--- In quizbowl_at_y..., fbush555 <no_reply_at_y...> wrote: > <500 > Answer: Henry Martyn Robert (do not accept _Roberts_) Knowing what to search for is important. Searching for "Henry Martyn Robert," quotations included gets 390 hits. Change the "y" to an "i" to account for mispellings and you get an additional 41 hits. Search for "Robert's Rules of Order," on the other hand, and you get about 39,800 hits. There are at least two flaws. One is that the knowledge put out on the web is skewed to the tastes and knowledge of whoever uses computers and the internet and who is more likely to actually make a webpage. Most notably, anything "geeky" or "computerish" probably has an inflated value. The other is that quizbowl has its own set of knowledge. I'm not sure how a line about disliking poetry became the stock giveaway for Marianne Moore. Certain things are gettable because they come up. Whether we should ask about such things is debatable. But solely as a judge of gettability, google-checking will miss such things that are gettable because most websites aren't written by people who comprehend this "language-game" we call quizbowl. Also, quizbowl allows us a platform to inform potentially like-minded people about cool things. I admit, I've gone overboard in the past. There is such a thing as too much of a good thing. Since "great" questions tend to be harder than average (no one ever said their favorite novel was Moby Dick and that there needed to be better questions on it), they need a little "vanilla-flavored" questions to make things go down smoothly. But judicious use of questions on new and interesting things is okay. On an internet-related tangent, it worries me a bit if people become too dependent on internet sources for writing questions. More specifically, I'm afraid that people latch on to specific websites and write all their questions in a specific area from one source. People complain about "straight out of Benet's questions." It would be equally annoying if, for example, half the philosophy questions on the circuit came out of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (http://plato.stanford.edu/), to name one site which I suspect is popular among certain people. I tell you about it now only because I use it rarely if at all these days. What you describe is a useful tool that will guide the novice and the unskilled question writer and prevent them from making mistakes. On the other hand, few laws are hard and fast and absolute. There are some writers and editors out there who I would trust to know exceptions to your rule. Anthony, whose academic "thing" was to look at how people acquired and used information for political purposes and who enjoys thinking about how people "access" knowledge [See also the thread beginning with message 9006 with the subject "Hooey" for the Felix Krull/Tonio Kroger debate for discussion of the use of Google in judging difficulty.]
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