thoughtful
james_nicoll this morning, I responded to a post about the Hugo Awards that included some misconceptions about the Awards. At one point one person repeated an oft-held misconception that the Hugo Awards are only for works published in the USA. (They aren't, as I hope most of you know; works published anywhere are eligible.)Making more work for me was someone who interpreted an earlier version of the Voting System explanation over at the Hugo Awards web site as meaning that an author couldn't have multiple nominations for his/her works in the same category. That is, two short stories by the same author couldn't be nominated in the same year. That's not true, but it comes out of our usage of "work/person," and that's because some Hugo Award categories are for individual works (like the written-fiction categories), and some are for people (like the editor and artist categories). You're not allowed to give a work or person multiple nominations in the same category; that is, you could nominate Kevin Standlee five times for Best Fan Writer this year and the Administrator would only count it as one nomination. This usage is clear to those of us who know the Hugos well, because we know that nominations in written fiction are, strictly speaking, for the work, not the person.
As a consequence of trying to clarify this and to also include examples and alternative wordings that different people suggested, that section has grown much longer. I hope it's understandable. I also hope that we haven't been inadvertently causing people to hold back nominating multiple works by the same author because they thought it wasn't allowed.