Civility

"Civility" is the act of agreeing with or, at least, passively assenting to, terrible ideas about Quiz Bowl. It should not be confused with the non-quizbowl use of the term, which refers to interacting with all other people in an even-handed manner, and has nothing to do with what proponents of "civility" in quizbowl actually want to see.

This term is no longer in common usage.

Historical context

For many years, quizbowl was torn between multiple formats. On one side were proponents of "good quizbowl", which emphasized quality questions, pyramidality, and fair tournament structures. These were championed by NAQT, ACF, and PACE. On the other side was "bad quizbowl", which did not prioritize these properties. The most prominent formats in this group were College Bowl at the college level and National Academic Championship at the high school level. While this conflict is still not fully resolved, the death of College Bowl and the success of NAQT and ACF have made it a much smaller presence in modern quizbowl.

Bad quizbowl had the advantage of historical precedent, having existed in many places for many years prior to even the founding of NAQT, let alone the start of their outreach. This made the process of replacing these formats and their very conservative-minded administrators very difficult. One consequence of this process was that, during the early history of the forums, arguments over which format was better were both frequent and heated. With few actual arguments, proponents of bad quizbowl began to use "civility" as their cudgel against the encroaching tide of change. Passionate arguments for how to improve the game of quizbowl and root out inferior products was construed as a negative by people who cried for a return of "civility".

Usage of "civility"

The use of the term was very skewed. Approximately 100% of people who wanted to see more "civility" in online discussion of quizbowl made sure to voice their concerns when College Bowl or the National Academic Championship were being targeted. These self-appointed discussion police would be strangely absent when ACF or other forms of good quizbowl were being attacked.

Things that were perfectly "civil" according to proponents of civility:

• Claiming that the PACE NSC questions are "only for the top teams"
• barring high school quizbowl players from improving themselves
• defaming high school quizbowl coaches for protesting bad questions in your tournament
• fixing matches in your tournament
• accusing any team that beats you of cheating, plagiarizing questions
• lying to teams about the existence and cost of tournaments in competition with your own
• attempting to sue quizbowl out of existence
• establishing policies which treat white and black people differently
• scheduling fake tournaments to compete with previously announced real tournaments in your region
• advancing fraudulent legal claims to establish a monopoly on quizbowl-like competition.

Things that were not "civil" according to proponents of "civility":

• questioning the legitimacy of the College Bowl national championship
• asking whether moderators at a tournament should be cheering for teams that they are a part of in the tournament
• discussing the NAQT distribution
• asking non-quizbowl people to stop posting nonsense on the quizbowl board
• saying that tournaments should not have fixed matches
• explaining why bad questions are bad
• calling policies which treat white and black people differently "racist"
• complaining about other people scheduling fake tournaments to compete with previously announced real tournaments in your region
• discussing quizbowl on the Internet in any way.