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Recently at a tournament( an awesome tournament which I have no complaints about) a situation arose around a question that my "B" team answered, was prompted, and got correct. The opposite team lodged a protest against the prompt saying it should have not been prompted. My "B" team buzzed in near the end on tossup about ***** ***** . The entire team was composed of people who had been to 1 or 2 tournaments before and stuck to the rule of using last names only (they were in the consolation bracket). They said, "***** " then were prompted and said, " **** ***** ". The moderator gave it to them and they got some parts of the bonus. The other team lodged a protest and the TD was called in. The TD ruled that since****** typed into Wikipedia gave a different page than****** *****, the answer was wrong and my "B" team lost the game. Now I would just like to say, I don't want this specific tournament identified. I can easily see the reasons for the TD's decision. This is not a thread to get the decision reversed, I just want to see what other people might have done in the same situation.
(The answer was a name but is not cleared yet).

Mods: please delete the uncleared answer in Todd's post.

Is that better?

The one thing that all tournaments need more of in their tossups especially is what to prompt on. I am a pretty experienced moderator and i pride myself on usually knowing exactly what to do in every situation... but i don't know when i'm supposed to prompt or what i'm supposed to accept sometimes, even occasionally on topics i consider myself an expert on. Question writers need to make it explicitly clear what should be promptable and what should not be. If that means doing through tossups and adding something to every single answer line that could possibly have an alternate answer, then do that. This really is very important for the high school level since you're going to have kids with very cursory knowledge of topics trying to answer them sometimes and just not knowing what the "most correct" answer is to say.

If I am reading this right, you are saying that your B team gave someone's last name, we're prompted for the first name, and did both of those things correctly. If that's the case, I really don't understand how the other team had grounds to lodge a protest, let alone win a protest.

Edit: point taken, info deleted.

salmon of wisdom wrote:Will since the answer isn't cleared this might be hard to explain. It was [x], and my "B" gave [y] and then when prompted gave [z].

Mods, I'm no expert on the forum rules, but it seems to me that this is still inappropriately specific information.

The following was almost certainly not the answer under contention here, but I always have to remember to type "Darius_Milhaud" if I want to look that guy up on Wikipedia, because if I just type "Milhaud" the page it takes me to is that of a French town called Milhaud. Thus, since "Milhaud" typed into Wikipedia gives a different page than "Darius Milhaud", the tournament director would say that the last name of Darius Milhaud should not be accepted or prompted (if they were at all logically consistent about this absurd Wikipedia criterion). Thus, the reductio ad absurdum is complete.

Well, unless the answer was something like John Quincy Adams, where a player has to make it extremely clear (I think there's even a thing about this in the NAQT and/or ACF rules) that they don't mean the other President John Adams (whose wiki page you get if you just type in "John Adams"). (But if the question was on John Adams the composer, it would be ridiculous to make them disambiguate between "FTP name this composer of Nixon in China" and either of those two other guys!)

I think why they looked it up on Wikipedia is because the answer that was given before the prompt was the same type of person as the actual answer. I assume they looked it up because the team protesting claimed it was a person but they didn't know. Once they found it on Wikipedia they saw it was a different person and ruled it as a wrong answer.

Repulse class ship of the line wrote:Well, unless the answer was something like John Quincy Adams, where a player has to make it extremely clear (I think there's even a thing about this in the NAQT and/or ACF rules) that they don't mean the other President John Adams (whose wiki page you get if you just type in "John Adams"). (But if the question was on John Adams the composer, it would be ridiculous to make them disambiguate between "FTP name this composer of Nixon in China" and either of those two other guys!)

Never write a question on this dude.

Sir Thopas wrote:

Repulse class ship of the line wrote:Well, unless the answer was something like John Quincy Adams, where a player has to make it extremely clear (I think there's even a thing about this in the NAQT and/or ACF rules) that they don't mean the other President John Adams (whose wiki page you get if you just type in "John Adams"). (But if the question was on John Adams the composer, it would be ridiculous to make them disambiguate between "FTP name this composer of Nixon in China" and either of those two other guys!)

Never write a question on this dude.

Don't knock JLA. For Lou Harrison and The Far Country of Sleep are excellent.

Sir Thopas wrote:

Repulse class ship of the line wrote:Well, unless the answer was something like John Quincy Adams, where a player has to make it extremely clear (I think there's even a thing about this in the NAQT and/or ACF rules) that they don't mean the other President John Adams (whose wiki page you get if you just type in "John Adams"). (But if the question was on John Adams the composer, it would be ridiculous to make them disambiguate between "FTP name this composer of Nixon in China" and either of those two other guys!)

Never write a question on this dude.

Looking at this, I think there may be enough people named John Adams to make a themed packet.