Sorting awards categories: follow awards, or be consistent?

I've been working on the National Book Award finalists, adding info so that they sort out by category. Some years have only three or four categories, in the same order each year. Other years, however, have five or seven (or more) categories, with the persisting categories (such as fiction and poetry) changing position within the list.

For many years, the categories look like this:

1 Fiction
2 Nonfiction
3 Poetry

Then in other years, they look like this (1970):

1 Arts and letters
2 Children's books
3 Fiction
4 Poetry
5 History and biography
6 Philosophy and religion
7 Translation

Should I follow the changes that the awards make? Or should I try to be internally consistent, with (say) Fiction always being #1 and Poetry always being #3? Has this come up before? What have other folks been doing? I found no relevant topics in this group, alas.

LT list, partially organized: https://www.librarything.com/bookaward/National+Book+Award+finalist
NBA site, organized by year: https://www.nationalbook.org/national-book-awards/years/

Many, like the (US) National Book Award, (UK) Royal Society Prize for Science Books and (Wales) Tir na n-Og Award, simply list the category and year, e.g. (General, 2004), and let LT sort the titles into alphabetical order within the year. Works fine.

https://www.librarything.com/bookaward/National+Book+Award
https://www.librarything.com/bookaward/Royal+Society+Prize+for+Science+Books
https://www.librarything.com/bookaward/Tir+na+n-Og+Award

>2 Cynfelyn: It works fine for the National Book Award too, as you point out.

The number of finalists for a given category can run from zero titles up to (maybe) ten? With up to seven categories in a year, alpha by title by year seems a lot less useful.

>3 karenb: honestly, i'm inclined to suggest just picking alpha-order for the categories and not worrying overly much about how the National Book Award presents them on the website, especially since there are so many!

When i was scrolling through the list to get an idea of the complexity of the problem, each section was long enough that trying to find any one category within the year-group was definitely not a problem, and even the smaller years at the top (except for 1950) would fill an entire screen before the next year's list began. Put the categories in alphabetical order, and there will be internal consistency and no complications about what to do with the variable categories from year to year.

As someone that specialises in CK awards I think that its best to leave them as they are. I have done over 30 000 and I am not going to go back and change the sort criteria

The other award info I've been looking to organize is that of the Lamba Literary Award Nominees. While the National Book Award finalists run from twenty to fifty works per year, the Lammy nominees can run up to about 150 works/year.

>4 keristars: Alpha by category is a good idea and easy to implement consistently.

>5 bergs47: I'm not suggesting that anyone else implement any changes to work they've already done. I'm wondering about best practices for these two sets of awards info, which are (AFAICT) go to the extremes. Also, it's work that I'm willing to do myself, building on what several other people started.

Another thing: The Lammys apparently started using "finalist" in 2010. On LT, the award CK uses "nominee" for every year since 1988.

As an experiment, I edited all the awards from 2018 to use "finalist". So I'm also thinking about whether to match the award organization's own wording there, too.