QBWiki:Community portal

This is a list of potential projects and goals for the QBWiki.

Here is the QBWiki:Style Guide (WIP) - try to be consistent with formatting and style choices.

Creating New Needed Pages

If there are any new pages that need to be created, please list them at this link and/or take on a page that needs to still be created. This page may be useful in identifying some of those.

• I'd like to see a large sort of "superpage" on the history of the Format Wars specifically with lots of examples from actual posts to show what kind of arguments were being made and how over time the principles of good quizbowl began to spread but also evolve themselves into what we see today.

Here's a Google sheet containing several pages which should be made: link. This contains many uncreated pages which have incoming links across several broad categories.

Standardizing School Articles

While there are already templates that can be used, there are still a number of schools whose entries are just stubs. Updating all of those school pages to the standard template and updating current contact/roster information would be helpful.

Establishing and Observing Notability Standards and Guidelines

See this talk page for notability guidelines discussion. Creating clear guidelines for notability standards will help us direct future articles and cleanup.

Establishing the Editorial Tone

Although the previous good vs. bad quizbowl conflicts that used to rage on the quizbowl forums are now pretty much settled, how specifically the QBWiki should address these disputes and existing areas of bad quizbowl should be discussed.

Specific Projects

Creating set pages

Many question sets do not have pages. This is particularly egregious for academic sets from the past few years - for instance, at the time of writing the 2016 set stanford housewrite does not have a page, nor do many instances of ACF Regionals. I recommend using the College Quizbowl Calendar as a resource for tournaments of the last few years.

Part of this effort has been the expansion of the Side events page to provide a centralized index for side events and the creation of pages for as many of those sets as possible.

College directory

Outside of whatever resources exist within the quiz bowl companies, there are few public, centralized directories of contact information for collegiate clubs. The "Quizbowl directory of four-year colleges in North America" page is an attempt on accomplishing this purpose on the wiki, but requires upkeep and involvement from all clubs involved. The directory also has a link to the ACF's page with club info.

Fleshing out individuals' pages

With a few exceptions, all player pages can make good use of an infobox to display their past affiliations and provide a convenient link to their stats. So long as a name is provided to the infobox, it will auto-generate links to NAQT and HDWhite pages. If one stumbles upon a page without an infobox, adding these in can be an easy and convenient way to improve the functionality of this Wiki.

Year Pages

Would it be a good idea to have pages for, e.g., "the 2016-2017 academic year" that can be browsed to get a sense of chronology? Each page could contain information such as a list of national tournaments and their winners, a list of that year's high school state champions, a list of packet sets produced, a list of which states ran at least 1 good-quality high school tournament, links to the "players active in ___" pages, and perhaps a list of which colleges played at least 1 tournament that year. This could be paired with any interesting firsts or other events. I've created a sample skeleton here: https://www.qbwiki.com/wiki/2016-2017\

I think this would be a good idea - I can see if I can't get some templates put together that would simplify the more rote parts of this (like the linking to specific categories, etc.) -Kevin Wang (talk)

Quizbowl concepts

The introductory materials in the Introduction to Quizbowl section are good, but could be better. In particular, it would benefit from more discussion of fundamental concepts (for instance, prompts) so that new players could follow links around in a natural way to learn about the ideas behind quiz bowl.

Categories

Right now each category has a very bare description of what fits inside it. They could use fleshing out to discuss the history of those categories: how they've been written over time, community perceptions of them, etc. It would also be good to have a sidebox, similar to what Introduction to Quizbowl has, to aid users in navigating between different categories and presenting a cohesive idea of what a quizbowl distribution is.

Suggestion for Focusing on School Pages

I would recommend in general for more of a focus on adding details to the pages on schools rather than individuals. Some reasons: 1) it will save time by reducing the overall number of articles out there that require maintenance, updates, etc. 2) it reduces the need to debate notability guidelines for an individual player by instead keeping the focus on the program itself 3) it can reduce the need to repeat the same information over and over again (e.g. about a good nationals performance by a team in one year) on multiple pages 4) it places the emphasis on quizbowl as a team competition and emphasizes the importance of the team as an institution over time with a unique history and 5) it avoids some of the issues with QBwiki pages for individuals showing up very high in search results. I'll work more on fleshing out some of the pages in the college team directory in the next few months, but I think more generally it would be good direction to work. -Chris C. (talk) 18:12, 21 June 2021 (CDT)