The Quest for the Historical Mukherjesus wrote:I will take a more positive stance than Matt J and say that I think this apology is a step forward. I think you (Brad) are doing your best with a bad situation, and I salute you for it. It does bother me that Dave won't come on here himself and apologize, but I understand why you wouldn't want him to post any more.
Eric, thank you for your kind words, and again for your help with IHO. I could ask Dave if he wanted make an apology post; we debated whether this thread should be started by him or me, and I held it made more sense to be started by me. That said, I wouldn't view one last apology post as a bad thing.
The Quest for the Historical Mukherjesus wrote:The way I see it, NHBB exists and it's not going anywhere; we have to learn how to live together. My primary concern is, and has been, the experience for the students and the quality of the questions.
I couldn't say it better myself -- though I suppose that I'm in the business of "saying things well myself" now and that may not be something to admit. :) So, your suggestions:
-$5 per quality tossup, with no money for spam-questions to dis-incentivize bad volume writing.
->3-4$/question for editing, either a side event or a sub-distribution of a main event. The kind of time Bruce Lou, for example, put into editing his ancient history set was not well-rewarded, and should be. For a college housewrite, that kind of work would earn around 300-400, if not more.
-Solid, achievable deadlines for every single event. All writing for every set should be done two weeks in advance. All editing for every event should be done one week in advance. There should be no writing or editing during actual events.
-Writing enough questions so that absurd formats like three teams playing against each other at once are no longer necessary.
-No more surprises. Every single question played at every single NHBB event must go through you, and only you. The requirements must be 100% clear from the beginning.
-No more question recycling.
I like this list, and encourage others to add to it in discussion, here or via e-mails/PMs to me. In response...
*Financials for writing and editing are getting hammered out this week; David's spoken positively about increasing writer pay, and I'm looking forward to making the 2016-17 Call for Writers post with specifics in a couple of days.
*I reject bad submitted questions, whether they're "volume written" or not, with as much feedback as time permits; in some cases I can go in-depth explaining the problem, and in no case does a question get rejected with no explanation whatsoever.
*The low number of writers (1) who expressed interest in editing for NHBB 2015-16's regular season work made the question of editing pay this past year nearly moot; I hope this won't be the case in the future. I'll take the blame for the awkward financial arrangements used for editing this year's IHO side events, with some explanation in the digression below.
IHO-related digression begins...
My initial plan was one that prioritized early quality writing, with the writing documents only shared with a small number of writers who had worked well for me in the past. Editors were signed on as writers-first from that small group; they were encouraged to write their own material and to reject poor submissions early, so as to give time for re-writes. The documents went out on May 2nd with an initial deadline of June 19th, such that any questions written before that date would be paid an additional dollar bonus over the normal rate for those writers' questions.
Writers did not, generally, follow through on making the June 19th goal; by the following weekend, when I playtested the finished products, only one side event had been fully completed, and I had solid chunks of four others ready to read.
I don't want to specifically name editors or writers for not making that deadline, but Bruce previously mentioned his Ancient History set, so I'll discuss his case. Bruce worked incredibly hard on that set; I won't disparage his work. But as of the June 19th deadline, he'd written a total of 10 questions, edited four others, and rejected none. The initial instructions given to editors -- "if you want money, write; if a question is bad, reject it, you've got plenty of time to get re-writes going" -- were not followed by Bruce. The June 19th deadline left multiple weeks to finish the 128-tossup side event; it's a lot of work, but by no means impossible, as evidenced by Bruce's completion of the job in those ensuing weeks. But even after the deadline, rejecting poor questions was still an available option; I made no "you're falling behind, better start accepting garbage" demands of Bruce. Indeed, I continued encouraging him in the same way in how to approach the job. It was his decision to not follow my instructions that made his editing experience aggravating; he could have rejected any poor submissions, writing his own work to replace them and collecting the writer money that he laments missing out on. Was my set of instructions at fault here? Yes -- providing incentives to encourage early question writing and discourage heavy editing did not work, and future NHBB work will benefit from the experience I've had here. But I also feel that Bruce's failure to follow directions contributed to the problem; had he promptly rejected poor questions, he could have received improvements from the writer or, failing that, written his own questions to replace them. I cannot answer why he did not do that.
Digression complete.
*The deadlines you suggest are highly agreeable; we had similar deadlines internally this year. My biggest regret about my first year of NHBB writing was missing the NHBB Nationals deadline, and my biggest takeaway from my first year is how much writing for Nats 2017 I'll be doing in first semester. David and I are talking about how we are going to make those deadlines more reasonable, and how to meet them. Victor and others have publicly described an "unjustifiable amount of work [David] dishes out;" writers have privately talked to me about this as well. I know that this is the number one challenge facing me this year; if I can't guarantee that my writers will have reasonable workloads, I'm doomed. No way around that. And, although I know many here will disagree, David is appreciative of that fact in our current talks.
*The question recycling issue isn't something that will affect any quizbowl operations that I oversee, ever, period. I'm thinking of ways to revamp the Table Combined competition for 2018 so as to not require quizbowl questions, thus making it easier for non-quizbowl writers to contribute to that effort. IHO features a number of historical-but-not-quizbowl competitions; I'd argue that Table Combined would work well as one of those.
Finally,
-The hiring of as many well-known history writers in quizbowl as possible. This will be difficult now, but NHBB gaining cred by putting out well-researched, well-edited, and well-received events will make this more feasible in the future.
*This is a crucial point. Experienced writers interested in learning more about writing for NHBB should PM me or e-mail me at
[email protected]. A number of the important details will be settled in the coming days, and I'll post to that effect when they're ready, so feel free to wait, if you like. Training new writers, as was my goal in the beginning of last year, has to take a backseat to making sure we can successfully produce this year's set; looking too far in the future has its detriments.
You mentioned the discussions between NAQT and the community in 2008; a hallmark of those discussions was a stringent commitment to question quality that was previously absent from SCT and ICT. I think the quizbowl community would ask the same of you here.
That's one of the reasons I'm optimistic about NHBB; given a sufficient combination of time and assistance, I can put together a good set of questions. I look forward to this year's work, and to a reflection on this in about 11 months.