We’re a little backwards this week. I am going on vacation next week, but I’ve already written 95% of what will be in next week’s newsletter. It’s not part of the main narrative of the book, so it’s the equivalent of a bottle episode. What I didn’t do is complete this week’s work as quickly as I’d like, so if these seems shortened, it’s because it is.
When I haven’t been writing or working, I’ve spent most of my time planting the summer crops in the garden. This has taken more time than expected because the rototiller’s fuel line popped out and I’ve had to break the soil up with a shovel and sweat equity. So after working out in the sun, I’ve gotten tomatoes and basil planted, and tomorrow is time for pepper plants to get transplanted.
I wanted to discuss this week some of the ways that things can’t come up on television. Some of the ideas we’ve gone through already here: not in the curriculum, not able to be asked in a satisfactory way on television, not able to fit into the length of a question on television, but the one I haven’t really gotten into is the possibility of ambiguity.
If a question in a circuit event has ambiguity in the clues, it often has directives in the answer line, some guidance that an editor or writer had created to address the ambiguity, or just some basic best practice warnings that the circuit uses to remove the ambiguity. The term “largest” is not usually applied in circuit questions in favor of more specific superlatives: “most populous”, “largest in area”, or “largest in volume” for bodies of water, etc. These terms are longer but the alleviate the need for adjudicating an ambiguity.
In most cases televised quiz bowl takes the opposite approach: the show continues ambiguous answers until it gets burned, and then the lesson is learned and changes are made only by checking only for that particular ambiguity. If you search for “schools quiz Jamaica controversy” you can see the sort of ambiguities that have nailed a program in Jamaica for years, and still new ambiguous phrasings have caused strife among viewers and fans of schools.
To a certain degree, circuit quiz bowl has gotten rid of ambiguous phrasing through repeated trial and error, and it did so comparatively quietly. All the controversies generated by these at most lit up the forums, or were polished out of the question after it was used, but before it made it into the archive. Removing ambiguities is one of the few cases where the circuit has been good at building up and retaining a cultural memory.
Television on the other hand hasn’t developed such a memory with all shows, and because there isn’t a real cross-pollination of knowledge among shows, nobody gets a chance to pass along war stories as cautionary reminders to other shows. So a show must go through a series of minor controversies as it develops, and then the show will effort to never have such an unpleasantness happen again.
So we can take as a rule that ambiguous text will be cooked out of a program as the program becomes more mature. And it will effort to prevent a recurrence.
This is something that we can exploit.
If we know of common traps that could affect the results of a show, we can assume that a new show might hit them due to inexperience, but a mature program with an equally experienced set of writers, will write around the ambiguous text. This makes the mature program predictable in a predictable way.
So what would be common ambiguities that would slide through once, and then cause controversy?
The nations of Great Britain, is the first one I thought of. Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland get termed as variously “countries” or “nations” while England is often used interchangeably with United Kingdom or Great Britain by people outside of quiz bowl. This isn’t always correct, but there are also contexts where it’s not wrong. Until you have to adjudicate a protest involving that and have to get it right, writers will use them incorrectly. A mature show won’t use those terms in that way for clues, and thus won’t have parts of Great Britain for answers, or will likely choose a policy of accepting all for each other, or none for each other. This might even appear in the rules set.
Cases where there’s a hierarchy of specificity, and an ambiguous term. The most frequent offender in this case is geography questions which ask for a “region”. Unless that’s an official term for a country’s subdivisions, the answer will be ambiguous and will invite controversy. Is it “Patagonia” or “Tierra del Fuego”?
Cases where the answer line isn’t well defined. There is an expectation with the circuit that the answer line is always well defined, there is an underlined section, directives to accept or prompt alternate answers. Not all providers do that, and shows are not blessed with perfect hosts, who know when they need to prompt for which “Bush”, “Harrison”, “Johnson”, or “Roosevelt”. The show’s rules may even leave that up to the discretion of the moderator, or not even allow prompting.
Cases where “what is an acceptable answer?” are not entirely defined in their own ruleset. The circuit has spent lots of effort in drafting rules for how wrongly pronounced an answer can be, due to years of matches and words that people have only seen but never heard. Television shows have much less experience with that problem, but because it’s a common problem, writers often solve the problem by eliminating answers which might have alternative pronunciations. If you’re burned once and get notes from the show, the writer will probably think twice before writing a question with that particular answer again.
To these cases, I’d add a few other guidelines.
If the answer is something that appears in a nested diagram, when it’s being taught, this probably has some ambiguity with it. See this diagram of the British Isles: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:British_Isles_Euler_diagram_15.svg
If the answer is part of something taught through multiple diagrams to distinguish between different types, this is too complex to end up clearly disambiguated in the length of a question on television. See this discussion of isomers for an example that was at too high a level of coursework for television, but was also to complex to disambiguate: https://www.compoundchem.com/2014/05/22/typesofisomerism/
Cases of chronological ambiguity, which we discussed in Week 98.
A final note: One thing I have to reconsider for the book is my advice to use the J!Archive for practice questions limited to a single subject for practice. This was very easy to accomplish when the site used its own search engine to compile lists of questions. Recently, they’ve switched to using google’s search, which produces a list of webpages, as opposed to a list of questions. This makes for an additional layer of work, which probably will be a barrier to use for the first week’s practices, but not in a longer timeframe. Fortunately, I was looking at how to do things with flashcard decks as a substitute for this, but that may require more work on my side. We’ll see how much of this week’s vacation turns out to be a working vacation.