Mastermind Wikipedia Challenge........

The whole issue of whether or not it was possible to get a good score on a Mastermind Specialist Subject by just reading through the Wikipedia page for that relevant subject a few hours before. I was surprised at the result!

I did not get enough time to read up on all eight subjects prior to the double header on Friday and even the ones I did read I did not give as much time as I would have liked. Anyway to cut a long story short the first subject was Kate Bush. Prior to the challenge I did not know a great deal about her other than the one album I own. Obviously I knew she was the first woman to have a self penned song at the top of the chart and new the main singles and first number 1 etc but for a specialist round I felt I would barely get over half a dozen.

So I spent maybe 15-20 minutes reading through the Wikipedia page and as I was only paying half attention. I didnt make notes and just tried committing key facts to memory. The round started and straight away I could see a pattern......the first five questions or so could all have been answered by knowing the first paragraph of the Wikipedia page! Indeed as the round went on every question just about had cropped up on Wikipedia. I managed a score of 10 and I know the ones I got wrong I could have got correct had I noted down the facts from Wikipedia. I was I must say a little bit disappointed! I am by no means going to get into an argument about the nature of the current Mastermind's specialist round but suffice to say that one round said a lot to me!

A similar trend continued in the other rounds...I already knew a bit about the Franco Prussian War so my score of 6 was aided only slightly by Wikipedia, Passenger Liners was a little bit trickier to learn and I managed 2 points on this both coming from Wikipedia. Fellini films was last and even though this was not on the scale of the Bush round, I still managed 7 points with only one of those points not coming from my wikipedia swotting up.

Obviously the wider the subject and the more vague the area, the harder this will be as proved by the Passenger Liners round but two rounds on pop stars and film makers showed that it can be done!