Talk:One-person teams

There is an open question of whether it is worthwhile to have a list of "one-person teams" like the one I added to this page. It is my opinion that this is information that people are interested in and are actively seeking out with some regularity, so it should be included (with some modifications). I have explicitly not added any information outside of the team, roster, year, and placement to present this table as neutrally as possible. I also intend to create pages for every player of every team. -Kevin Wang (talk) 16:28, 21 June 2021 (CDT)

As one of the people mentioned on this page, I do not think it is a good idea for this page to contain a "list of one person teams" for a multitude of reasons.

(1) The name "one-person team" can be interpreted as derogatory, and I do not think it is a good idea for a (public) history of quizbowl to be derogatory towards people whose only crime is not getting a ton of tossup points.

(2) The criteria for defining a "one-person team" are quite arbitrary (there's no real significance to the "2/3 of a team's scoring" clause), and I don't think it's either useful or informative to demean the skill of the majority of the players on a "one-person team" based on arbitrary criteria.

(3) The name "one-person team" suggests that if that team only included a single person, it would have performed similarly to the full team. As a player on one of these "one-man teams," I can guarantee that this is false. After all, bonuses are worth around twice as much as tossups, and many of these players contribute significantly on the bonuses in ways that aren't really apparent from team statistics.

(4) Classifying a team as "one-person" can basically erase the contribution of specialist or hyper-specialist players (and it has, especially in the case of Justin Wytmar, whom I believe to be an extremely good history specialist - he made Illinois NASAT, after all! same for my own team's Vishal Sareddy, and probably many more people on this list), fueling the misconception that generalism is the only way to play/be good at quizbowl. This is an extremely dangerous perception, one that I have spent a lot of time trying to eradicate in the novice players I've worked with. I don't think very many experienced players will be affected by this, but there are always new players who wander into the wiki and start looking around, and I don't think it's good for them to feel that they have to become a top hypergeneralist carry or whatever to be successful at quizbowl.

Basically, while I don't think that every single use of the term "one-person team" is intended to be derogatory, I think that maintaining a list of such teams in a public-facing space like this one is demeaning. -Aadi Karthik (talk) 17:50, 21 June 2021 (EDT)

Aadi makes some very good points here. My own opinion is that while there is certainly an argument to be made that this article is useful (more QB info on the wiki > less QB info on the wiki), there are a lot of other things we (QBWiki contributors) could be spending our time doing that would benefit the wiki more in a less controversial way (updating old pages, adding recent stats and results, etc.). ~~