where tournaments come from

[grapesmoker]

The CO discussion has led me to the following conclusion: a lot of people, even people who should know better, seem to have very little clue about where tournaments come from and how they are put together. For example, the CO thread features a lot of people saying things like "tossup X was too hard." Well, this may be true, but what is to be done about it? If you read carefully (what? you don't hold on to every word I type and treasure it as infinite wisdom? How dare you?!) you will have noticed that I actually posted a brief outline of the method that I used in editing CO. I explicitly said that I was working based on a triage system that gave first preference to the selected answer, second preference to questions on related topics, and had as the final stage outright replacement by a completely different question. What this means (at least for something like CO) is that if you submit a well-formed tossup on the War of the Breton succession or interactive proofs, it will get used. In fact, I will be more bold and assert that every editor who has ever edited operates under some sort of triage system like this, because otherwise editing would be impossible.

I'd like to point out, again, that I wrote somewhere between 1/4 and 1/3 of this entire tournament; together with my co-editors, I would estimate that close to half of this tournament was written from scratch. I don't do this to say "boo hoo poor me look how hard I worked" because honestly I really enjoy editing hard tournaments and I liked putting in that time, even if it was incredibly stressful too. However, editing is hard. It takes a lot of time. Even for a grizzled dinosaur like myself, it's incredibly labor-intensive. If you care that your facts are correct and not Wikicopied, if you care about interesting and novel clues (an aside: one of my favorite clues in this tournament was the bit about how the October Manifesto resulted in a proliferation of pornography; I had to dig through several history books before locating that), if you care that clues are arranged in the right order in a readable fashion, then you are going to invest a great deal of effort in it. What that means is that you're going to have to make judgments about what is or is not worth spending time on. You focus much of your energies on questions that are seriously problematic rather than questions that might be aesthetically displeasing in some minor way. And when it comes time to do things like write replacements, you tend to optimize within your time constraints by writing on things for which you either have a good knowledge base or sufficient resources to write good questions on.

I'm not saying this so much in response to the CO discussion (which is why it's a new thread) but rather to explain to people that many discussions of tournaments in general seem to be fairly ignorant of these basic facts (and the CO discussion was really no different in this regard). In any editing effort, the editors will have to make some judgment calls based on constraints defined by time, effort, and resources. This is why things like "why was Tossup X in this tournament" are completely uninteresting questions and don't help anyone evaluate the quality of the tournament. Especially when packets come in late and there are any kinds of problems or overlaps, this results in a huge last-minute effort for the editors.

Tournament editing is hard work, and those people who do it do it because they enjoy it, for the most part. Editors have a responsibility, to be sure, to deliver high quality tournaments. That's a given, and tournaments that don't live up to that standard can and should be criticized. But there's a concomitant responsibility on the part of writers to write good questions on time, and also to understand, in the post-tournament critiques, that there's no way short of writing the whole tournament from scratch a year in advance, to sidestep this process of deciding where to focus one's energies. When tournament critiques amount to "everything in this tournament should have been different," (something I've seen in multiple post-tournament discussions) those critiques stop being useful to anyone who is trying to figure out how to edit an event.