Talk:List of Webby Award winners
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[edit] Notes on new article
I am creating this article in response to the recent deletion of the category Category:Webby Awards winners. The deletion was unfounded because it is a highly notable award that in many cases defines the careers of the winners, but following the nominator's suggestion I am re-doing it as a list rather than proposing a review of the deletion. Perhaps a list can be more useful and encyclopedic than the category because it can more fully capture the relationship between the website, website owner, and designers winning the award. Webbies are designated by the website that won the award. For purposes of review and study, I am providing external links to those sites that won the award, if they are still around and not a mere redirect. That isn't wholly satisfactory because in some cases the site that won has been completely redesigned, so what you see at the link is not the site that won the award. In other cases, particularly in the art and other esoteric categories, the website is preserved in its old state, either for historical reasons or because nobody has seen fit to maintain or redesign it. Perhaps an archive.org (the Wayback Machine) link would be more useful but that has its own problems - unclear copyright status (though we do allow such links currently), and also that Alexa (the owner of the archive site) did not archive all the images. Also, the archive does not deal very well with revisions to the server side of a website, and obviously cannot preserve servers that have been shut down. Nevertheless, I think these links are useful where available because when one reads that a particular site won a webby, it increases the understanding to actually link to the site that won, in addition to or rather than following a wikilink to the organization that won.
To try to head any complaints off at the pass, I think this is useful, encyclopedic content of the sort that Wikipedia is eminently qualified to support, and that cannot be done as well anywhere else. It is not an indiscriminate list - the criterion for inclusion is very clear: a site must win a webby. The awards are highly notable (search any major magazine or newspaper and you will find multiple articles highlighting the various winners, and covering the awards and award ceremony). The official webbies website from which this material is derive (mostly) does not keep current on what happened to the sites, and contains lots of dead links - plus, it is not wiki-linked to our store of articles where one can read about the companies and sites involved. So even though this page is mostly table form and navigational, it is well-suited to Wikipedia's structure.
For now I have just reproduced the 1997 list. The annual awards were given in 1996 but the Webby Awards official website There are a number of other questions or choices that I hope to resolve before populating the entire list. One is format: the list format is a little awkward. Perhaps a table, or some marked-up style, would be more useful. Another question is whether to list the website designers (which would take a lot more research), whether to list the "people's choice" winners in years they had them (those awards carry significant honor and are important, but far less so than the main award and it would complicate the format), and whether to list the nominees who did not win (as with the Academy Awards, merely being nominated is quite an honor that designers and site owners list as a credential, but it is obviously far less significant than actually winning, and listing them all would make this a very long list).
If anyone has any constructive changes and suggestions, please feel free. I obviously do not WP:OWN this article, and I'm not in the middle of updating it with future years. I would rather get some feedback first to see how it does.
