Trash - Revision history

Ophir Lifshitz: streamlined, used sequential order in Terminology section, alphabetized

2024-07-20T07:19:09Z

streamlined, used sequential order in Terminology section, alphabetized

Matt Weiner: /* Terminology */

2023-10-25T01:45:14Z

Terminology

Matt Weiner at 08:52, 8 January 2023

2023-01-08T08:52:05Z

Matt Weiner at 08:49, 8 January 2023

2023-01-08T08:49:02Z

Matt Weiner: /* Crossover categories */

2022-06-10T07:21:57Z

Crossover categories

Kevin Wang at 18:34, 15 February 2022

2022-02-15T18:34:30Z

Kevin Wang at 18:34, 15 February 2022

2022-02-15T18:34:19Z

Matt Weiner at 19:07, 12 February 2022

2022-02-12T19:07:49Z

Kevin Wang at 13:27, 1 November 2021

2021-11-01T13:27:06Z

Kevin Wang at 16:18, 27 October 2021

2021-10-27T16:18:50Z

@@ Line 1: / Line 1: @@
 {{Category box}}
-:''This article discusses "trash," a commonly used term for popular culture in Quiz Bowl. For information regarding Testing Recall About Strange Happenings, the organization also known as TRASH, see [[TRASH]].''
+:''This article discusses "trash," a term for popular culture in quizbowl. For the organization Testing Recall About Strange Happenings, see [[TRASH]].''
 <onlyinclude>
 '''Trash''' is the common name for '''popular culture''' (sports, movies, TV, video games, non-classical music, comic books, etc) in quizbowl.</onlyinclude>
@@ Line 12: / Line 12: @@
 ==Terminology==
-Since 2021 there has been a movement to avoid using the term "trash" and use other terminology such as "popular culture" in order to avoid giving a false impression of combativeness regarding the category to those who are not familiar with the term.
+===Early history===
+The exact time and circumstances of the first usage of "trash" to refer to questions on popular culture or similar is not known. "Trash" was an understood reference in quizbowl communications fora no later than July 1993, when it was casually used in this post without any need for explanation: https://groups.google.com/g/alt.college.college-bowl/c/T6anySgSaeM/m/eXrNMk6Hn2gJ. By the late 1990s, it was a common term among nearly all experienced college and high school players, even those outside the core of extremely online college participants.
 In the 1990s, "trash" sometimes meant "any category not prominently featured in ACF at the time," which included not only popular culture and sports but also current events, contemporary literature, etc. By 2000 it was understood to mean "popular culture and sports" only.
@@ Line 28: / Line 23: @@
 *No definition of "trash" content in quizbowl has ever meaningfully corresponded to "strange happenings."
 *By the mid-2000s, many people who were unaware of the TRASH organization began to assume that "trash" was simply a generic term spelled in all-caps for no reason. TRASH went defunct in 2010, and to this day there are still "TRASH tournaments" announced by hosts who may be unaware that such a group ever existed and cannot explain why they believe that the word is capitalized.
 ==Crossover categories==
@@ Line 48: / Line 50: @@
 The number of trash tournaments has declined significantly since the late 2000s, while participation at academic events has remained constant or increased. From spring 2011 to fall 2013, there were only four full-length, standalone trash tournaments held, all of which took place in the summer.
-The decline in the popularity of trash can mostly be explained by the fact that trash was invented and played by a pre-existing social group of 1990s quizbowlers, and once that group moved on to other things in life, the true level of interest in trash at about one tournament every six months has emerged. There was constant tension not only over trash's deleterious effect on academic participation but also about its negative influence on question quality, as trash tournaments tended to be very rough in question structure and self-indulgent in answer selection.
+The decline in the popularity of trash can mostly be explained by the fact that trash was invented and played by a pre-existing social group of 1990s quizbowlers, and once that group moved on to other things in life, the true level of interest in trash at about one tournament every six months has emerged. There was constant tension not only over trash's deleterious effect on academic participation but also about its negative influence on question quality, as trash tournaments tended to be very rough in question structure and [[vanity|self-indulgent]] in answer selection.
 ===The trash paradox and its converse===
@@ Line 54: / Line 56: @@
 Teams and players who are extremely enthusiastic about playing trash to the exclusion of playing academic questions are, generally, not very good at trash.
-The skills to succeed at properly written quizbowl tournaments are largely the same at academic and at trash; while naturally some people have a bias in their knowledge base in one direction or another, it is rare to find someone who is good at academic and wholly incompetent at trash (or vice versa). Being able to understand the structure of questions, interpret them on the fly, make educated guesses, have the confidence to buzz, work well in a team environment, etc. are subject matter-independent skills, and someone who has mastered them enough to be noticeably good at either academic or trash quizbowl is very likely to be able to leverage their external-to-quizbowl store of knowledge, which everyone has to some degree, effectively at the other format.
+The skills to succeed at properly written quizbowl tournaments are largely the same at academic and at trash; while naturally some people have a bias in their knowledge base in one direction or another, it is rare to find someone who is good at academic and wholly incompetent at trash (or vice versa). Being able to understand the structure of questions, interpret them on the fly, make educated guesses, have the confidence to buzz, work well in a team environment, etc. are subject-matter-independent skills, and someone who has mastered them enough to be noticeably good at either academic or trash quizbowl is very likely to be able to leverage their external-to-quizbowl store of knowledge, which everyone has to some degree, effectively at the other format.
 ===Trash teams===
@@ Line 73: / Line 75: @@
 ===Elevated trash, "historically significant trash," and other attempted distinctions===
-Sometimes, proposals to limit the popular culture distribution in some way that aligns with the canon of academic quizbowl are floated. These have generally proven unworkable in practice for several reasons. (A list of these arguments, cited to who first put them forth, would be good here).
+Sometimes, proposals to limit the popular culture distribution in some way that aligns with the canon of academic quizbowl are floated. These have generally proven unworkable in practice for several reasons. (A list of these arguments, cited to who first put them forth, would be good here.)
 ===Historical trash tournaments===
 *[[ASS]]
 *[[Ann B. Davis]]
 *[[Boston College College Bowl Jam: Tournament Edition]]
 *[[Boston University Trash Juniorbird]]
 *[[GARBAGE]]
-*[[Chicago Open Trash Tournament]]
+*[[Penn Bowl Trash]]
 *[[TERP]]
-*[[Penn Bowl Trash]]
+*[[The Chris McCray Tournament For Academic Excellence]]
 [[Category: Formats]]

← Older revision		Revision as of 01:45, 25 October 2023
Line 13:		Line 13:

	Since 2021 there has been a movement to avoid using the term "trash" and use other terminology such as "popular culture" in order to avoid giving a false impression of combativeness regarding the category to those who are not familiar with the term.		Since 2021 there has been a movement to avoid using the term "trash" and use other terminology such as "popular culture" in order to avoid giving a false impression of combativeness regarding the category to those who are not familiar with the term.
		+
		+	As of late 2023, [[NAQT]], [[ACF]], [[IQBT]], the [[Quizbowl Packet Archive]], and the [[ACRONYM]] tournament series all use the term "popular culture" or "pop culture." The only remaining institutional use of the term "trash" is for the section on the [[hsquizbowl.org forums]] devoted to trash/popular culture tournament discussion. Some one-off tournaments not affiliated with an ongoing question production concern also still use the term.

	Though probably a derogatory term when it was first coined, the term was ultimately embraced by the most vocal supporters of popular culture content in quizbowl, and no longer contains any value judgment when used by insiders.		Though probably a derogatory term when it was first coined, the term was ultimately embraced by the most vocal supporters of popular culture content in quizbowl, and no longer contains any value judgment when used by insiders.

@@ Line 48: / Line 48: @@
 The decline in the popularity of trash can mostly be explained by the fact that trash was invented and played by a pre-existing social group of 1990s quizbowlers, and once that group moved on to other things in life, the true level of interest in trash at about one tournament every six months has emerged. There was constant tension not only over trash's deleterious effect on academic participation but also about its negative influence on question quality, as trash tournaments tended to be very rough in question structure and self-indulgent in answer selection.
-===The trash paradox===
+===The trash paradox and its converse===
 Teams and players who are extremely enthusiastic about playing trash to the exclusion of playing academic questions are, generally, not very good at trash.
 ===Trash teams===
@@ Line 67: / Line 69: @@
 People who have been dubbed "the greatest trash player ever" by someone other than themselves include [[James Dinan]] and [[Dwight Kidder]]. Trash was, generally speaking, a format that required a balanced team to succeed at high levels, due to its elevated difficulty and the unlikelihood of one person being an expert at both, e.g., video games and hip-hop music, combined with the fact that few people were willing to study to become better at trash, so teams needed to be formed from the natural interests of individuals.
-===Elevated trash, "historically significant trash," and other attempted distinctions==
+===Elevated trash, "historically significant trash," and other attempted distinctions===
 Sometimes, proposals to limit the popular culture distribution in some way that aligns with the canon of academic quizbowl are floated. These have generally proven unworkable in practice for several reasons. (A list of these arguments, cited to who first put them forth, would be good here).

@@ Line 4: / Line 4: @@
 '''Trash''' is the common name for '''popular culture''' (sports, movies, TV, video games, non-classical music, comic books, etc) in quizbowl.</onlyinclude>
-In mainstream academic quizbowl tournaments, trash usually takes up between 0 and 5 percent of the distribution. There are no exclusively trash questions at all at [[ACF Nationals]], the [[PACE NSC]], or [[NASAT]] (see below note on crossover categories), though [[ACF Fall]] and most high-school level regular-season events including [[HSAPQ]] Tournament Sets have 1 to 2 trash questions per round.
+In mainstream academic quizbowl tournaments, trash usually takes up between 0 and 5 percent of the distribution. There are no exclusively trash questions at all at [[ACF Nationals]], the [[PACE NSC]], or [[NASAT]] (see below note on crossover categories), though [[ACF Fall]] and most high-school level regular-season events, including the former [[HSAPQ]] Tournament Sets, have 1 to 2 trash questions per round.
 [[NAQT]] has somewhat more trash (6.6% in their high school sets when pop culture and sports are treated as a unit [http://www.naqt.com/hs/distribution.jsp]). In small amounts, trash questions can help keep rounds lively and increase retention of new players, but a preponderance of trash in an otherwise-academic tournament is considered [[bad quizbowl]].
-==Crossover categories==
+==Terminology==
-Certain subcategories are traditionally asked in both purely academic distributions and in trash tournaments. These non-exhaustively include:
+Since 2021 there has been a movement to avoid using the term "trash" and use other terminology such as "popular culture" in order to avoid giving a false impression of combativeness regarding the category to those who are not familiar with the term.
-Though probably a derogatory term when it was first coined, the term was ultimately embraced by the most vocal supporters of popular culture content in quizbowl, and no longer contains any value judgment when used by insiders. Since 2021 there has been a movement to avoid using the term "trash" and use other terminology such as "popular culture" in order to avoid giving a false impression of combativeness regarding the category to those who are not familiar with the term.
+Though probably a derogatory term when it was first coined, the term was ultimately embraced by the most vocal supporters of popular culture content in quizbowl, and no longer contains any value judgment when used by insiders.
 The exact time and circumstances of the first usage of "trash" to mean "popular culture" questions or similar is not known. "Trash" was an understood reference in quizbowl communications fora no later than July 1993, when it was casually used in this post without any need for explanation: https://groups.google.com/g/alt.college.college-bowl/c/T6anySgSaeM/m/eXrNMk6Hn2gJ. By the late 1990s, it was a common term among nearly all experienced college and high school players, even those outside the core of extremely online college participants.
@@ Line 29: / Line 22: @@
 NAQT has always separated "popular culture" and "sports" in its distribution. All-trash tournaments generally include a sports distribution. It is ambiguous whether the new term "popular culture" includes sports by default or not.
-In 1997 the [[Testing Recall About Strange Happenings]] organization was founded to centralize the running of regional and national trash tournaments. Inevitably, this forced bacronym proved problematic for two reasons:
+In 1997 the [[Testing Recall About Strange Happenings]] organization was founded to centralize the running of regional and national trash tournaments. Inevitably, this forced backronym proved problematic for two reasons:
 *No definition of "trash" content in quizbowl has ever meaningfully corresponded to "strange happenings."
 *By the mid-2000s, many people who were unaware of the TRASH organization began to assume that "trash" was simply a generic term spelled in all-caps for no reason. TRASH went defunct in 2010, and to this day there are still "TRASH tournaments" announced by hosts who may be unaware that such a group ever existed and cannot explain why they believe that the word is capitalized.
 ==Trash tournaments==
@@ Line 62: / Line 66: @@
 People who have been dubbed "the greatest trash player ever" by someone other than themselves include [[James Dinan]] and [[Dwight Kidder]]. Trash was, generally speaking, a format that required a balanced team to succeed at high levels, due to its elevated difficulty and the unlikelihood of one person being an expert at both, e.g., video games and hip-hop music, combined with the fact that few people were willing to study to become better at trash, so teams needed to be formed from the natural interests of individuals.
 ===Historical trash tournaments===

@@ Line 17: / Line 17: @@
 *graphic novels of literary merit
 *"true crime" type current events (this category has dwindled in popularity to essentially zero in recent years, but was askable in the 1990s and 2000s in both academic and trash tournaments)
 ==Terminology==

← Older revision		Revision as of 13:27, 1 November 2021
Line 1:		Line 1:
		+	{{Category box}}
	:''This article discusses "trash," a commonly used term for popular culture in Quiz Bowl. For information regarding Testing Recall About Strange Happenings, the organization also known as TRASH, see [[TRASH]].''		:''This article discusses "trash," a commonly used term for popular culture in Quiz Bowl. For information regarding Testing Recall About Strange Happenings, the organization also known as TRASH, see [[TRASH]].''
	<onlyinclude>		<onlyinclude>