The Quizbowl Resource Center

Jonah, you're a crappy QBWiki admin. Let the people have some god damned jokes. If a dude with a crappy sense of humor is going to policing everyone's page like this then we should just declare the QBWiki the failure it is and start from there, because man does that site blow ever since Mike gave it up.

Fred's Law of QBWiki: if a page about a person is longer than the page on Andrew Yaphe, Matt Weiner, or R. Robert Hentzel, that page needs deleted and rebuilt from the ground up.

If someone else wants to host the QBWiki, (s)he should let me know and I'll be glad to facilitate the transfer. If not, and the community consensus is that it would be better to have no QBWiki at all than the current one, I'll delete it.

Real talk: I think a discussion of what QBWiki should be and how it can get there would be beneficial for the entire community.

jonah wrote:If someone else wants to host the QBWiki, (s)he should let me know and I'll be glad to facilitate the transfer. If not, and the community consensus is that it would be better to have no QBWiki at all than the current one, I'll delete it.

I don't think anyone wants anything like that. They just want you to stop taking out funny things.

I really don't care about QBWiki. It seems like what irritates people is the arbitrary censorship, especially of things that obviously the people being discussed have no problem with it appearing (club in-jokes and the like). I think just some simple toning down of those things would make people less angry about it.

Isn't the idea to make QBWiki a legitimate source of information about quizbowl for new teams and not just a compendium of inside jokes within the quizbowl community? I'm all for inside jokes and such, but I think QBWiki has a larger purpose that needs to be served here.

I think QBWiki takes itself too seriously. If people wanted a "compendium of information," why would there even be entries on people? Why does anyone need to know about Charles Hang, Auroni Gupta, or me? I guess a simple "Plays for ____, employed by/runs ____" would be all that is needed. QBWiki does a good job indexing tournaments with stats and maintaining some useful lists on things like "problems with Chip Beall," etc. But we are not the professionalization brigade--including a few jokes here and there isn't going to ruin anyone's day.

Yeah, I mean, as far as I know half of the reason for the founding of the QBWiki's various incarnations was to collect various anecdotes and other such items of historical interest for preservation. Presenting a mess of in-jokes and nothing else isn't ideal, but neither is a bunch of uninteresting blandness studded with unusually detailed entries on people of little historical import (which, it should be noted, aren't inherently bad in and of themselves).

I think that more important than the lack of humor on the site is its out of date content and uselessness to new teams and players.

Again, I don't care about QBWiki and don't find many of the jokes that amusing. But it seems like a laissez-faire policy should be adopted within reason. Do whatever you want as long as you besmirch others with false statements, post non public record things that others don't want posted, etc.

It would be good were the QBWiki to take on some Maize Pages functionality, or were anything to. I bet people will contact me for quizbowl things long after two months ago.

Jeremy Gibbs Freesy Does It wrote:...man does that site blow ever since Mike gave it up.

Wasn't Mike the one who came up with the idea of getting rid of all of the jokes?

Mike Bentley in 2009 wrote:Even articles about generally liked people in the quizbowl community often contain things that a lot of people don't want showing up on a first-page Google search. Whether the new admins want to keep these or not is up to them, but I'd suggest going through the wiki and removing all non-quizbowl content.

I personally also don't mind jokes, but I think the sailor scale thing (which I was the first person to remove, if you want to cast blame) is a bit more on the side of creepy than funny.

Well another online wiki that's also an encyclopedia has many many pages (though never in mainspace, because it's held to much different expectation of professionalism than QBWiki is) which are just in-jokes among the Wikipedia community. These are in the Wikipedia namespace, but are clearly marked as "This page contains material that is kept because it is considered humorous."

So while the page called Wikipedia: Featured Articles Candidates is very serious and professional, the page called Wikipedia: Featured Redirects is marked humours and features such ingenious "featured" redirects as [Fuck a Duck] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuck_a_duck, [Lick Me in the Ass] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lick_Me_In_the_Ass (probably known to many of the musically-inclined players here), [Great tits] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_tits, [Knob Lick] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knob_Lick, [Featured redirect] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia: ... d_redirect, and is clearly not meant to be taken seriously.

Couldn't something of a similar nature, though limited to each individual article as opposed to a separate namespace be implemented on the QBWiki? Say article on noted player X could have lvl. 2 sections entitled "Playing History," " "Tournaments edited/directed," and maybe one called "Community In-jokes/Quizbowl Lore/Meta-jokes"?

Then all the community-specific material could remain in its own designated section on the main article. Then we have an article that's elsewhere serious with a clearly marked section which is meant to contain humour and some things you should take with a grain of salt.

Tl;dr: Can't we have an individual section on each article for such community in-jokes?

I think the sailor scale thing isn't funny either, but I don't think QBWiki is the humor police--if the participants involved don't mind, then it probably should remain.

So the problem with "humor" is that it's really subjective what people would take offense at. I guess you could argue that these people should just suck it up or that your particular brand of humor is so hilarious and inoffensive that no one would possibly care, but I really don't see the purpose in savaging someone on the Internet for the amusement of a handful of people in the quizbowl community to read once or twice. Additionally, lots of the "facts" about people in quizbowl we don't like are at best vehemently denied by those people being attacked. And ultimately it's the admin of the site who has to deal with the constant e-mails about "take down this libel or I'll sue you".

I personally also don't mind jokes, but I think the sailor scale thing (which I was the first person to remove, if you want to cast blame) is a bit more on the side of creepy than funny.

Wonderful, now Charles Hang's internal metric of creepiness is what editing decisions are being made from. In any case, I wasn't even posting about the sailor scale thing, this strict "boring material only" editing policy for the QBWiki has been something that quizbowl luminaries have been frustrated by for ages.

Jeremy Gibbs Freesy Does It wrote:this strict "boring material only" editing policy for the QBWiki has been something that quizbowl luminaries have been frustrated by for ages.

Maybe there's a fine distinction that I'm missing between "nonboring material" and "gossipy crap that the QBWiki revision product was trying to excise."

2009 Matt Weiner wrote:I've been waiting for the host transition to come so that I can go through and scrub out all of the irrelevant stuff... the new Wiki (should I be retained as an admin, anyway) will be solely focused on factual, historically important information gathered from public sources or from cited interviews with named people.

If it's ambiguous at this point that Matt's referring to jokes (or non-"boring material"), he goes on to say

2009 Matt Weiner wrote:The excised content may be given over to some other party to host a "QB humor wiki" for which that person would be solely liable.

He actually goes on to specify specifically what types of irrelevant stuff are being removed, later in the thread. What matters is: what quizbowl luminaries are you citing? In fact, that 2009 thread is the last time I remember "the purpose of the qbwiki" being discussed, and at that time the only person who really objected was Marnold mentioning that it's dumb to remove anything negative, which is, well, obviously true. (If we've since then turned the qbwiki into a document that praises bad things for no obvious reason, well, that's terrible, but this seems to be about removing stupid content, not "anything negative.")

Well, later in that thread, Rob objects to the removal of A. J. Raffles (?!?!?!?), and Mike Sorice seems to hate unfunny in-jokes. The question of what is an unfunny in-joke, and whether A. J. Raffles qualifies (I think it doesn't; it's a damn story, not useless gossipy crap), seems to the prime contention.

So, if you're suggesting that "boring material only" omits all the A. J. Raffles, then I have a problem with "boring material only" and I think that a complete historical/non-stupid-gossipy-crap qbwiki should include A. J. Raffles. But I don't see armies of quizbowl luminaries publicly lining up on either side about this; the count was 2-1 in favor of removing extraneous content and if any subsequent sins were committed against dear A. J., that may have been an error of definitions.

I was asked this morning by a former University Challenge player for a concise history of College Bowl (you'll note that Richard Reid and College Bowl are listed on the credits of every UC episode) and I sent him the qbwiki articles on College Bowl and ACF. Both of those articles have a fairly robust treatment of the histories and controversies of the various formats and companies that I haven't seen anywhere else. So I think the qbwiki in its current incarnation does provide some useful information. I am more interested in history than most people (to the point of launching an abortive project a couple of years ago to compile a history of the Harvard College Bowl Club and a more recent project three weeks ago to create a qbwiki article in great detail on the old British Student Quiz Championships), but even if you aren't quite as interested in history you should appreciate that a lot of this historical material provides useful information when explaining things to outsiders. So whatever happens to qbwiki, I think certain of the articles deserve a more prominent and possibly even more formal treatment, with a light-hearted tone but without the jokes, somewhere on the internet.

Kyle wrote:College Bowl

I was looking at that article the other day. It would be nice if people in the know would fill out the sections that just have topic titles under "History of" and "The problem with".

So... what's the point of adding in-jokes into the QBWiki? All it seems to do is create an in-group mentality, slander people, and decrease the professionalism in the wiki.

I'm all for jokes, but keep it somewhere where it doesn't interfere with the professionalism that should be going on in QBWiki.

The real issue about the QBWiki should be the lack of details about certain players, teams, and tournaments. Not the lack of stupid in-jokes certain people find funny and the slandering of people certain people don't like (see former Jonathan Thompson page).

I was under the impression that making QBWiki more serious was part of an attempt to make it more reliable to schools in need of more reliable sources about the history of Chip, CBI, etc. and why not to participate in those things. Given that it's currently full of huge gaps for anyone who wants reliable, important quizbowl history (do not accept " _high school_ career of Charles _Hang_" for "important"), and has been for a long time, I find it hard to believe that teams see it as a reliable source, humor or no humor. If we're too busy eliminating jokes to fix important gaps, the website has lost its way pretty badly - what reason is there not to torch the whole thing?

As it stands, the QBWiki still has some pretty valuable information so I don't think torching it is the best idea. Also, I'm pretty sure that getting rid of humor isn't some time consuming demon which prevents actual work from getting done. Rather, actual work isn't getting done because no one is putting forth any effort to make QBWiki any better.

Say what you will about the "ego" of Charles Hang, but the guy actually helps out the wiki. I'm pretty sure he's written more than anyone else has even subtracting his sizable personal page. If everyone were a bit more like Charles Hang (that is, writing about things that you know about and updating your personal profile on there), the Wiki would be a lot better.

RyuAqua wrote:I was under the impression that making QBWiki more serious was part of an attempt to make it more reliable to schools in need of more reliable sources about the history of Chip, CBI, etc. and why not to participate in those things. Given that it's currently full of huge gaps for anyone who wants reliable, important quizbowl history (do not accept " _high school_ career of Charles _Hang_" for "important"), and has been for a long time, I find it hard to believe that teams see it as a reliable source, humor or no humor. If we're too busy eliminating jokes to fix important gaps, the website has lost its way pretty badly - what reason is there not to torch the whole thing?

Yes.

Charlie, what should I send to British people when they ask about the history of College Bowl?

RyuAqua wrote:what reason is there not to torch the whole thing?

Because we want to preserve the existing information that's there?

(For instance, I've posted a bunch of information about the non-pyramidal quizbowl league in my hometown, which to my knowledge is not archived anywhere else because:

1. most of it is from the local newspaper, which firewalls its articles after a year's time

2. a bunch more is from the notebook I kept in high school

3. those teams never post on this board (and don't play formats that keep stat archives anywhere))

Not sure what's mysterious about all this: removing negative and funny things made the wiki less interesting and meant that people didn't want to edit it as much. So they didn't and now it's both boring and also useless. In particular, one of the things the wiki was most useful for was collecting stats from tournaments across mirrors and over years - that's never updated now. If the community wants a wiki with useful info like that, maybe allowing the entertaining stuff generates enough interest that it's a good idea to keep it, even if the admins might have to hit "delete" now and again in response to internet lawyaz threatening suits.

Nobody should have problems with the idea of pages about, say, NAC or College Bowl or the history of ACF. Nobody should also have problems with pages that have stats from ten or twelve Penn Bowls ago. Purging everything beyond that seems to be a good idea. I'm not thrilled with the idea of people reading the qbwiki to familiarize themselves with current members of the quizbowl community as a substitute for interacting with them.

I'd like the make the argument that some things dealing with people are important. Tournament results, writing experience, editing experience, and TDing experience are all quite useful when discussing a player's merits in this, that, or those. However, aside from that I agree that most personal stuff is unnecessary.

every time i refresh i have a new name wrote:ten or twelve Penn Bowls ago

Here's where I wish I had a copy of that Matt Colvin post blasting 1999 Penn Bowl for being the last mainstream tournament with variable-value bonuses.

I don't understand these last two arguments. You're arguing for the wiki that exists now. Basically all the colorful stuff was purged the last time; the personal stuff that isn't tournament results, TDing and writing was purged last time. And the wiki has fallen into disuse aside from riveting updates to the IPA pronunciation of "Matt Weiner."

Well, I'm arguing that how it is now is fine and that the real suck about the QBWiki is people not updating or writing stuff and not the lack of (un-)funny anecdotes.

Charbroil wrote: I personally also don't mind jokes, but I think the sailor scale thing (which I was the first person to remove, if you want to cast blame) is a bit more on the side of creepy than funny.

Well, I find the fact you edit your profile so obsessively to include detailed accounts of your middle school career to be mildly creepy, but I don't erase it based on my personal feeling of aversion.

I suppose I triggered this thread by adding a stupid joke--one that Dallas approves of, I might add-- to mildly poke fun at Dallas. The individual joke doesn't matter, but I am getting a bit annoyed by the self-righteous people in this thread who claim to want an uber-serious version of the wiki, yet refuse to take it seriously themselves. Basically, I'm the only person who has edited articles on important topics the last few weeks, yet I'm being threatened with being banned because my approach is not serious enough for Kay Li or Charles Hang. However, Charles Hang will not take away five minutes from editing his profile to give a much-anticipated update about his latest high scorer award at a community college tournament to actually edit an important profile.

The way I approach editing the wiki is finding a balance between humor and real information. Some articles like NAC or College Bowl need to be completely serious, but others can have some humor. Rob is completely correct when he points out that the original purpose of the wiki was to capture some of the inside jokes--to capture some of the flavor of the quizbowl community. Hopefully, the wiki should make for modestly entertaining reading. We don't need a wiki to blandly tell us that Jerry is good at quizbowl, so it should include details that both convey his quizbowl philosophy/accomplishments and the flavor of his presence in the community. Thats why the list of things Matt Weiner likes and doesn't like seems like a fine thing to include on his profile because it gives a sense for his quizbowl persona.

marnold wrote:Not sure what's mysterious about all this: removing negative and funny things made the wiki less interesting and meant that people didn't want to edit it as much. So they didn't and now it's both boring and also useless. In particular, one of the things the wiki was most useful for was collecting stats from tournaments across mirrors and over years - that's never updated now. If the community wants a wiki with useful info like that, maybe allowing the entertaining stuff generates enough interest that it's a good idea to keep it, even if the admins might have to hit "delete" now and again in response to internet lawyaz threatening suits.

Marnold is 100% correct here. The current model objectively hasn't worked because no one wants to edit profiles. Maybe, the inclusion of a little humor would encourage people to put more time into updating the wiki.

Also, I'm actually glad that there are gate-keepers like Jonah who prevent people from just posting anything in the wiki, but by approaching the wiki with an iron fist mentality it makes people not want to spend the time to update profiles because they can't have any fun with it.

Though I think the QBWiki will always suck to some degree, regardless of whether or not it mentions the sailor scale or lists things that Matt Weiner dislikes, I hope that it sticks around. There are some useful pages on there, and more good stuff probably will get added over time.

I don't think the inclusion of jokes makes it all that attractive--the first version, where half of the sentences dealt with sex with animals, was not fun to read or add to for more than a few seconds at most. (Correct me if I am in the minority.) The second version, which included some interesting gossip and stories along with some actual information, wasn't all that exciting either, which is why many major tournaments/teams/people didn't get written about or weren't updated even when something important happened--some of the most important people in quizbowl were stubs if anything. The fact that pretty much all of us are in no hurry to make obvious improvements to the site is not some new development that started when some of the gossip was taken down.

Things like links to tournament results and threads and tournament summaries for the past ten years are boring--it is boring to put in the links, it is boring to write, and it is boring to read, at least generally speaking. Furthermore, it's never urgent work--there will always be something in your life more important and more interesting than providing easy access to information about Penn Bowl '07 or whatever (unless your life is more pathetic than mine, which is doubtful). However, I think we agree that it would be cool if that stuff was available, either so we could direct other people to it or browse it ourselves when the mood strikes. This is the dilemma that leads to QBWiki sucking. However, having some of that information available is better than having none of it available, so I hope the QBWiki is kept up.

It's been about a year since I last read or edited QBWiki (the end of anonymous editing ended my QBWiki career; previously I had written a lot of articles). So I'm not sure to what extent in-jokes have become a problem.

If we are going to have articles about quizbowl in-jokes or memes, they should primarily explain the in-joke or meme to outsiders. For instance, the article on "AJ Raffles" might say "AJ Raffles is a quizbowl meme that originated on the University of Chicago quiz bowl team", followed by an explanation of its origin and examples of its use. This is useful because a person who hears an AJ Raffles joke and is confused can look it up and be not confused. In-jokes are bad when they make QBWiki harder to understand for people who are not in on the joke.

Also, the reality is that quizbowl wiki becomes a front-page google result for many of the people written about. It's probably a good thing if we let these people edit out content that would be harmful to them professionally.

Here's my thoughts:

Explaining the meaning of in-jokes/memes seems like a worthwhile thing that will dilute rather than strengthen in-groupness.

Letting true information be removed on the basis of who is willing to pitch the biggest fit about it is a bad policy.

Letting Jonah be the sole gatekeeper is a bad idea, as he's basically an idiot. He's very vigilant about removing things like who Cam was dating when he cheated at quizbowl (a true fact) but not so much at removing things like the part of my article referring to the questions at ACF Nationals 2009 being "disastrous" (this being a setup to a joke whose punchline is no longer there, which Ted Gioia put in and which he himself may not actually believe). One or more people who do not hold collegiate quizbowl in contempt and really know something about it need to be the administrators, and the administrators need to have a reasonable set of non-secret guidelines to follow on what is to be allowed.

Once all of these things are done, maybe some people will be willing to do the amount of research needed to collect old information and interview people in order to put together a useful resource. Right now there seems to be no impetus to compete with the volumes of Hangiana and the people decrying actual historical and statistical facts as "boring," since anything useful is going to be deleted when someone claims it's "libelous" to report their 2 PPG at the 1997 ICT.

Matt Weiner wrote:Explaining the meaning of in-jokes/memes seems like a worthwhile thing that will dilute rather than strengthen in-groupness.

I don't have the same expectation, but I also don't have a problem with actual explanations of such things. It's unexplained references that outsiders would be unlikely to understand or find relevant that I object to.

Matt Weiner wrote:Letting true information be removed on the basis of who is willing to pitch the biggest fit about it is a bad policy..like who Cam was dating when he cheated at quizbowl (a true fact)

That's not the policy. That bit of information is a "personal detail[] that do[es] not pertain directly to quizbowl and [is] not already available on the internet", which in accordance with the privacy policy (which I believe has not changed from the Bentley edition of the QBWiki other than the link for who to contact) was removed in accordance with the request of the person it concerned. A personal relationship that was tangentially related to a quizbowl tournament from 10 years ago—although I understand and endorse the relevance of the page's overall content with respect to a cheating incident—is simply not important, and since one of the people involved in it requested its removal, I had no qualms about getting rid of that fact.

Matt Weiner wrote:removing things like the part of my article referring to the questions at ACF Nationals 2009 being "disastrous" (this being a setup to a joke whose punchline is no longer there, which Ted Gioia put in and which he himself may not actually believe).

Nothing's stopping you from deleting that yourself if you don't like it.

Matt Weiner wrote:people who do not hold collegiate quizbowl in contempt

Do I?

and really know something about it need to be the administrators

I have never turned down anyone's request to be an administrator, nor would I turn down any reasonable one. The current administrators are me, Charles Hang, and Andrew Hart. I suspect Andrew fits your guideline of "know[ing] something about [collegiate quizbowl]"; however, he has—as far as I know by his own choice—not made edits other than to his own page. Anyone interested in being an administrator should certainly contact me.

I suspect that Matt Weiner and I will never come to any sort of agreement on the proper balance between exposing the dirty laundry of quizbowl villains and maintaining the employability of quizbowlers, so let's not talk about that. Let's instead talk about how to make QBWiki easier to use for the people who, IMO, need QBWiki most: people who are unfamiliar with quizbowl and want to become familiar with quizbowl.

These people could be new players, potential players, or they could be complete outsiders who want to know exactly what quizbowl is. Their specific identity isn't important, but they all would face similar challenges.

The first thing I notice is that the front page of QBWiki is completely naked, except for how to sign up to be an editor and a list of articles that don't exist. Laughably useless for this particular audience. There should be navigation guides that point the user to important information like mainstream formats, important tournaments on the circuit calendar, lists of teams, etc.

When I first started editing QBWiki, I added a "Did you know?" section that was pretty much a satire of the front page of Wikipedia's did you know feature (I remember having things like "did you know that [[Seth Teitler]] played at the [[2006 Illinois Open]]?"), and that's been deleted, but it was more useful than what we have now.

Whoops, I didn't know/remember that I was still an admin.

Bruce's idea makes a lot of sense. It not only would make the site easier to use for newbies, but it also would mean that experienced players traffic the important pages often, which would lead to those pages getting improved.

Some pages that deserve prominent links are:
http://www.qbwiki.com/wiki/Quizbowl
http://www.qbwiki.com/wiki/How_Collegia ... bowl_Works
http://www.qbwiki.com/wiki/ACF
http://www.qbwiki.com/wiki/NAQT
http://www.qbwiki.com/wiki/PACE
http://www.qbwiki.com/wiki/How_Quizbowl ... ournalists
http://www.qbwiki.com/wiki/How_to_Get_Good_at_This_Game
http://www.qbwiki.com/wiki/How_to_Write_Questions
http://www.qbwiki.com/wiki/How_to_run_a ... tournament
http://www.qbwiki.com/wiki/Category:Quizbowl_basics

This isn't meant to be a definitive list--just some suggestions. Some of these pages need work--one of the goals of frontpaging them is to get them more attention.

Below this, there could be a short list of stubs that really are stubs and really shouldn't be stubs (and/or topics that are current but haven't been updated in years), and I would also keep the current list of pages that should be created, though it would be less prominent because it would be under this other stuff.

Matt Weiner wrote:but not so much at removing things like the part of my article referring to the questions at ACF Nationals 2009 being "disastrous" (this being a setup to a joke whose punchline is no longer there, which Ted Gioia put in and which he himself may not actually believe).

Sorry about that, I'll fix this.

I just changed the front page. Feel free to give feedback here or to make improvements. I realize the design is very boring, which is what you get when I design something, and there is no rule that it has to stay boring.

Though I realize there are unresolved issues regarding tone in collegiate articles and who should edit the collegiate articles, I encourage people to update information on QBWiki. There are several articles on topics that several people know about that either suck or do not exist.

Bumping this to say that I created short stubs for each school that I listed in my post-season rankings. I hope that, as a group, we can help improve the quality of the QBWiki by getting basic information about teams - such as what they've played and how they've done, along with tournaments they've hosted and so forth - and then going from there.

Thanks to Matt Jackson, Fred, and a few others, that site is getting a little better. If 20 or 30 regulars from this site each spent a half hour at that site making sure information on themselves, teams they've played on, and tournaments they are closely associated with was half decent and up-to-date, it would make a significant difference. If you want to spend more time, that's good too.

So yeah, I've had a change of heart about this. There's a lot of quizbowl information and history out there, and if we're going to have a site devoted to delivering that information, we may as well make it work as best it can.

Leucippe and Clitophon wrote:If 20 or 30 regulars from this site each spent a half hour at that site making sure information on themselves, teams they've played on, and tournaments they are closely associated with was half decent and up-to-date, it would make a significant difference.

While there's a lot of information still missing, I think contributors to QBWiki could do a better job accurately gauging the importance of topics, including their own selves, to quizbowl as a whole when they figure out how much text is needed to describe them. A QBWiki page doesn't have to be a comprehensive biography unless the person has one, and it's easy to mistake fluff for things that seems important (the tournament at which you were inspired to get good while playing on the C-team, "noted" finishes below 1st or 2nd place).

I also think that pages tracking individual players' tournament playing histories, especially when outdated or particularly long, help to make individual pages look gratuitously long. If people are interested in keeping an online record of the tournaments they played, and with whom, maybe it's possible to make a "List of individual playing histories" with alphabetical shortcuts at the top.

RyuAqua wrote:While there's a lot of information still missing, I think contributors to QBWiki could do a better job accurately gauging the importance of topics, including their own selves, to quizbowl as a whole when they figure out how much text is needed to describe them. A QBWiki page doesn't have to be a comprehensive biography unless the person has one, and it's easy to mistake fluff for things that seems important (the tournament at which you were inspired to get good while playing on the C-team, "noted" finishes below 1st or 2nd place).

I also think that pages tracking individual players' tournament playing histories, especially when outdated or particularly long, help to make individual pages look gratuitously long. If people are interested in keeping an online record of the tournaments they played, and with whom, maybe it's possible to make a "List of individual playing histories" with alphabetical shortcuts at the top.

I think the other thing that could potentially be done is to have the main page article detail the person's actual important contributions to quizbowl (e.g. major tournaments written/edited, championships won, important leadership positions) and then, if the person is a contributor, moving the rest of the stuff to the "User: [quizbowl player]" page, which for I think everyone right now is just a redirect page.

cvdwightw wrote:"User: [quizbowl player]" page, which for I think everyone right now is just a redirect page.

For some people it's a redirect; for others it's what they submitted as their "biography" when registering, which is supposed to include relevant affiliations. People should feel free to edit their user pages as long as that info remains.

I don't think that we should worry about whether or not some unimportant quizbowl player's article is too long. If he's not important, nobody will read it anyway (except his potential employers when they google him). Too much information is a good problem to have.

I think the real problem with QBWiki is that we have some very important people with either no or very short articles.

I'd like some discussion on this before I try to really make it a rule (as much as I could do that, anyway).