Will's Questions (Euro, World, Economics) (DEES)

[naan/steak-holding toll]

Hey everyone! Thanks for playing DEES - I hope y’all enjoyed the set!

I was in charge of editing all of the world history and economics for this set, and I also took most of the responsibility for editing European history, in which effort I was given invaluable assistance by my co-editors Mike Cheyne, Victor Prieto, and Saul Hankin. I’m also grateful for the assistance of Mik Larsen, who pitched in several classics and medieval history questions, and Tejas Raje, who wrote a replacement British history question.

Having just come off writing Penn Bowl, I wanted to make sure I crafted a set that had solid middle and middle-late clues which a lot of less experienced teams could reasonably buzz on, since I think Penn Bowl and some other regular-difficulty sets these days have been lacking in these. Balancing these with lead-ins that provided adequate challenges to players could be a bit challenging, but I think I managed to do it reasonably well. While most of the other editors didn’t try to stick with Charlie’s intended six-line cap, I kept with it to stick with the spirit of the tournament and to see if I could do a good job with such a constraint – let me know how it worked out!

I was very happy to see a wealth of topics represented in the world history submissions, which made my job of ensuring that every time period and geographic area got a fair treatment fairly easy. The exception was Africa, which I didn’t receive that many quality submissions on – I ended up writing a tossup on Mugabe myself, and put a full 1/1 Africa in the editors’ packets to balance things out. I stuck to standard answers even more than in European history, but I made an effort to use clues that struck me as fresh and interesting, especially in the first few lines of questions where you have a bit more leeway.

I was a bit more liberal with choosing what to use for the European history, using some things that skewed a bit harder or off-the-beaten path but which I still thought were eminently answerable at regular difficulty (Queen Christina, Athenian trials, Phoenicians, William Rufus, La Rochelle) even by newer teams. I used replacement questions and editors’ questions to make sure every area of European and Commonwealth history was hit well (particularly Spain, which I believe only received a single submission in the entire tournament).

Finally, I pitched in during the final week to help with social science and religion. I edited all the economics questions and while the submitted topics asked a lot more about people than about concepts than I’d otherwise have liked to see, I think the questions turned out well enough.

I wrote the following questions from the ground up myself, mostly for the editors’ packets:

Syria
Timbuktu
Cultural Revolution
Robert Mugabe (Penn B and McGill)
Inequality
Eids
Egypt
Giscard/Chirac/Socialists
Malaysia/Tunku/Singapore
Nur ad-Din/Seljuks/Rum
Tamils/Sri Lanka/Pallavas
Aliyah/Zionism/Ezra

I would like to apologize for the screw-up that happened in the Penn packet, since the questions involved fell under my purview.

Thanks again for playing, and any and all feedback is appreciated.

[Cheynem]

Will's being pretty generous thanking me, as I really only edited one Euro bonus and shot in some feedback on a handful of others. I won't speak on his work, since I haven't studied it in any detail, but he worked extremely hard on this set at short notice and should really get praise for that.

[Victor Prieto]

Will's being pretty generous thanking me, as I really only edited one Euro bonus and shot in some feedback on a handful of others. I won't speak on his work, since I haven't studied it in any detail, but he worked extremely hard on this set at short notice and should really get praise for that.

Will is indeed being pretty humble here. The extent of my contribution was four history tossups, then one tossup from Saul, 1/1 from Tejas and 3/3 from Mik. Will did a great job of blazing through 3/3 history in 15 packets, plus writing 9 tossups and 6 bonus by himself in history alone. He put in a terrific amount of work on this set, and he deserves a lot of praise.

[Tejas]

I would like to apologize for the screw-up that happened in the Penn packet, since the questions involved fell under my purview.

This is my fault, made an error formatting the set. The Ems tossup was not meant to be in the set, so my apologies for that.

[Beast Mode]

Will's being pretty generous thanking me

Same. My so-called "assistance" as a "co-editor" was editing (under Will's auspices) the Polish history questions, the Peace of Westphalia tossup, and the Stalingrad bonus. I'll join in the chorus of people lauding Will's hard work.

I also wrote the following questions, if anyone has feedback:

Virginia B: Serbia tossup
Editors 1: Kossuth/Hungary/Nicholas I bonus
Editors 2: Elizabeth/Table of Ranks/Catherine the Great bonus, Garibaldi/Pius IX/Depretis bonus
Tiebreakers: Six-Day War tossup, Odoacer/Ravenna/Ostrogoths bonus, Finland/Kalmar Union/Ivan the Terrible bonus

EDIT: Forgot the Kossuth bonus.

[Gautam]

Most of the econ was fine. The TU on M Friedman was not very great - the part about maximizing shareholder value, which I think was in the second sentence, is really real-world famous.

[naan/steak-holding toll]

Yeah, I wasn't sure how to judge the real-world famousness of that clue but I put it fairly early and figured rewarding people who knew those things would be okay. I'm generally not a huge fan of tossups on economists and general and didn't want this particular question to degenerate into frequently difficult-to-identify texts out of papers or names of things that people don't read often.