Thankfully, CO 2023 did assemble a team. With fifteen editors, two logistics persons, and about a dozen freelance writers, it had the largest production team of any CO to date. It's not alone in that trend -- every ACF event this year has 10+ people on the editing team alone. It's not unusual for some editors to do onlyone sub-subcategory (e.g. "earth science" or "opera"). Add dedicated proofreaders, playtesters, freelancers, advisors, etc. and sometimes thecredits roll of a set reaches 30+ people. (You do still see some feats by one writer (e.g. DMA) or a very small handful, but they're getting rarer.)I wrote:Stray observation: It seems like, in recent years, the number of editors per tournament has sharply increased (10+ is now normal) and the typical number of (sub)categories edited per editor has decreased proportionally. Does the fact that most subject editor jobs are smaller increase anxiety about the prospect of head editing? Does this make it harder or easier to assemble writing teams? Do people tend to feel they've hit their limit for the ~year editing 1/1 or 2/2 on one set, or more able to do several small editing jobs?
I'd like to start some broader discussion of the pluses and minuses of this change. Some things that appear to me as tradeoffs/axes include:
- Manageable per-person workloads vs. coordination problems. It feels much more reasonable to ask a person to edit 1/1 or 2/2 than it is to ask the same person to edit 6/6 or 7/7, and that's because it is. That said, more people causes more tracking problems for those in charge. While raising the size of the production team reduces the impact of one person flaking, it also may make such flaking more likely due to diffusion of responsibility; it may feel "less bad" to flake on a task that didn't feel very large to begin with.
- More editing opportunities for more people vs. less of a "resume to show for it" from each opportunity. It's easier now than it used to be to apply to do some work on a set in a category without having social ties to the existing in-crowd. I do worry about it being less easy to demonstrate a body of good work over time if editing jobs are smaller and more people have them. (Relatedly, I do sometimes wonder about question sets presented as written "by" a high school team or collection of novice writers, with high-caliber upperclass collegiate and open-level "editors" brought in. It seems highly likely that almost all the newcomers' output is discarded or near-totally rewritten. At that point, how honest is it for one of those newcomers to present themselves as qualified to take on more responsibility in the future?)
- Improvement of (hyper-)specialized editing vs. decline in generalist oversight. Some categories, most notoriously science and auditory fine arts, are often prone to subtle factual errors that generalists are less likely to detect, and the standards for accuracy are (rightly, for a game about facts) higher than they once were. Specialized subject editors can take the time they need, and have the knowledge base needed, to weed those out. I do fear that if most editing jobs are expected to be small in size and specialized in subject matter, it will end up making the idea of head-editing or overseeing an entire set look too daunting for most experienced subject editors to want to take up. This seems to be occurring in tandem with a decline in subject-spanning generalist players in the current game (most of the ones that remain are, well... from before the current game).
- Non-editing tasks getting the attention they need vs. non-editing tasks interfering with editing. It's good when big editors can be freed from also handling mirror logistics, proofreading, document styling, and the like, because other capable people are handling them. That said, I do worry about nice-to-have tasks, such adding pronunciation guides, scrunching the timeline for editing even further, which to some extent puts the cart before the horse.
From my experience, my hunch has long been that about 10 people can realistically contribute a "significant chunk" to an independent question set before coordination problems set in, and/or quality starts to dip, and/or someone in the top 10 contributors starts doing most of the work the 11th person was supposed to do anyway. I have an additional hunch that the ideal distribution of work on an n-person production team is not an even division among the n people; typically, the top few contributors will do a lot more than the next few, and so on, and that's not an accident.
A potential happy medium I've seen some people discuss is a model in which a few relatively co-equal "core editors" each have a pretty big chunk of the set (say, 3 to 5 of them splitting up ~50-75% of the set), with additional specialized subject editors brought in to fill gaps in their competencies where needed. Does there really need to be exactly one "head editor" all the time? (And is there really one at all if the nominal head editor is only doing 2/2 as other subject editors act autonomously?) In A World where few to no players can purport to supervise almost all the categories, it might make more sense to have a small "brain trust" at the top anyways.
Thoughts?