Wikipedia:Canadian Wikipedians' notice board/Genies cleanup project
This is an ad hoc subproject of Wikipedia:WikiProject Canada, concentrating on cleanup and format upgrading of our articles on the Genie Awards and the Canadian Screen Awards.
In all cases, while adjustments have been made for aspects that are unique to the Genies/CSAs, the general principle is that the lists should follow the same basic formatting model that is used for the Academy Awards — the templates that should be used, as displayed below, have been adapted directly from the ones in use on the Academy Award articles.
If you have access to a news database, you may add references to the article at the same time as you clean up a list, if you choose to do so. This is not required at this time, however — there will be a separate later phase to comprehensively ensure that all of the articles are referenced to reliable sources, so it is not crucial to add references immediately. A link to the appropriate ceremony's page on IMDB may be added at the bottom of the page as a direct external link; however, IMDB should not be cited as an inline reference.
Award-by-year lists[edit]
Introduction[edit]
Note that the parent article Genie Awards contains a table which already lists the host, venue and exact date of every ceremony; however, not all of the awards-by-year articles have actually had this information copied over yet. Check that table and ensure that all of those details are copied over into the introduction and the appropriate fields in the infobox.
Also in the infobox, do fill in the "best picture" field if it is not already filled out. Do not worry about counting awards or nominations yourself to fill in "most_wins" and "most_nominations", due to the small but present risk of editor or IMDb error; this information can wait for the sourcing round.
Body[edit]
Copy and paste the following table into the article.
| Motion Picture | Direction |
|---|---|
| Actor in a leading role | Actress in a leading role |
| Actor in a supporting role | Actress in a supporting role |
| Original Screenplay | Adapted Screenplay |
| Best Feature Length Documentary | Best Short Documentary |
| Best Live Action Short Drama | Best Animated Short |
| Art Direction/Production Design | Cinematography |
| Costume Design | Editing |
| Overall Sound | Sound Editing |
| Achievement in Music: Original Score | Achievement in Music: Original Song |
| Achievement in Make-Up | Achievement in Visual Effects |
| Special Awards | |
Fill in each field by cutting and pasting the winners and nominees list that is already present in the article. If a category is not listed there, then check the appropriate year in the "event history" column at this IMDb link or the ACCT's awards database — if the page does list nominees in the category, then copy them over; if it does not, then you may remove the category. (Do not assume that our list is already complete until you have directly confirmed this against one or both of the other lists; every single article that I've cleaned up so far, even if it seemed to already be complete, has actually had at least one category still missing.)
Special considerations:
- Verify every blue link on the page to ensure that it's linking to the correct article, and not to a wrong topic that happens to have the same name.
- Original Song category: For many years, IMDb does not actually list the title of the winning or nominated songs, giving only the name of the songwriter and the film. For every ceremony from #11 on, Achievement in Music: Original Song has already had the song titles confirmed in other sources, so copy the song titles from that page if they are missing from IMDb. For #1-#10, the song titles have not yet been confirmed — but do not worry about tracking them down yourself. Just fill out what you can, and the actual song titles can be added in the comprehensive referencing phase.
- Screenplay: While in most years the ACCT has presented separate awards for "Original Screenplay" and "Adapted Screenplay", in others it has presented only a single award for "Best Screenplay". In some years, accordingly, you may need to readjust the ordering of the categories; for simplicity's sake, just drop "Best Screenplay" down to a vacant spot near the bottom of the template (or pull another similarly unpaired category up) rather than readjusting every individual section heading through the entire template — at this point, just getting the job done at all is much more critical than maintaining strict consistency in the order of the categories (we can always reorder the categories later on if need be.) However, if the only vacant spot available to drop an unpaired category into is the one next to "Special awards" at the bottom, then do not put the unpaired category directly into that spot — rather, move the special awards to the righthand position and then put your unpaired category to its left.
- Documentaries: In some earlier years you will need to adjust the "Best Feature Documentary" and "Best Short Documentary" sections to "Best Documentary" and "Best Theatrical Short"; in those same years, you will be removing the section for "Live Action Drama". You may also end up having to remove "Animated Short" at the same time, but verify this against IMDb first just in case.
- Technical award categories: Unfortunately, the Canadian film industry receives a much lower volume of reliable source coverage than its American equivalent — unfair though this may be, it is what it is and there's little we can do about it (decreeing that the topic is subject to a special exemption from Wikipedia's content rules is not an option.) In particular, most non-wining nominees (and even some of the winners) in the less prominent technical categories (costume design, editing, cinematography, sound, sound editing, etc.) are substantially less likely to actually be the subject of enough coverage in reliable sources to actually stand alone as independent article topics — realistically, many of these people are just never actually going to get good articles that contain enough valid sourcing to pass current WP:GNG and WP:BLP standards, and instead these categories are just going to get stuck as permanent redlink nests. Accordingly, unlink the names of all people in the technical categories who do not already have articles to link to — if an editor gets around to writing an article about one of these people in the future, then that person's name can be relinked when that happens, but there's not much value in leaving them redlinked in the meantime. This does not apply to the more prominent categories (actors, directors, screenwriters, musicians, etc.) — in those categories, leave redlinks in place as redlinks.
- Make-up/Visual effects: Due to the relatively limited budgets available for Canadian film production, relatively few films have been made in which any special or award-worthy accomplishment in these categories was warranted at all — and accordingly, these have historically been presented as "special occasion" awards rather than regular yearly ones. In the vast majority of years you will simply be removing these categories from the template; however, for courtesy's sake they're there if you need them.
Award-by-category lists[edit]
All of the award-by-category lists should be upgraded to use this table for formatting. The "year in film" link should be to the eligibility year, while the actual date on which the ceremony was held should replace the word "date" in this template. The content columns (given here as "original screenplay" and "writer(s)") should be adjusted to reflect each category.
| Original screenplay | Writer(s) |
|---|---|
If an award was not presented at all in a given year, it is important that the category list explicitly denotes this, so that it does not appear incomplete, rather than just skipping the year altogether — so copy the following template in for that year instead of the above, making the same adjustments for "year in film" and the number and date of the relevant ceremony:
| No award presented |
|---|
In addition, each list needs to be verified for the following:
- While some of the high-profile categories are already complete and thorough, most of the lower-profile technical ones are missing one or more years. For any year in which the winner/nominee information is missing, go to the appropriate award-by-year list and copy that category over if the information is present; get the information from IMDb if that year has not been upgraded yet.
- Every blue link on the page needs to be verified to ensure that it is actually linking to the correct article. Note that on the pages that I've already cleaned up, I've found several cases where linking was inconsistent — in one situation, for example, some links were pointing to the correct film while other links intended for the same film were pointing to the original play that the film was based on instead of to the film. Accordingly, do not skip verifying a title you think you've already seen earlier in the same list; take a moment to directly ensure that every link intended for that film is actually linking to the same place.
Note that at the present time, Wikipedia is not maintaining separate award-by-category lists for the Genie Award and Canadian Screen Award eras. Splitting them up may become justifiable in the future as the number of Canadian Screen Awards increases — but with only two CSA ceremonies having been held to date, there is not yet any encyclopedic value in keeping a separate set of CSA lists just because the name of the award has changed. For the time being, the Genies and the CSAs are kept together in a single list, which is titled in the format "Academy of Canadian Cinema and Television Award for..." — articles have kept the old "Genie Award for..." title only if the category was discontinued within the Genie era.