Advice For Someone Who Wants To Edit History Questions

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Æthelred the Unready Steady Cook
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Advice For Someone Who Wants To Edit History Questions

Post by Æthelred the Unready Steady Cook »

I'm sure I'm not alone in having seen a lot of things on the forum recently about trying to get more people involved in editing quizbowl tournaments and it struck me that there isn't that much information on the forum afaik about how someone should go about editing a particular part of a tournament. One of the big things in my opinion that you see people getting wrong is that there is more to editing a good slate of questions that just creating a slate of good questions. In this vein, are there particular pieces of advice that people would like to leave on record or in one place for someone setting out to edit the history for a given tournament? I have picked this area slightly capriciously, but I think it would be good if people can be as specific as possible about how they think about balancing things so looking at a particular part of the distro seems justified. I'm sure most people have learnt while working on a tournament with an experienced editor but I'm sure there are lots of things that y'all think about which it would be great for the more unexperienced editors of us to use as a reference.
Daoud Jackson
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Re: Advice For Someone Who Wants To Edit History Questions

Post by Skepticism and Animal Feed »

So you're lucky that history, in general, is not a topic that quizbowl players like to complain about on the internet. Certainly not the way people complain about science and music.

When people do complain, it's often one of the following things (I'll focus on things you can fix):

Temporal distribution: Questions should be well distributed across the timeline. The 19th century is fascinating (I think so, at least, it's by far my favorite century) but don't write too many questions about it. Don't forget to mix in stuff that happened really long ago, stuff from less-sung periods like 500 - 1000 AD, etc.

Geographic distribution: Questions should be well distributed across countries and continents. Quizbowl officially divides history into "Europe", "America", and "World" but you need to strike a good balance across sub-components of those big things. Not too much of whatever your favorite Asian country is, don't forget less-asked things like Native Americans or pre-colonial Africa, etc.

Question type balance: By question type I mean things like military history, political history, social history, economic history, legal history, etc. Each of these categories has its fans and detractors. The format of quizbowl probably favors military and political history, which are out of fashion everywhere else. Consider creative ways to bring in social and economic history and your questions will end up pleasing a broader group of players.

Actual history vs things that happened in the past: Even though I was one of the most notable history players and writers of my quizbowl era, I didn't major in History in school and actually only took one actual history class in college. To me, history was just a bunch of stuff that happened in the past that I found fun to learn about and memorize: facts, events, names, etc. But to people who take history classes and aspire to become historians, history is actually an entire methodology, an academic discipline. To them there isn't just stuff that happened in the past, there's theories about how to do history and famous historians and famous sources. Sometimes these actual historians complain that history questions in quizbowl don't resemble their actual history classes. Consider thinking about ways to make some of your questions interesting and rewarding to them, without being unfair to the vast majority of players who are not history majors.

In my experience, you will know that you were successful if people don't make complaints of the type above. If you are successful, people will instead complain about question-specific things like "you put clue A in front of clue B, but actually clue B is more famous". Basically, the more specific the criticism of you is, the more it's about a specific tossup or a specific clue and the less it is about your overall approach, the better you can feel about yourself as a writer.

EDIT: oh, and never be afraid to ask for help or feedback. I had an entire rolodex of people I would ask about specific topics and who were willing to write or look over 1-2 questions in their field of expertise.
Bruce
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Re: Advice For Someone Who Wants To Edit History Questions

Post by Edmund »

I'm not the expert history editor you probably want to hear from, but fwiw: what Bruce says is exactly how I try to lay out the history distribution during the Briticisation process for a BSQC. The very first time I did a BSQC, I wound up setting so many tossups on 19th C British prime ministers that Kyle said by round 10 you could almost buzz with "Derby" or the like because he was the only one I hadn't done yet. I had thought by asking on a lot of people who were important in UK history but didn't routinely come up in US sets, I was doing a good thing - however, my approach was clearly too narrow. This was a bad idea and I tried to learn from it.

I'm not necessarily terribly good at it, but working in interesting social and economic history is something I try hard at, especially in those areas of the distribution where it is more challenging to find clean answer lines, such as for the mediaeval world.

Getting a true specialist to read things over is always, where possible, a great boon too. For the last two/three years Andrew Frazer has kindly read all the history edits I've made for BSQC and has made valuable criticisms when I go wrong.
Edmund Dickinson
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Re: Advice For Someone Who Wants To Edit History Questions

Post by vinteuil »

Edmund wrote:I had thought by asking on a lot of people who were important in UK history but didn't routinely come up in US sets, I was doing a good thing - however, my approach was clearly too narrow.
This is a pretty good experience for everyone to learn from, in every category.

For a huge number of subjects, the moment you get a reasonable amount of real knowledge, it suddenly becomes obvious how little "quizbowl knows," and it's tempting to throw everything you just learned at players all at once. The problem being that you just learned about a fairly narrow slice of knowledge, so you're going to skew things pretty badly by doing this. All I can say is (Matt Jackson said this here before): if you're editing/writing for a tournament and you're learning cool things that will make for exciting questions, you will almost certainly have the opportunity to do so again, especially if you save up your ideas/questions.
Jacob R., ex-Chicago
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