"Blind" Judging for Future Writing Contests?

Originally posted by antar
Can we have it both ways? Once we make a change here it sometimes gets cemented and there is no turning back. Will it take a lot of effort to make the anonymous submissions?

Sure we can have it both ways.

We can try it out for one contest initially, just to see how it goes.

-have them sent via U2U to one of the Forum mods for submission (worldwatcher, intrepid, jbird or myself)

-have the contest judged by a panel of members with writer status

-once winners are picked, edit the authors profile into the OP of all the submissions.

As far as lost points for posting is concerned, ALL successful submissions that are posted for the contest will be compensated for their entry.

We'll see if we like it or not and go from there. This would only go for Short Story contests, though. If we had another poetry contest, which I'm sure we will, we'll do that the way we always did because of the huge numbers of submissions we get.

I like the idea and think it should be tried out. The purpose of the plan could be twofold:

1. It will hinder intentional and unintentional bias within competition judgements.
   
2. It will eliminate this author from all future contests because this author is the only author to post submissions in Portable Document Format, and everyone will know exactly who is responsible straight away.
   

Both are worthwhile causes but for different reasons.






[edit on 20-2-2009 by Cadbury]