[felix]

I'm not retracting the previous proposal, but to simplify discussion lets try a systematic approach; as just throwing something out seems to not fair well.

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A. What type of entries/content the contest needs to be able to support:

• long stories
• short stories
• seemingly unending stories
• monologue
• dialog
• poetry
• haiku
• fanfiction

B. What type of writters:

• unexperienced (like myself)
• experienced (like say papermario)
• fanfiction writers
• enthusiasts
• people with strange/original styles

C. Additionally the following goals apply:

1. everyone should have a chance of winning, regardless of style or experience.
2. somehow the contest needs to help writers become better, aside from simply giving them a place to write.
3. for fun there should be a common point to some of the stories. Something the reader can easily identify.
4. there needs to be some kind of prize to the winner that influences the next contest.
5. there should be (preferably) only one contest, and only one winner

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Tackling one goal at a time, for the initial goal the following (independent) systems have been proposed so far:

1. limit everything to only 1500 words
2. limit everything with word count, but by category
3. split everything into major categories (no limit)
4. weighted voting (ie. a vote for a poetry entry counts more then a short story)

(a) doesn't meet goal 1 and conflicts with a lot entries in A and B (it can also be considered biased towards poetry)
(b) mitigates some problems of (a), seems to conflict with goal 5
(c) fails goal 5
(d) is probably undesirable, because it applies the solution of "unfairness" to goal 1

Anyone got other ideas?

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[edit] gonna post before I forget

e. word rating

Explanation

Set a baseline wordcount and a base rating, you then have a exponential reduction formula; basically the more words you use the lower your rating. However the formula works exponentially, so it gradually takes less and less away (it will never reach zero, and in theory should never go bellow the baseline). The idea is the more words you use the lower your rating, thus encouraging you to make use of every little word you have.

The current system doesn't really encourage say poetry from trying to use good wording, but in this one it doesn't matter what the source is, less words just equal higher rating. You are encourage to write say short stories that are 200 words or less and so forth; not just big ones as with the current fixed limit.

The rating follows the same principle as the proposal I gave above. It's a multiplier for your votes, so higher is better.

Goal 5 is accomplished because the rating that is obtained from this in combination with votes will be almost never equal to someone elses. The rating numbers would just never be equal, and calculation would be able to go in floating point precision where as even with distorted votes, you would still have a difference of things like 0.005 and so forth.