria are applied in an "umbrella" fashion, it will indeed be devastating for the representation of academics on Wikipedia, as expressed by David Eppstein. If I had more free time I would try to establish notability and write articles on some of the awards that we are discussing in the bio of the academic we have both edited. It's good to see that more people are concerned about this: there IS a danger, as David Eppstein aptly says, that (quote) "[it could] kill off Wikipedia's coverage of academics and focus only on celebrities and sportsballers" Saintfevrier (talk) 10:20, 7 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]