For many years, my friend Ophir has sent me links to Wikipedia articles he’s come across on his endlessly mysterious internet travels. About 5 years ago, I floated the idea of writing a tournament themed around them and wrote over 100 tossups for it, but never finished the project. Now that I’ve picked it back up, touched up the extant questions, simplified the conceit/constraints, and written a bunch more, I’d like to announce it officially.On Apr 19, 2021, Jordan Brownstein wrote: sorry any wiki pages shared in this chat are all rights reserved of the ophir links tournament
Each question of “Questions based on Wikipedia links Ophir sent me” must meet two constraints: 1) It must be inspired by a link to a Wikipedia page that was sent to me by Ophir (the link will be annotated below the question), and 2) the tossup must contain at least one clue drawn from the source page. While a few questions may explicitly cite Wikipedia or mention some quirk of the source page, almost all will not. In other words, this is not a tournament about the website of Wikipedia and, when read aloud, most questions will have no obvious traces of the gimmick that they were produced under. Here’s a sample tossup (see the third caveat below if it looks familiar):
Format and DifficultySample tossup wrote:Douglas Gordon filmed this action on the moors of Northern England for his 2012 film The End of Civilisation. The performer is instructed to do this action in the first of Annea Lockwood’s series of “Transplant” pieces, which was covered for the 18-minute closing track of a .clipping album. The explosion of a weather balloon triggered this action during the self-destruction of Jean Tinguely’s Homage to New York. On two occasions 35 years apart, (*) Yosuka Yamashita conducted a performance while this action was performed. The Royal Air Force performs this action in a tradition that apocryphally started when airmen did it to protest assigned dexterity exercises. For 10 points, name this destructive act performed on a large keyboard instrument.
ANSWER: burning a piano [or obvious equivalents mention both fire and a piano; prompt on burning with “what sort of object?”; prompt on answers like destroying a piano with “by doing what to it?”]
<Other>
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piano_burning)
The set will consist of 10 packets of 22 power-marked tossups each, with 1 tiebreaker per packet. Tossups will be hard-capped at 7 lines in 10-point Times New Roman before power-marking, though many will be a bit shorter, and some will be as short as 5.5 lines.
Difficulty will be roughly in the “hard side event” range, though the average answer difficulty will be tamer and questions will cut to the chase more quickly than what you’d expect at, say, TELEOLOGY (due both to the constrained length and some of the caveats mentioned below).
Distribution
The set uses a fractional category system to account for the fact that many questions mix clues from multiple disciplines. Each packet of 22 questions will be roughly distributed as following:
3.5 Literature
6.5 History
1.0 Science
1.5 Visual Art
1.0 Auditory Art
0.5 Audiovisual Art
1.5 Religion
0.5 Mythology
1.0 Philosophy
2.0 Social Science
3.0 Other Academic / Modern World / Geography / Pop Culture
Caveats
- While Ophir’s links and my tossup-ifications do reflect our interests, this won’t all be – to use the popular backformation for sets or packets on the author’s pet topics – “Jordangories” or “Ophirgories.” Having a close familiarity with us won’t be an advantage. Likewise, expect some inexpert questions on topics that I am not an expert on.
- Though most will, not all the clues will meet the notability threshold I’d normally aim for, because the content of some of the source pages just isn’t all that “notable.” Hopefully the smidgen of obscure stuff will be amusing in a Depths of Wikipedia sort of way.
- Since about half the set was drafted almost four years ago, some clues and topics have been “scooped” since then; for example, most of the clues in the sample tossup above appeared in the Scattergories 4 tossup with the same answerline. While I’ve made some cuts and touch-ups, some “repeats” may remain.
Availability
The set will be finished by the end of May (and quite possibly sooner) and will be available for mirrors the rest of the year. The set is a good fit for a post-open or “side event weekend” slot; alternatively, if events are needed for Chicago Open Sunday, it could make its debut then and open up for further mirrors after that. Feel free to reach out via DM or post here if you have any preferences or would like to arrange a mirror.
