Best Web Site Hugo

The Best Web Site Hugo category was a one-time Committee Special Category awarded by two different Worldcons, ConJosé and Interaction.

The category was created from a general feeling that web sites were increasingly important to fandom and SF and should be recognized with a Hugo. The category seems to have failed for two reasons, the 800-pound gorilla problem and the body of work problem, and the category was judged to be unworkable.

The 800-pound gorilla problem is what caused the Best Semiprozine category to be split out of the Best Fanzine category: A highly creative, highly meritorious website created and maintained by fans as a hobby will not get the readership and thus can not hope to compete with a merely good commercial website. Disparity in resources overwhelms differences in quality. This could be solved by creating multiple "weight" categories, but that is going too far, for now, anyway.

The body of work problem is that Hugos are supposed to be for work done in the previous calendar year, but for something on-going, it is essentially impossible for an average voter to distinguish what was done in the year in question from the whole body of work. Traditional magazines and fanzines appear in discrete issues with new content, so knowing what, say Amazing did in 1954 is straightforward, but even in these categories we have a problem with voters voting based on body of work rather than just the calendar year in question. Websites make this much harder since they normally change continuously.

Doubtless the WSFS Business Meeting will eventually create a Hugo category for web sites, but probably not until these problems are mitigated.

Click on the year for detailed results.

Year	Winner
2002	Locus Online (www.locusmag.com) by Mark R. Kelly
2005	Sci Fiction by Ellen Datlow

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Hugos

2002—2005

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