Gibson assembly

Gibson-assembled (and its noun form Gibson assembly) is a phrase coined by Eric Mukherjee to describe questions written by haphazardly joining together clues from lists on Wikipedia, analogously to the molecular cloning method of Gibson assembly. It is now used more broadly to describe tossups which have been created by joining together clues from previous questions without significant alteration.

Context

As part of the Would You Recommend Working for NHBB? thread, Eric Mukherjee criticized the low quality of questions written by Andrew Leung by calling them "Gibson-assembled from lists of named things on Wikipedia".

Gibson assembly is a molecular cloning technique which joins fragments of DNA together into a single strand. Crucially to this analogy, the pieces are joined together without modification and in a single step (i.e. with little effort from the assembler).

Theory

Gibson assembly is the lowest-effort method of creating questions and is frowned upon as a result. At best, a Gibson-assembled question is serviceable but unornamented; at its worst, it may involve literal plagiarism of informational sources and past questions. It is generally accepted that questions at lower difficulties involve less "art" and are mechanically simpler to write, especially for sets with length constraints like those of NAQT; thus, there is little utility to referring to them as "Gibson-assembled". The term is thus almost exclusively reserved as a criticism of higher difficulty questions, for which there are expectations of quality and novelty.

Writing tossups via Gibson assembly is a common mistake for newer writers, who may pull clues from question from the archive to the exclusion of all other sources. Such questions are functional but involve little to no new creative input and their close resemblance to past questions makes it easy for experienced writers and editors to notice them (and remove them from their sets if desired).