Alternative Names in Answerlines

[23nl1us]

Answerlines often contain alternatives as well as past names for locations, groups, and individuals, but I would like to know how the inclusion or exclusion of names is considered. For instance, in the recent Online SCT tournament, I was negged on a question for answering the [a geography-related alternate --Mgmt.]. I would like to think that it is not completely at the discretion of pack writers, but I'm not sure if there is a consistent and systematic set of rules for this. Personally, I believe that unless the question specifically asks for one of the names, all should be expected no matter how (seemingly) absurd. Similarly, I also think that the current acceptance of some "native/original language terms" is still insufficient when dealing with cultural concepts that are not as relevant in Anglo-American culture but have spread to cultures other than the "original", with Buddhism being a good example. I think it is entirely reasonable for someone to only know Mahayana Buddhism as 大乘 (a crosslingusitic Sinographic term) since this form of Buddhism is primarily practiced by Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese people. However, I not sure if it would be accepted under the current paradigm, as I have only encountered one such question in a pack before and I forgot what the answerline was. Certainly, the wording used in questions imply that any non-English terms that are not strictly "original-language", and plausibly discourages players from answering with those terms, which I think is an undesireable result. I understand that accomodating a longer list of alternate terms would increased complexity for readers, however, given the ease of searching up terms on the internet I do believe that this is not serious enough an issue to make the status quo the only option.

[jonah]

For NAQT sets, the Correctness Guidelines describe how various types of answers should be ruled upon (in answer lines and upon protest).

[Skepticism and Animal Feed]

I agree with you that a wide range of answers should be acceptable and that writers and editors should make a good effort to consider what other answers to list. However, consider that adjudicating rare examples of alternate answers as one-off protests might be a more efficient use of resources than adding the n-th alternate answer to an answerline that already has many. Yes this means you might still get negged for perfectly correct answer if it doesn't matter to the outcome of the game and that hurts (it's happened to me and to anyone who has played for a long time), but the tradeoff for that might be that some other typo in a different part of the packet gets fixed.

[23nl1us]

The point about not includnig it in the answerlines makes sense. However, I find that the guideline is still somewhat strict in certain places--for instance, when it comes to foreign language terms that are not the "original" language (something I mentioned in my OP).