5th of March Incident

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meebles127
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5th of March Incident

Post by meebles127 »

Seeing as today's the 5th anniversary of the 5th of March Incident and it was before my time, it would be interesting to hear from those who were there and prevented a remarkable act of malfeasance from occurring.
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vinteuil
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Re: 5th of March Incident

Post by vinteuil »

(This post is not directed at Emily in particular. It’s also pretty cranky.)

Can we stop obsessing and mythologizing over this crap? All of the good stories have been told a zillion times by now, and you can read the anecdotes off of an overlong/injoke-y QBWiki page. There are so many other good quizbowl stories to tell and rehashing the same Weiner and Watkins stuff every spring doesn’t help us do that.
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Re: 5th of March Incident

Post by Bosa of York »

vinteuil wrote: Thu Mar 05, 2020 1:25 pm (This post is not directed at Emily in particular. It’s also pretty cranky.)

Can we stop obsessing and mythologizing over this crap? All of the good stories have been told a zillion times by now, and you can read the anecdotes off of an overlong/injoke-y QBWiki page. There are so many other good quizbowl stories to tell and rehashing the same Weiner and Watkins stuff every spring doesn’t help us do that.
For what little my opinion matters, I agree with this.
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meebles127
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Re: 5th of March Incident

Post by meebles127 »

For what it's worth I only posted it because I came up with a joke that was funnier than a broken lecture I was sitting in.
Last edited by meebles127 on Thu Mar 05, 2020 1:28 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Em Gunter
Club President, University of Virginia
Tournament Director, 2023 Chicago Open
Assistant Tournament Director, 2022 and 2023 ACF Nationals

Author of: My Guide to High School Outreach and So You Want to Buy a Buzzer System

"That's got to be one of the most useful skills anyone has ever gotten from quizbowl." -John Lawrence
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Cheynem
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Re: 5th of March Incident

Post by Cheynem »

I can understand why folks would be interested--I think there was a thread on this topic last year that included some interesting comments.

viewtopic.php?f=63&t=22473
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Re: 5th of March Incident

Post by AKKOLADE »

vinteuil wrote: Thu Mar 05, 2020 1:25 pm (This post is not directed at Emily in particular. It’s also pretty cranky.)

Can we stop obsessing and mythologizing over this crap? All of the good stories have been told a zillion times by now, and you can read the anecdotes off of an overlong/injoke-y QBWiki page. There are so many other good quizbowl stories to tell and rehashing the same Weiner and Watkins stuff every spring doesn’t help us do that.
I get what you're saying, but quiz bowl's history largely isn't talked about at all. I'd rather one incident that is talked about too much be discussed again then the generally half dead status of this particular subforum.
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Re: 5th of March Incident

Post by Cheynem »

Might be nice to talk about good quizbowl history, not that there aren't a lot of good things about this particular event.

Like all the Carper winners? Who are they? Where did they come from? Where did they go?
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VSCOelasticity
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Re: 5th of March Incident

Post by VSCOelasticity »

Cheynem wrote: Thu Mar 05, 2020 4:23 pm Like all the Carper winners? Who are they? Where did they come from? Where did they go?
Carper Winners: What Do They Know? Do They Know Things?? Let's Find Out!
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Re: 5th of March Incident

Post by Sima Guang Hater »

Dunno why Jacob thinks that people remember the Matt Weiner aspect of it, or why it should have the same valence as the Andy Watkins story. To me, it showed that the community can come together in a crisis and get work done (an amount of work that would ordinarily take weeks), and I'm quite proud to be part of a group that did/does that.
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vinteuil
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Re: 5th of March Incident

Post by vinteuil »

It has the same valence as the Watkins saga inasmuch as we always seem to hear from the same group of people about their own (sometimes limited) involvement. I'd love to hear Matt Jackson talk about the absolutely heroic amount of work he did writing thousands of questions and helping to run 2015 ACF Nationals, but he's clearly not interested.
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Re: 5th of March Incident

Post by Skepticism and Animal Feed »

I've always found that if people are talking about a subject that doesn't interest me, I can just not read that thread.
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Re: 5th of March Incident

Post by Skepticism and Animal Feed »

Less flippantly, I think the 5th of March Incident is worth studying and commemorating for the following reasons:

(1) It is a warning about the dangers of putting one person in charge of everything. It may come to pass that there will be a person in quizbowl's future who has a lot of energy, is good at logistics and question writing, and is willing to take on enormous responsibility. And they may say of them, "this person should run everything!" Well, somebody familiar with what happened in 2015 will understand that as attractive as that seems in the moment, there are risks.

(2) It truly is a heart-warming tale of the quizbowl community coming together and saving multiple tournaments, on a timescale that would have been thought implausible beforehand. It is nothing at all like Watkinsgate, a sad story where a guy ruined multiple tournaments and never got any punishment for it while his victims could never be appropriately compensated. Hopefully, it will inspire future generations when they face the crises of their era, knowing that great things have been done before and thus could be done again.

If we only have accounts of it from marginal participants...well, boo hoo, that's how history generally works. We have the notes of Procopius, a middling Senator, and not the notes of the generals or emperors he wrote about. The Matt Jacksons and Justinians of the world are too busy making history to write it.
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Re: 5th of March Incident

Post by cchiego »

Bruce has it. I'd love to see what the quizbowl community could do by coming together for something similar every year--it could be writing a novice or a themed mini-tournament, it could be a coordinated outreach push, it could be a mass mentorship (virtual) meetup, or it could be upgrading various parts of the quizbowl online presence (like a hack-a-thon). Or better yet, something that involves all of these at once depending on community members' interests--the quizbowl community has many talented, enthusiastic people and it would be great to coordinate everyone at some point each year.
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Re: 5th of March Incident

Post by Mike Bentley »

cchiego wrote: Fri Mar 06, 2020 1:14 pm Bruce has it. I'd love to see what the quizbowl community could do by coming together for something similar every year--it could be writing a novice or a themed mini-tournament, it could be a coordinated outreach push, it could be a mass mentorship (virtual) meetup, or it could be upgrading various parts of the quizbowl online presence (like a hack-a-thon). Or better yet, something that involves all of these at once depending on community members' interests--the quizbowl community has many talented, enthusiastic people and it would be great to coordinate everyone at some point each year.
I think the quizbowl version of a hack-a-thon is a great idea. There can certainly be many of these but this strikes me as something that would be great for an organization like PACE to organize. I'll start the discussion with the rest of the group.
Mike Bentley
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Adviser, Quizbowl Team at University of Washington
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