Importance

"Importance" is an abstract concept with no formal definition that nevertheless is used as a key factor in distinguishing facts which can be incorporated in quiz bowl questions ("knowledge") and those which are not suitable ("trivia"). A fact is "important" if it has qualities which justify its inclusion in questions.

There are varied criteria which can be used to determine if a piece of information is "important":

1. in the colloquial meaning, it is marked by or indicative of significance worth or consequence; this could include as much as "everything that is discussed in quiz bowl" or as little as "nothing", depending on one's personal leanings
2. it is known by many people in the general population
3. it is known by many people in quiz bowl
4. it is studied in academia
5. it is encountered in academic settings
6. it does not involve rote memorization
7. it requires engagement with the material
8. it is interesting

The practical definition of "importance" within the community is some mixture of these, as individual editors and writers will shift their clue choice and distributions to align with their personal beliefs. These deliberate differences often arise from a desire to reward different knowledge bases, especially those that are outside the accepted norm.

Generally speaking, quiz bowl tends to limit its scope to academic subjects - however, the criteria of importance can (and often is) applied to topics in pop culture-specific tournaments. Arguments in favor of increasing or decreasing any given category's distribution are inevitably couched in discussions of their "importance" relative to one's preferred categories.

Examples

Here are a few hypothetical topics and some examples of how they align with the sample criteria provided above.

	the political history of Paraguay	a Rice Krispies TreatTM	Francis Ford Coppola's 1972 film The Godfather	Season 6 of Friends
it is known by many people in the general population	No	Yes	Yes	Yes
it is known by many people in quiz bowl	Yes	Yes	Yes	Depends on demographics really
it is studied in academia	Yes	Very rarely	Yes, but not in the fields of academia that quiz bowl typically chooses to represent
it is encountered in academic settings	Yes	Perhaps as a snack	Yes, but not in the fields of academia that quiz bowl typically chooses to represent
it requires engagement with the material	Yes*	No	Yes	Yes
it is interesting	Subjective
"Important" for quiz bowl	Yes	No	Typically	Only in pop culture sets
"Important" for other formats	Yes	Hopefully not	Yes	Yes

* - It's something of a Catch-22 that, because this topic is already part of the mainstream canon, one can avoid direct engagement with the material. For more discussion of this topic, see "real knowledge".

Other formats

Many trivia formats have a practical definition of "importance" which diverges greatly from that of quiz bowl; it is unclear whether they have formalized this concept at all.

Many of the things which trivia formats include that quiz bowl does not can be viewed as consequences of these differences.