I'll expand on Andrew's expansion: the writing break-down of the 864 questions in the 2012 DI ICT set was as follows:Birdofredum Sawin wrote:Seth noted in another thread that "the distribution of questions per writer had a mode of 1 and median of 3 (or maybe 2)." To expand on this observation: The D1 ICT set contained a total of 864 questions. Of those, 310 were written by Seth, while 191 were written by me. (Note that these figures do not include questions that were nominally "by" other writers, but that Seth or I radically rewrote for inclusion in the set.) After that, the next most productive writer (NAQT member Peter Freeman) produced 41 questions. After that, as Seth indicated, the number of questions-produced-per-writer drops off drastically.
lingering questions from people who appear to have retired from writing: 34
questions from circuit people who have not historically kicked in bunches of ICT questions: 91
questions from NAQT people other than myself and Andrew: 238
questions by me and Andrew: 501
These categories are a bit nebulous and overlap somewhat, but shuffling things around a bit won't change the basic picture. I'll also note that I think approximately 20 of the "circuit people" questions were written by people who may well play DI ICT next year.
The corresponding numbers for 2012 DI SCT:
lingering questions from people who appear to have retired from writing: 53
questions from circuit people who have not historically kicked in bunches of ICT questions: 148
questions from NAQT people other than myself and Andrew: 404
questions by me and Andrew: 163 (Andrew had the largest contribution at 106; I came in third with 57, with R. edging past me at 58 questions)
Another way of viewing these numbers: the circuit contributed approximately 2 packets' worth of questions to the 2012 DI ICT (out of 18 packets), and approximately 3 packets' worth to the 2012 DI SCT (out of 16 packets). Compare that with ACF--even ACF Nationals 2011, which featured 10 editor packets, was more than 50% circuit-written (at least in name, I don't know how many questions in the submitted packets were replaced wholesale by editor-written questions), and ACF Regionals 2012 had no pure editor packets.
Obviously the extent to which the circuit as a whole can contribute to SCT or ICT is severely hampered by the fact that they are non-packet-submission events, but I have to think we can do better than this. I also think the set production models embodied by the last few SCTs/ICTs is not sustainable in the long run--I think SCT 2012 came closer to a reasonable production template than the others, but I think there needs to be even more circuit involvement than there was there. I've heard from a few people who won't be competing next year and want to chip in more. That will be a great help, and hopefully more such people will step up. I'd also like to see more contributions to the SCT set from players in clubs that are hosting SCT (so they'll wind up staffing rather than playing), and more contributions to the ICT from players who aren't going to attend ICT (because of not having a bid, or not having time/money/whatever). I'd also like to see a repeat of the set-up from SCT 2012, where an eligible player helped write and edit the set in exchange for an autobid; unfortunately, I think the timing of the arrangement and Andrew Hart's other commitments precluded him from writing lots of questions for the SCT set (and he absolutely did the right thing in prioritizing set editing over question writing), but hopefully we can get something similar set up for SCT 2013: bring in one or more eligible players who have time to handle the set editing, and ideally also get them kick in a bunch of questions to reduce the load on NAQT writers who are eligible to write for ICT 2013. Finally, players competing at DII ICT can write DI ICT questions for use that same year (and vice versa for DI ICT players writing DII questions), and it would be great to see more of this*.
* Note that this is not true for SCT; I apologize to anyone I misinformed on this point before I learned a couple months ago about the "no cross-division question writing for SCT" policy.
If anyone has questions or comments about this--especially, suggestions on how to get more contributions from circuit people to SCT and ICT set production--I'd be very interested to hear them.
Thanks
-Seth