Why Nominations? Did They Work?

[Hollinger.]

I like it as a bit of a safeguard against the poll getting shared in the WWECWTNA Super Mega Storytelling With Boobs Federation Fans facebook group and getting an influx of 1000 votes for Bray Wyatt as one of the 20 greatest wrestlers of all time. Is there a chance of that happening? Probably very little, but a less extreme version of that kind of happened with twitter. 

[Kadaveri]

17 hours ago, SirSam said:

My thought on nominations is that it is a good thing to have for the reasons mentioned above however it can take months for applications to join this forum to be approved and be able to make nominations.

For me, I found out about this project in March but didn't have my membership approved until a week or so ago, when I somehow found the Discord, mentioned it in there, got a reply, then DM'd someone who ticked a box in the background.

That is quite a while for it to sit in lieu and is prohibitive for new voices to enter and make nominations.

In summary while nominations are good there needs to be a more consistent and lower barrier to entry into the forum so nominations can be made as there are some deserving wrestlers that didn't get nominated.

I just want to reply to this point specifically. I'm very frustrated at how neglected this forum has become lately, but I'm not an admin so there's not a whole lot I can do about it. It really shouldn't be so onerous to just sign up to an internet forum and start posting. I don't know the admins personally but it just feels like they've moved on from this place, and that's fair enough, but if the site isn't going to just slowly die there should be some kind of handover.

This issue however is totally separate to the nomination process question, so I'll talk about that in my next post.

[oldcasper]

Lurking here for a while, I have got a lot of value out of the nomination threads.  I think they are an effective way of trying to make the list of nominees a little more manageable (even though we are over 1,000).  The best thing about a nomination process is it forces someone to think about who they are voting for and why.  A short paragraph and three matches isn't that much effort to put in if you really want to vote for someone.  I wouldn't be opposed to having a 'second' process, similar to GME but that would be dependent on enough people about to take part and second.  I think there is a clue in the title - it's 'Greatest Wrestler Ever' so for me, every nomination has to be a very strong candidate to appear on the nominee's list.  If folk are just nominating, 'wresters I quite like, or are interested in' that kind of broadens the scope of this.

 

As others have shared, the absence of those not nominated will hardly influence the final result, and there are few that I think are huge omissions (I did really like jetlag's run through of A-B though in the other thread).  I think many of us saw the odd ballot here and there were 70% of the 100 were not nominated - that doesn't reflect a failure of the process, it reflects either someone relatively early in their wrestling journey picking out the WWE wrestlers they know, the ultra niche of the niche (some dude picking all their friends from an indie type deal) or a troll.

 

Hindsight is a powerful thing, and it feels like a large proportion of voters got on late with this (in terms of weeks before the deadline).  Some of those people have submitted some great ballots but been unaware of the process of nominating.  The promotion of GWE in online spaces has been brilliant but the nomination question is more of an unintended consequence of the promotion and late interest, rather than a failure of the process perhaps.  (None of this is a dig at Grimmas or anyone else involved - the work has been superb and I think everyone can see how much effort has gone in to make this fun and interesting).

[Kadaveri]

So on the nominations process: I think part of the disagreement over this stems from a difference in opinion over what the main purpose of GWE should be, and how important the final list actually is. The two extreme ends of the spectrum are:

1. The purpose of GWE is to poll harcore wrestling fans on who they think the greatest wrestlers ever are. It's basically a survey done every 10 years. So the emphasis should be attaining as large and broad a base of voters as possible voting for whoever they want, so long as they are serious wrestling fans in order to create a list which represents the views of wrestling fandom at that moment.

2. The purpose of GWE is to facilitate a process where serious fans can explore, discuss and debate the merits of pro-wrestlers, and in the process improve our collective understanding of this medium. The final list isn't really that important. It's really about the engagement and elevated discourse that it generates, so having barriers to participation is a positive because it imposes a minimum level of engagement on everyone.

I'm not saying those two philosophies necessarily represent anyone's opinion, more that we all fit somewhere in the spectrum in between. Wherever you decide to balance things, there are going to be upsides and downsides to it.

Now for me, I do think there should be a nominations process. That's not to say that I think we should keep things the same next time, there were certainly some flaws that we should talk about now so whoever's running the 2036 itteration (inshallah!) can hopefully make wiser decisions (though who knows what the internet will look like by then. I think the biggest mistakes this time round were more down to the lack of clear communication of how to participate, what the rules are etc... It wasn't really until the last few months that we actually got a team (or 'committee' as it was later called) to actually organise things, till then everything was just being done by Grimmas by himself, which in practice resulted in a lot of stuff just not being done because he's just one guy with a job and family and it was never feasible that he'd effectively run a project like this by himself. Not meant as a personal criticism of anyone, just an analysis of what happened imo. I think the next generation should strongly consider having a committee sorted out a year in advance, make decisions on how it's going to be run and delegate tasks to each other and make sure they don't end up in a situation where everything just grinds to a halt if one person becomes inactive.

There is also the problem of the rules we made being inconsistently enforced, but to me that's far more a problem stemming from organisational failures than the system itself. The rules really were not complex or difficult to enforce. We just did a sloppy job. The Greatest Match Ever Project has similar rules and has managed fine.

The positives of having a nominations process are:

1. It's an effective way of facilitating people writing about the wrestlers. Sure, it didn't happen in every thread, but we still have hundreds of wrestlers on this forum with threads with multiple pages of posts. They're a great resource for anyone wanting to find out more about a wrestler's GWE case and wants something a bit more thoughtful than just looking at their CageMatch entry. If someone looking at the lists in 2030 or something is perplexed as to why a wrestler was voted the 83rd greatest ever, they have a very easy place to go read to find out why. I just don't think that resource would have been produced if we didn't enforce nominations.

2. Kinda related to point 1, it also just creates a list of wrestlers for people to check out. I've heard so many people talk about going through the List of Nominees for people to watch, see if they've forgotten anyone etc... 

3. It also changes the ethos of the process into something that encourages long-term participation from individual fans beyond just turning up at the end of the 10 years and submitting a ballot. When you write up a nomination, or comment on someone else's nomination, you're honing your skills in thinking about and writing about wrestling. This might sound a bit pretentious but I think that also means you're becoming a better wrestling fan. I think helping to facilitate people doing this is a much more virtuous goal than making it as easy as possible for everyone to submit a ballot voting for whoever they want.

4. It puts up a modest barrier of entry. People who insist on voting for wrestlers who have not been nominated and wanting it counted just won't be able to participate. I think that's puerile behaviour. Either you haven't bothered to engage with the project in a meaningful way, or you've found out about it at the last minute yet are demanding that people who've been working on something for years should change how it works just because you, a Johnny Come Lately, think you're so important. I'd rather such people just go away than try and cater to them.

I think those 4 points outweigh the negatives that we have at the moment, basically that some votes ended up not being counted. But even that negative can be spun into an opportunity by telling people hey, here's a list of wrestlers who got votes but haven't been nominated. If you think they should be nominated, well, why don't you do it yourself! Then they will be nominated for next time. And if nobody cares enough to write a nomination for them then, well, to me that just sounds like their votes not being counted is an extremely minor detail indeed.