Talk:Quizbowl directory of four-year colleges in North America

This is an experiment to see if the Wiki can be used to collaborate on a major data-gathering project for outreach. "Notes" should be used for outreach info that's not encoded in the other columns. Hopefully the page is self-explanatory otherwise. Matt Weiner (talk) 11:34, 5 February 2014 (PST)

Also, my criteria for inclusion on the list are "any place that grants bachelor's degrees and conducts classes at a physical campus in English." Thus, professional-only schools, community colleges, and online-only schools are not included, nor are exclusively French-speaking universities in Canada (I've never heard of Mexican quizbowl and I assume all universities there speak Spanish, but feel free to add any in that prove me wrong). There are probably a few schools that fit my definition and aren't here, so add them in as you find them. Matt Weiner (talk) 11:42, 5 February 2014 (PST)

What is "high water mark"? Cody Voight

That's supposed to be like "4th place at 2009 ICT" or whatever the best thing the team ever accomplished was. It's for a slightly tangential purpose than outreach. Matt Weiner (talk) 12:31, 5 February 2014 (PST)

Does "active" include things like hosting tournaments or intramurals? Zachary Yan (talk) 22:18, 5 February 2014 (PST)

Are there schools that ONLY host college tournaments and don't attend them? I guess include that in column 1 if so. Matt Weiner (talk) 00:39, 6 February 2014 (PST)

Ended up cutting the "high water mark" column - I think that it'd probably get very cluttered if this table ended up more populated. We could certainly bring it back without too much difficulty though.

I split the list into has/has not played quiz bowl, though I have only done a cursory scan for schools that have played. I wrote a short Python script to alphabetize the rows - I can't exactly recommend that other people do the same (though it is convenient) but if you guys move rows around you can give me a shout and I can reorder them, so don't worry too much about that. -Kevin Wang (talk) 09:16, 15 March 2021 (CDT)

Ambitious idea

Is there a way to automate some of the information on this page? E.g.:

• Pull names or emails of club contacts from the club pages that each row links to, so that clubs only need to keep their own page updated and this page will automatically follow?
• Use searches of hdwhite to automatically update the last active dates (or "suggest updates" to an editor who needs to approve them, to avoid problems with different formats of team names)?

We don't really have a basic directory of team contacts for people who are looking to self-recruit to existing college quizbowl teams. Fixing that seems like an obvious first step towards fixing the problem of college quizbowl outreach (i.e., the problem that essentially no outreach for college quizbowl is being done by anybody). This page could fulfill that role which would be very helpful. If people are willing to keep editing it by hand, we should appreciate those people's efforts, but perhaps there are ways to avoid creating so much busywork.

If any of the above comes to pass, then maybe something can also be done through this page to facilitate the formation of new teams. I am trying to run a regional Discord server for basically "people going to colleges in Virginia and North Carolina that don't have quizbowl teams right now to find other people at their colleges interested in starting a team." The rows for non-active teams in VA and NC could link there. If this proves to be effective, then I'm hoping similar projects will exist in other regions, and we can link to them from the appropriate entries as well. Matt Weiner (talk) 20:38, 15 March 2021 (CDT)

I'll look into whether there's a natural way to incorporate contact info from team pages into the table, but I don't anticipate finding anything too straightforward - Wiki code is not exceptionally powerful. I don't think there exists a way to directly link the information on this page to outside pages, though. My guess on the most efficient way to do that would be to have a bot that occasionally checks up on all the schools and then adds them to this page, but that might be a bit unnecessary. I certainly would have no objection to including information about your Discord on this page; you could add a sub-section that describes the server and provides a link, or find a succinct way to include that info in the relevant rows as you suggested. -Kevin Wang (talk) 21:59, 15 March 2021 (CDT)

Other versions of this page

I plan to make an equivalent page for two-year colleges at some point in the near future. If there is anything I can do in terms of formatting or sorting that data to make it easier on people who plan to help with maintaining the page, please let me know.

I don't plan to do a version for the UK or other non-US/Canada places, because I don't know enough about how higher education or quizbowl works in those areas to figure out what institutions to include, but I hope people from those areas do so at some point.

I can see high school or middle school versions being helpful for outreach on those levels, but they should probably be state/province specific to avoid becoming very unwieldy in size. I don't currently plan on making those myself. If 60 different people are going to do it, then having some guidelines to point to on this page will be helpful in avoiding chaos. Matt Weiner (talk) 20:45, 15 March 2021 (CDT)