2007 TRASH Regionals Discussion

[creed_of_hubris]

The sentence from the tossup isn't a direct quote cut & pasted from IMDB or wikipedia. Clearly the clue came from IMDB/Wikipedia originally, but that doesn't make it inappropriate. Nor is the failure to cite sources an issue -- if this were an academic paper, it would be a big problem, but not in a quizbowl tourney.

Obviously a greater degree of rephrasing would be better, to prevent people from buzzing based on locution (a.k.a. the straight-outta-Benet's syndrome), but I don't think "plagiarism" is an appropriate term.

[Abra Cadaver]

Ah, didn't realize the statement was just confined to the significance of older games. When I read it first it sounded like you had never played older systems and felt we just shouldn't include questions about them.

[The Good Dr. Bill]

Good tournament on the whole, and any criticisms I have come more out of personal bias than a lacking in the tournament, whose only real gaffe was the Jimmy Rollins thing. Nonetheless, some fine-tunings I would make, most of which have already been brought up:

1. Most importantly, less Trash Lit. The necessity of tossups should, I think, be based on the percentage of people who would feel slighted were their wheelhouse categories ignored, and does anyone really have a TRASH lit wheelhouse? (Genuine Q here, I'm curious if there are people that anxiously await those questions) Seems like so many any of these tossups are met with eye-rolls and go dead.

2. Less dead athlete questions. Rod Beck, Josh Hancock, Eddie Griffin, Bill Robinson (who no one on either team had ever even heard of in my room)--it's a bit much.

3. Less non-Big Four Sports TUs. This is very much a personal/team preference thing, but as someone who's more or less out of the question as soon as they hear about NASCAR, soccer, Olympic sports or the WNBA, it felt like those Q's were coming up a whole lot.

4. Dear God, please no more Uno tossups ever.

Like I said, though, petty squabbles. On the whole a very solid tournament. And if copying facts from Wikipedia is considered grounds for TRASH plagiarism, well, it's a very good thing my team's never hosted a tournament.

[The Good Dr. Bill]

oh, and I'm aware that TRASH writers are under pressures and deadlines and such that prevent them from doing it with every TU, but I wish there'd be a couple more creative and unexpected TUs like the great South Park Hippies one that ended the tournament. They're way more fun than playing through the millionth Elephant or Unassisted Triple Play Qs.

[theMoMA]

And if copying facts from Wikipedia is considered grounds for TRASH plagiarism, well, it's a very good thing my team's never hosted a tournament.

[answerguy]

Incidentally, does anyone have stats from the Canada, Southwest, or West Coast regionals yet?

[Bigfoot isn't the pr]

Oh, btw, I would like to personally thank whoever wrote the bonus about songs that reference Romeo and Juliet. It was great to see Singing in my Sleep by Semisonic to come up.

[AKKOLADE]

And if copying facts from Wikipedia is considered grounds for TRASH plagiarism, well, it's a very good thing my team's never hosted a tournament.

[cvdwightw]

On the West Coast, ASU B defeated ASU A in a 1-game final to win. Stats will be up as soon as the person delegated stats responsibility finds all the scoresheets in our box of schedules/packets/scoresheets/scratch paper, puts them into SQBS, and e-mails them to the person in charge of putting them on our website.

Um, yeah, copying from Wikipedia is bad, for multiple reasons. Everyone from Jerry Vinokurov to Charlie Steinhice has railed against this practice. Copying from Wikipedia is plagiarism in as narrow a sense as you want to define plagiarism. I don't know how "TRASH plagiarism" has different grounds like "copying from Wikipedia is okay, despite people cautioning against using it even as a reference, for TRASH, because they're somehow special". If you think copying straight out of a source is not plagiarism, then it probably is a good thing your team's never hosted a tournament.

[answerguy]

In case this is not understood, though I can't speak for everyone in TRASH with regards to anything that occurred before I joined, our policy is not "plagiarism from Wikipedia is OK."

I'd be lying if I said it wasn't an important source of question writing material for many of us.

As has been pointed out elsewhere, I don't like it when people get questions solely based on verbiage they recognize from the original source materials, unless it's a direct quote from the text and attributed as such.

[themanwho]

...and does anyone really have a TRASH lit wheelhouse? (Genuine Q here, I'm curious if there are people that anxiously await those questions)

I work at Barnes and Noble.

Gimme, gimme, gimme.

-M

Edited to add: Hey, my first post! -Myron M. Meyer, Sioux Falls, SD

[insaneindian]

I imagine the Eddie Griffin tossup got answered really quickly or went dead in most rooms. The first clue about his porn-watching escapades while driving was a bit easy.

I thought the music distribution was better than it has been at the two previous trash tournaments ive been to, but would it hurt to have an occasional rap tossup/bonus on somebody that came up after 1996 not named 50 cent? It seems like all the rap questions are about Old School rap or our good friend Curtis.

By the way, I know this can only be said in so many ways, but

In the 2002 season, Dawkins became the first player in NFL history to record a sack, an interception, a fumble recovery and a touchdown reception in the same game, against the Houston Texans.

That was basically the first clue in the question. But again, I think that steered clear of any wikiplagiarism.

Oh, and can somebody share the Jimmy Rollins question? I didn't hear that one.

[Skepticism and Animal Feed]

I did not write this one, but the clue in question was:

"The only female presence in the entire film is the voice of Adrienne Barbeau as a computer."

The line from the Wikipedia article (which has been intact since before this year) is:

"The only female presence in the film is the voice of the chess computer, voiced by Carpenter regular (and then-wife) Adrienne Barbeau."

Dude, how is that not plagiarism? It's quite obviously taken directly from Wikipedia with the sentence structure slightly altered. Weird locutions like "the only female presence" are unlikely to show up in normal writing, and this coincidence is way too close to ignore.

Wikipedia is probably a decent source for pop culture stuff, but let's not kid ourselves about situations like these: they're just copy/pastes with a couple of words changed.

But what if the writer determines that the way Wikipedia (or any other source) phrases it is the best of ways to phrase it?

If I were writing a paper and I came across this situation, there is an easy solution: use quotation marks and attribute the author. But you can't do that in a tossup. At least, nobody does it. So the result is that if you can't use that phraseology, we give Wikipedia (or any other source) a veto power over quizbowl.

Though actually, I just found an amazing leadin for an academic tossup and might footnote the source just to ensure it doesn't get edited out by somebody who finds it implausible. Maybe this is a wave of the future of some kind.

[swwFCqb]

Oh, and can somebody share the Jimmy Rollins question? I didn't hear that one.

It was the third part of a fairly easy baseball bonus. It basically stated that this man had joined the 20/20 club, but they gave his position as an outfielder, which threw a lot of people off, including my own team.

[shim]

One more thought. The opening line "They drive around in a blue Toyota Yaris" confused me into buzzing for Hiro and Ando from Heroes (but upon googling, I realize now that they drove a Nissan Versa in season 1).

Also, I got OKCupid on a really early buzz, but I don't think there was anyone else in the room that would have gotten it after the entire question. Also is "Crosley" a well known enough sports personality to be gotten? I only got it because I'm from Southwest Ohio.

[Coelacanth]

I'd never heard of Crosley the guy. But most people know (or should know) that the Reds played at Crosley field, and the question ended with "namesake ballpark" or somesuch.

I really liked the "blue Toyota Yaris" clue as it allowed me to get my second-earliest buzz of the tournament :)