Why the Nanowrimo Regions don't work:
Nov. 30th, 2005 04:22 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kolMy main gripe with the Regions on the forums is right in the title of the project to begin with: National Novel Writing Month. I have no problem with people from other countries doing Nano, but it is vastly unfair to compare regions of the USA to an entire country. Comparing all Canada to Germany, for example, would be interesting and more in the spirit of a pleasent national rivalry.
But when you combine two countries, like Germany & Austria are, it creates unfair statistics for comparing to other countries. While there are fewer English Speaking people in those countries, there's no reason they can't write in their native languages. In fact, many of the authors in the various regions do.
I believe the rational beyond keeping these countries as a single region instead of breaking them up is because the there hasn't been the exposure to Nanowrimo in those countries and the fact that the website is mostly in English. So, the sample size for each country is much smaller than it is in the USA.
But it also leads to places like California being separated into tiny regions that penalize people for belonging to that region. The South Bay, for example, lost a great deal of writers when Santa Cruz and the mountains got their own region. This led the total sample size for the South Bay to decrease; frankly it's amazing that we have held on to the #10 spot.
This is why having a two-fold ranking system works better. For one, it would allow people like me who are interested in the statistics of Nanowrimo to get a better idea how how the project is progressing across the country as well as across the world. So here's what I think might work:
The first ranking would be how you do compared to every region in the world. This is exactly the system we have now, and I think it's great for trivia value. But to get a better analysis, I think we need a second ranking system.
The second ranking would be how you do compared to regions in your own country. This would allow people in the Germany & Austria region to divide their countries into specific regions, to compare how their City did against another City, and so on and so forth. We can pretty much do this with the search engine, but it is very faulty because if I look up "San Jose," I get results for other cities. I think this would be more helpful for people in other countries.
I think it might be fun if they could do lists of how each city did, based on zip codes, in the USA. I do the results for San Jose every year, but other places don't have that luxury. Granted this system will never be put into place, but I think it would be more helpful than having the South Bay compared to all of Germany & Austria.
But when you combine two countries, like Germany & Austria are, it creates unfair statistics for comparing to other countries. While there are fewer English Speaking people in those countries, there's no reason they can't write in their native languages. In fact, many of the authors in the various regions do.
I believe the rational beyond keeping these countries as a single region instead of breaking them up is because the there hasn't been the exposure to Nanowrimo in those countries and the fact that the website is mostly in English. So, the sample size for each country is much smaller than it is in the USA.
But it also leads to places like California being separated into tiny regions that penalize people for belonging to that region. The South Bay, for example, lost a great deal of writers when Santa Cruz and the mountains got their own region. This led the total sample size for the South Bay to decrease; frankly it's amazing that we have held on to the #10 spot.
This is why having a two-fold ranking system works better. For one, it would allow people like me who are interested in the statistics of Nanowrimo to get a better idea how how the project is progressing across the country as well as across the world. So here's what I think might work:
The first ranking would be how you do compared to every region in the world. This is exactly the system we have now, and I think it's great for trivia value. But to get a better analysis, I think we need a second ranking system.
The second ranking would be how you do compared to regions in your own country. This would allow people in the Germany & Austria region to divide their countries into specific regions, to compare how their City did against another City, and so on and so forth. We can pretty much do this with the search engine, but it is very faulty because if I look up "San Jose," I get results for other cities. I think this would be more helpful for people in other countries.
I think it might be fun if they could do lists of how each city did, based on zip codes, in the USA. I do the results for San Jose every year, but other places don't have that luxury. Granted this system will never be put into place, but I think it would be more helpful than having the South Bay compared to all of Germany & Austria.
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Date: 2005-12-01 01:51 pm (UTC)I'm assuming you guys have a South Bay area up north too, because I keep thinking the LA/San Diego/Malibu South Bay area. XD
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Date: 2005-12-04 09:05 am (UTC)