Just on the crowd-sourcing, we could easily do this for the fan-fair idea. Like if I set up a Google spreadsheet with the outline of data and share it with anyone who is interested in helping (maybe you, vaysh, and eidheann, and possibly others) then anyone who has info on a fic can add it. And if anyone disagreed for any reason on the classification of a fic as top/bottom, they could make a note of it. The data would be public so people would know if they felt they could trust it.

And the nice thing about limiting it to a given fest or fests is that the date issue will not be a problem. Fics for fests are required to be original, so the fest date will be the earliest publication date and everything is simple.