Ambiguous moon question in Round 3: does "largest moon" need a planet named?

The prompt just asked for "the largest moon in the solar system." My team wrote Ganymede. Another team wrote Titan and argued the host never specified "current accepted measurements" versus "largest visible apparent size." Nobody at the table had ever heard that distinction before.

That is a badly phrased question, full stop. If a host leaves room for alternate interpretations, the safest ruling is to void it and make the round score out of one fewer point.

Our circuit added a proofreading checklist after this exact type of problem. Any superlative question now gets a required qualifier line: by area, by population, by distance, by mass, and so on.

If the host intended the modern astronomy answer, then the wording should have been "largest moon by diameter." Trivia should not require contestants to reverse-engineer the editor's assumptions.

I would not credit Titan here, but I would also not keep the question live. A question can have one best answer and still be defective enough to void.

Small note: if the event packet cited an old sourcebook, that might explain where the alternate confidence came from. Some outdated quiz decks carry weird astronomy phrasing forward for decades.

In appeals we always asked whether a reasonable, well-prepared team could hear the prompt and still disagree in good faith. Your thread proves the answer is yes, which is usually enough to toss the point.

Another sign the item should be retired: everyone is now debating the instructions instead of the knowledge. That usually means the question failed its job.

Void the question, publish the reason, and move on. Nothing makes players trust a host more than hearing "we wrote this badly and we are not pretending otherwise."

Sounds like the consensus is stronger than I expected. I am sending the organizer a note asking them to void it rather than crown one team as "more technically correct" after the fact.