Category talk:Question writers

I don't like the idea of this category. It lumps people into two groups: question writers and non-question writers. Practically everybody in quizbowl can be a question writer at some level, and most people in college and beyond have had to write some questions.—Jacob Reed (talk) 22:12, 8 July 2019 (CDT)

Here is what I did. I'll wait for Jonah and/or others to weigh in before either adding more names or getting rid of the names that are here. I don't have a strong opinion one way or the other on this. I was going through the Wanted categories page, and this category was listed. The only person in the category was Brad Fischer, who was put there by Tom Egan in 2017. Brad writes a lot of questions, so Egan's decision was reasonable from that point of view, though it created a wanted category with one member. I decided to make something of it, so I wrote three words in the category and went through the Long pages and added people who were question writers. The 19 people currently listed are the people who write questions who have long qbwiki pages. It seems like a reasonable category to have, since there are a number of people who have contributed to the game by spending a lot of their time writing questions. As I said, I am willing to either keep adding people or kill this off, so feel free to weigh in one way or the other. I do see Jacob's point, and if this page remains there will always be some arbitrariness to who is listed and who is not. David Reinstein (talk) 05:59, 9 July 2019 (CDT)

I don't have strong feelings about this (now there's a sentence I rarely use). It doesn't seem that useful, but that's true of enormous swaths of the QBWiki, and the only way to rectify that is by making it more useful, which is what David's trying to do here. Whether the category even has realistic potential to be useful is an open question; I think Jacob is right to be skeptical (though I don't quite agree with his reasons as written), but it may be possible to make it decent even if imperfect. I'd at least suggest having the main category page explain that most people in college quiz bowl write at least some questions due to packet submission requirements, but this category is for people who write or once wrote lots of questions beyond packet-submission requirements. Jonah (talk) 22:40, 9 July 2019 (CDT)