I think its safe to say that questions should not be plagiarized whether from web sources or print sources. Plagiarism is both dishonest and counter to the purpose of playing on original questions. I'm willing to assume its less fun to play on a question or questions that you have already read in identical form beforehand. The point I'm getting at is we, as a community should do everything possible to discourage use of plagiarized questions. Having said that, I must disagree with Jerry and many other quizbowl theorists. Questions that are designed with the purpose of giving an advantage to a mythical player with "deep knowledge" are often poorly designed. Speaking as a recent history student, I know that many topics in which I have deep knowledge would have to include boring, extra-obscure facts in order to systematically advantage the deep knowledge players. For instance, a question on the Presidential election of 1860 designed to systematically advantage "deep knowledge" players from "tangential knowledge" players would probably have to exclude any information regarding political party names, candidate names, and any information contained in electoral charts, since that information is readily accessible to anyone who has read a one page summary of the election to the exclusion of studying the election in extensive detail. As a result, a writer trying to form a "well written question" will have to resort to obscure nonsense for the first sentence or two which will likely be uninteresting and unmemorable for the vast majority of teams playing. I say we should focus on writing interesting, original questions that have clues ordered in a logical way. If that means that someone with less knowledge is not significantly disadvantaged by not having researched the topic, that's fine. The downside of that is probably less than the downside of trying to design questions based upon which players are likely to answer the question at what point. Bottom line, plagiarism is bad. Needlessly obscure questions are bad. Interesting questions with well ordered clues are good. Write those. Steve
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