Respect the Pronouns

[kevin_standlee]

I'm going to promote (somewhat reworded) the conclusion from a comment I made elsewhere to here, because I think it encapsulates my thoughts on the AO3 issue.

Saying, "I won a Hugo Award" is not something that any one AO3 contributor should legitimately say for their individual and personal contribution to AO3. Anyone doing so is implicitly denying the agency of every other contributor, whether they intend to do so or not.

Saying "We won a Hugo Award!" is appropriate. In my opinion, it's just as legitimate as the fans of a sports franchise saying, when their team wins the championship, "We won!" In fact, it's more appropriate, given the "ownership" of the individual AO3 contributors in the combined entity and joint authorship of the work that WSFS honored.

Comments

[elf]

Who are the members the sports team in this analogy?

[kevin_standlee]

Okay, I'll bite: they're like the contributors to a magazine, and I think it's still more appropriate for them to say "we," but the leader of the team (say, the quarterback of an NFL team) tends to be personally credited.

I've said this before, but apparently it's rejected by others: the editors of a magazine or non-fiction work are credited individually by convention, but the various authors of the material in that magazine or collection are not, although they can rightfully and accurately say that they contributed to a Hugo Award-winning work. Apparently that formulation is considered wrong by some, and every single person who had anything to do with the work (presumably including whoever printed it, did the copy-editing, got coffee for the contributors, etc.) are individually and personally Hugo Award winners, too.

No, this is not black-letter law. It is custom and practice dating back decades. Try to write black-letter law and you'll make a mess of things.

[elf]

Okay, who are the people involved with AO3 who are the equivalent of editors of a fanzine or semiprozine?

Who's the "quarterback" of AO3?

[kevin_standlee]

That's a good question. I don't recall hearing individual baseball players taking individual and personal credit for winning the World Series, although it's not uncommon for the team's manager to be so referred. Even the MVP isn't generally called the person who won the Series in the same way that we tend to talk about an NFL quarterback being the winner of the Super Bowl. Although I'm a fan of the San Francisco Giants, I don't think I ever said, "We won!" though.

Inasmuch as AO3 is owned by OTW, which is a specific entity (technically it is a non-natural person), and that's the only entity credited on the nomination, on the trophy, and in the official historical record, it's not impossibly that you might say the president of OTW is the "quarterback," but it doesn't sound right to me. OTW and AO3 is so diffuse in its "management" that there's no individual or small group of individuals to whom you can IMO plausibly point and say "those individuals are the 'guiding mind.'" Saying "I won [a tiny percentage of] a Hugo Award is probably correct if you contend that every single contributor is a an equally-responsible editor of the overall work." Saying "I [solely and individually] won a Hugo Award" is misleading.

In 2002, I was fortunate to be allowed to keep one of the two spare Hugo Award trophies, as was the other co-chair of the convention, Tom Whitmore. I took that trophy to show to my mother, who is the person who set me to reading SF many, many years ago. She said, "My little boy won a Hugo Award!" I was very quick to correct her and say that I had not won a Hugo, but was able to keep a spare trophy. The two things are very different. Similarly, as one of the co-designers of the 1994 Hugo Award trophy base, I was given one of the bases (but not a rocket attached to it). Both of these things are on a shelf here in my house, and I'm proud of both of them, but neither of them make me an award winner.

(As I've pointed out many times, chairing a Worldcon is the most expensive way you can ever get yourself a Hugo Award trophy. All of the other ways are cheaper and easier.)

Heck, I was a proofreader for the 2004 winner for Best Fanzine. That doesn't make either me nor fellow copy-editor Anne Gray a 2004 Hugo Award winner either, even though we were part of the team that helped make it happen and I contributed toward that 'zine as a writer as well from time to time. (Cheryl Morgan won fair and square, despite some carping from some people who tried to deny her magazine's legitimacy as not a "real" fanzine because it was primarily distributed electronically, not on Good Old Twilltone paper like Ghu intended, and said some really awful things about her personally showing their despicable prejudice.) This is not, as some people seem to think, me trying to complain about not being a Hugo Award winner, but a way of trying to show examples that affect me personally, to show that I'm not hating on people. The same distinctions that I'm drawing apply to me personally as well as other people. I'm not saying, "One set of rules for thee and another for me."

[kevin_standlee]

Further to this: I was one of the two co-chairs of the 2002 Worldcon (pictured in the user icon here). I can say "I chaired a Worldcon," as did Tom Whitmore, my fellow co-chair, as we were equal partners. But neither of us nor either of us jointly can say that we were solely responsible for that convention. We were members of the team that made it happen, and the successes are due to the many, many individual contributions of the hundreds of volunteers that worked on the convention and the thousands of fans from around the world who attended it. It's a team effort, not an individual one.