SHHHH! Bob (RMG) might hear you! He might set his avatar on you! LOL!

Pfft! I'm not afraid of an avatar whatever it is...

*goes to look at RMG's avatar*

*gulp* Jolly good team, the Leicester Tigers.

is there some possible way we could get back "on topic" here? lol

Oh.

Okay.

Let's talk about why Television questions are so difficult to answer from the other side of an ocean/globe.

I'd say that's the category with some of the most problematic cultural assumptions - and I'm sure it works in many directions.

For example, a question such as "which dog-owning granny from Full House won a daytime Emmy for her nursing duties in General Hospital" is a double whammy for me... I can't watch those programmes, they're just not shown here, so I have no idea what Full House is about, who's in it, what role they played... and ditto for General Hospital plus who is this Emmy when she's at home? Actually I do sort of know the answer to the Emmy bit but only vaguely, she doesn't travel.

In the same way, I wouldn't expect an American to know "Which hapless mechanic from Eastenders developed twinkletoes on Strictly Come Dancing 2009". However, I suspect, hope, that a British quiz writer would know that Americans wouldn't understand the assumption within the question, ie who plays a mechanic in Eastenders, whereas I don't think Americans realise how little of their television is seen outside the US. And I would also expect a British quizwriter to know that Strictly has another name outside the UK and what it is... but perhaps I'm assuming too much there, lol.

Anyway, these are not problems when I'm doing a quiz on a specific show... but they are problems in the hourlies and the GC because there's no time to figure out the many layers of assumptions being made.

So has that stirred the pot enough?

We do understand Flopsy, but I think it goes more to quiz writers sometimes thinking their favorite shows are watched by everyone.

I dread the Sports and Television categories the most when playing hardcore, and I watch a decent amount of American T.V. and follow a decent amount of American Sports.

Very guilty about the TV thing. I find it surprising when recent American shows are known overseas (like "How I Met Your Mother"), but I tend to take it for granted that people are familiar with the older US shows. I'm still trying to digest the fact that "The Brady Bunch" isn't internationally-known. You're missing out on the sibling order psychology of "Marcia, Marcia, Marcia"!

I love the phrase "global value" - that's really what we have been talking about. If the Global Challenge, which invites players from all over the world to compete against each other, is to appeal to those players, then the question pool should consist of questions with high rather than low "global value". I think what a lot of us have been saying is that many of the questions on US Sports in the pool are at the lower end of the scale.

Yes, please keep it on topic in this thread since it is an anchored thread and intended to answer various questions.

This is my first time playing hardcore and sports is killing me. It keeps coming up and I've hardly ever qualifyed in it up to level six - I dread the higher divisions.

I'm hopeless on sport from any country but I can at least learn from some questions and get them right if they come up again but I haven't found a way to remember all the statistics questions and jersey numbers and don't think I ever will.

My personal pet hate though is being asked where people I've never heard of (and have no idea what sport they even play) went to college among a list of colleges that I've probably never heard of. Don't know why but that ones always irked me.

I just gave up on the "Globalisation of my Quizzes" thing when I got a message complaining that a quiz with 4 US, 1 Canadian, and one Secretary General of the U.N was too British and the people in it weren't well enough known outside "UK circles". (Of the remaining 4 Qs, 3 were Brits and one was Australian.... sighhhhhhhhh) Is there anything more American than The Jacksons and Baywatch? Someone point me at it if there is

I would first and foremost consider the source of the note.

I hope the Jacksons and Baywatch aren't considered typical of America, but I guess I shouldn't be suprised if that is how America is viewed around the world.

When I write my quizzes, I tend to focus on more than my home country (Belgium). Otherwise my quizzes would all be rated poorly.

Most of my quizzes have focussed on my home state of Western Australia, and I would hope that people would try them in the same spirit that I try the American or UK based quizzes - to learn something.
Having said that, I would not attempt an American or UK based sports or TV quiz, as I have no interest in either topic in ANY country.

I've noticed, as I'm sure many others have too, the slant (sometimes heavy bias) towards american subjects.

I appreciate that it possible that the majority of people venturing onto this site, and submitting questions, are indeed american located or of american origins.

However, as a suggestion, would it not be possible to perhaps tag each question with a geographical reference and maybe limit a set of random questions (for the daily or hourly question sets) with five from any geographical location??

Is this a viable option to do??

Would this be appreciated by the masses??

Just wanted to throw this idea out into the ether and see if
a) my arm gets bitten off;
b) if this has been thought off before;
d) yes, there is no c; and
e) what others thing of this bias.

I just want to add my voice to this thread.

Had many examples of bias towards american related questions and just taken Who's The Expert and of 15 questions, 14 of which were american.

Now, I understand that the majority of people here may well be american, or ask american related questions - thats to be expected. However, this IS the internet and as such, it has to be recognised that people use this site ALL over the world.

My suggestion for reducing any slant/bias towards any one geographical area is to simply add a field when submitting questions to determine said geographical area (say by USA/UK/Canada/Australia/Europe etc) and then limit any question set to no more than 5 from any area.

Whether this is pratical or not is another matter and only can be addressed by those in the know. I'm guessing that for future submitted questions, it wouldn't be a problem, but for those already submitted than this could be a lengthy process.

I admit to not having read through the whole thread here, (and will rectify after posting this) but I personally feel that for this site to be fully 'international' it needs to have more questions set (by people of this site) to compensate for the american subject matter.

I do understand that whilst the site may have started off small and grown over the years, retrospective action to counter bias is never going to be easy, but there needs to be some adjustment to make it a more level playing field for all concerned.

The advice that is nearly always given when a question of US bias comes up still applies: the reason so many questions have a US slant is because most members are American. If you want to increase the number of questions from other countries, then you can always have a go at writing them yourselves.

I actually think this issue of the 'America-centricity' of questions on Funtrivia can be a little overstated. There's no doubt there are 'more' American questions than from other English-speaking countries, and that's clearly unavoidable given the site membership, but I don't think the imbalance is as bad as that.

To be honest, most of us outside the USA are so bombarded with multiple aspects of American culture in our daily lives - television, KFC/McDonalds, Hollywood etc. etc. - that we're way more familiar with 'American' trivia questions than many US-based players are with British-Irish-Australian (and even Canadian?) trivia questions ... so that reduces the effect of any imbalance considerably.

So I honestly don't think it's a problem on Funtrivia ... apart perhaps from the obsession 'some' US question writers have for incomprehensible football/baseball statistics ... and the other tendency to assume that only Americans are reading their question and that there's no need therefore to make clear it relates to things-American! The example that comes to mind are questions like "Who was the first President to ...", as though no other country in the world has Presidents!

... Apart from that, no problem

I'm afraid english_gent's suggestion is not quite practicable.
Terry could program a box for indicating on *new* questions / quizzes which region is involved. But who'll take care of the more than a million existing questions?

I'm sure this isn't just with American questions. Out of a lot more than 1,000,000 questions on the site, I'm sure at least one of them asks "Who was our prime minister in 1912?", or "When did we last win a medal in the Olympics?" It might seem like this because there are more American questions, so more act like this is a purely American site. Either that or the fact that most questions from the point of view of an Italian would not be accepted, even with the lower standards that this site used to have.

Hmmm yes, I'll concede that .... at least one question out of a million!! I think my point though, that there is a reasonably significant MINORITY of American questions (FAR higher than one in a million and FAR more frequently than is the case for questions written by players of other countries) that don't bother specifying the specific context - the USA - that they refer to, still holds true.

I see that some of the posters who followed my post, if they're specifically replying to my post, didn't fully understand my drift.

It has to be accepted that the majority of the questions already submitted are american related in subject, and one remedy to this is simply for more questions to be submitted which are NOT american related. Difficult possibly as the sphere of 'americanism' is expanding if you consider TV programmes (as an example) are now shown more and more thoughout the world.

However, to simply brush this over as 'this is how it is' is simply a poor (and lazy) excuse and while I accept that to retrospectively alter submitted questions to fit in with the idea that I proposed (as an example) will take a lot of time, I feel that there should be at least some effort made to 'level the playing field'.

Fine if all people want to do is answer questions on a specific theme/subject, but when attempting to complete general hourly/daily quizzes and to be stumped by a influx of american-based questions seems somewhat unfair to those people who are in the minority (namely - non-american individuals).

The internet is a region-free zone where impartiality should reign supreme, and whilst I appreciate that this objective is a long term goal, it should be something (for everyone, both admin and quizwriters) to aim for and there's no time like the present to address this issue.

To ignore this imbalance is to accept that that there is a 'class difference' with America being in heirachy position over the rest of the quizzing world.

As our members write all the quizzes and the majority of our members are American how can you insist that they write quizzes aimed at Brits or Aussies? It would be the same as insisting that you write an American quiz when you are British.

There are two separate issues here - questions that have an unwritten assumption that players will know they are referring to the United States, and the number of quizzes that are based on US trivia.

The questions you see are the ones written by FunTrivia members and placed online because they met the standards at the time they were written. If you feel a change needs to be made to a question to make it more accessible in the timed games, you should submit a correction note after playing it. The volunteer editors have their hands full editing new quizzes and attending to corrections that have been sent - there is no way anyone has time to go through 120,000 quizzes searching for questions that could be reoworded to be more precise. (I personally cringe a little bit every time I see Civil War references, as if there was only one civil war in the history of the world. However, since the category in which the quiz is found specifies American history, it is fair for the writer to assume that players will expect the questions to be about the US civil war of the 19th century.)

As others have said before, both on this topic and in other threads bemoaning the fact that many of the quizzes in a certain category seem to be on a single topic rather than the full scope that the category offers, the only way to increase the number of questions that focus on a particular area is to be part of the quiz writing process, and increase the number of quizzes that do not focus on the United States.