Sorry cant help laughing - just did the Hourly Expert game after writing that.

The topic says "This Hour: States & Cities (History)"

Imagine my surprise when all 15 were on US states and cities.

That really should have 'US' in front of it. I'm not sure how many countries around the world have states but I know for sure Australia does

Well, where would you suggest questions like that be put, within the larger categories of FT?

If you were to be working toward your BA in Geography, you would not be limiting yourself to studying physical features of the landscape. Geography also encompasses *human* geography - I'll quote the Wiki article here: "a branch of geography that focuses on the study of patterns and processes that shape human interaction with various environments." A big part of that is what is called "Cultural Geography", and things like state birds fall into that category.

There certainly are too many questions of that type in our question pool, but that has more to do with them being easy to write and research, than anything else. Those categories are closed to new quizzes and have been for ages.

When I studied Geography in High School a few years ago, I was quite surprised to find that it was not so much about rivers, mountains, etc. I, actually, would've called it history: a history of the governments, cultures, etc.

Well that's why history and geography often 'go together'. Most of my teachers from elementary school to high school taught both of those subjects, rather than one or the other. I believe, even at my university, if you are studying for a B.A. in Geography, there are a couple of required history courses that you have to take (I think Environmental History is one of them). Not the other way around though - I'm not required to take Geo classes for my history degree. However, if I wanted to, some history courses count as pre-requisites for geography courses.

And about the state bird/state beverage/etc questions in Geography quizzes: I agree that some of those questions belong in the Geography category. For example, if you were writing a quiz on the state of California, you might have 4 questions about individual cities, 2 questions about rivers, 1 about mountains, 1 about a beach or something, then maybe 2 asking for the official State Whatever. That makes sense. I think, however, if you were writing an entire quiz on State Birds, would that not go under General -> USA Specific? (assuming those kinds of questions weren't restricted)

Actually I kind of stuffed up here by following up a previous post I made about not really caring in the quiz's but not liking them in the GC and KO etc

As far as quiz catagories go I don't have a problem with them being put in the Geography section under a sub catagory.

I was still on the fact that I don't think they should be in the GC geography questions when it's a world wide contest and sometimes you could get 10 out of fifteen questions on a 'state something'.

I say I stuffed up because, of course, this is really on the quiz's not the challenges but it's hard to seperate them on an issue like this

In France, I believe they combine history and geography into one phrase:

L'histoire-géo

Whether or not they are taught as two separate subjects my memory unfortunately lets me down

I sometimes smile when I do a quiz on World Geography or World History that is 2/3 USA.
I just assume that for some, the States is a synonym for World.
It's one of the things that makes the Americacentricity of the site interesting, a possible insight into a different culture and a different way of seeing.

Perhaps I'm beating a overworn drum here, but the questions are drawn from the quiz pool and if there are more American based quizzes than not, what are we supposed to do?
As has been said many times, if you want a better showing of non-American questions, write the quizzes!

That is a fair point, but it's not as if new quizzes go straight into the cache for tournaments. I know Terry has recently expanded the pools, but the vast majority of questions still come from quizzes written between 2000-2004.

I think all the caches are up to date now, which means most of the questions are from recent (ish) quizzes. The number of quizzes going online has generally increased every year.

I don't think it's quite as simple as that skunkee.

I'm doing my share writing quiz's - I'm nearly up to 50 in 7 months which I don't think is too shabby.

But there's two issues here.

1) Apart from a history quiz I did, none of mine are Australian based so though I write I haven't added any Australian based questions to the pool

and

2) The population differences in countries and their members. Even if every single member in the non US/UK countries wrote quizs we couldn't equal the volume that the US can produce

I think I may need something clarifying here that may answer my question.

I'm starting to gather that ANY question that is in, say Geography seeing as thats what I was talking about, gets added to the Geography pool.

I was under the impression that it was a choice what went into the general pool (like obviously the questions that appear in the Impossible catagory aren't) but I think I made a wrong assumption there

I think I'm suggesting that not all of these ones on 'state something' should be added to the competition pools.

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1) Apart from a history quiz I did, none of mine are Australian based so though I write I haven't added any Australian based questions to the pool

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Sorry if I didn't express myself clearly, but I did mean for players write more quizzes with an Australian/British/Canadian slant.

I'm guilty too! I have almost 300 quizzes online and I think that only about 6 of them (off the top of my head) have a Canadian focus (I am Canadian), while a couple of others are about our trip to the UK and Southern Ireland.

The questions can only be drawn from quizzes online. They are not chosen on a question by question basis, although certain categories can be eliminated.

Playing Devil's advocate for a minute here, let's assume we could choose the questions and balance them out to give fair representation to other countries. Because of the smaller pool of questions we would have to draw from, we would soon be getting the complaint that there wasn't enough variety in the question pool as the same questions would be circulated through the system much more frequently.

I guess it's just hard to counteract the fact that there are a lot more Americans on site than Canadians, Brits or Ozzies!

I have a slight problem with the argument, "There aren't enough questions on country X in the pool, so go write quizzes on that country to get them there." The question pool is still very largely drawn from quizzes written 4 to 8 years ago. I believe Terry only updated 30% of the cache to newer quizzes. And even then, many of the country-specific quizzes might go into very specific categories that mightn't be added to the pool. Even if they were, if we were to start writing even more non-American quizzes now, who's to say that they'd be added before 2-3 years and the next cache update rolls around?

As an American, the bias doesn't stand out as much. A good many American-based questions are just as foreign to me as something British or Australian, and as the subject of State Drinks has shown I don't think I'm the only one that would say that. Almost evens it out, doesn't it?

I did count on the Who Am I? yesterday, 7 Americans, 4 Brits, and 4 Scottish/Canadian/Germans.

Try playing those games when you're (like me) Dutch!

Or Indian! I love to get questions on French, German, Spanish or other non US/UK nationalities. That's the only time I can pick out the right answer by just scanning the options. Otherwise even if I do get it correct, I'm too slow to win.

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In France, I believe they combine history and geography into one phrase:

L'histoire-géo

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In West Australia, we go to high school for five years - years 8 to 12. For the first three years of high school (years 8, 9 and 10), history and geography are taught together as one subject called Social Studies and it is a compulsory subject. They don't split into separate subjects until years 11 and 12, when they are available as options.

We could certainly narrow it down for potential players by requiring a note in the title of description of the quiz to mention the country that the quiz is specific to, if it is no general in nature. That way there would be no surprises for the potential player, and one would be able to play the quizzes of interest to them without guessing the country.

In the hardcore part of the Global Challenge I must have faced 600 questions on sport. Not a SINGLE one has been on football - or 'soccer' as I suppose I have to call it. Several hundred each though on US football and baseball. More than a dozen on - is it really professional? - paintballing(?), and about as many on skateboarding. Since, 'globally' speaking, American football and baseball barely amount to a gnat's [censored] in comparison to soccer, I question the fairness and integrity of the Global Challenge. I understand that assorted lamewits will automatically tell me that I should set to writing soccer questions if I want to see them appear in the tournament, safe in the convenient knowledge that weight of numbers will always tell in the distribution of questions (by the way - I'm not particularly a soccer fan; it just strikes me as odd. I'm more of a cricket and rugby man, subjects which I confidently expect never to appear in the GC), but surely there are already enough soccer questions in the archives for us to see the occasional ONE? And what about tennis, track and field, cycling, boxing, swimming, golf? They barely feature. US players are handed a massive advantage in this and in one or two other categories which I can only assume they are loathe to surrender. The 'Global Challenge' is a bit of a misnomer, since in some instances it is anything but.

Well I was doing some calculations on the sports quizzes here at FT when this issue last came up, so my figures will now be out of a date by a few tenths of a percent (which is just unacceptable ) so I have done them again:

American Football - 1086 (1091 but 5 taken out as they weren't US specific)

Basketball - 595 (600 but 5 taken out as they weren't US specific)

US College Sports - 758

Baseball - 2551 (the Japanese specific quizzes have been taken out)

Total US specific sports quizzes = 4990
Total sports quizzes on FT = 10712

Percentage of US specific sports quizzes = 4990/10712 = 46.58%

Percentage of total visitors to FT that are from the US = 53.40%

46.58% < 53.40% - so in fact the US specific quizzes are underrepresented!

As for not many soccer quizzes making it to the hourlies - your best bet would be to submit to the question quest - I am sure Nightmare will take as many soccer questions as you are willing to give! I too am a 'lamewit'.

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I understand that assorted lamewits will automatically tell me that I should set to writing soccer questions if I want to see them appear in the tournament,

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Name calling really helps present your case in a mature fashion.
What solution would you suggest then? All you have done is present a problem and derrogate the most obvious solution.
I guess I must be another lamewit.

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I still see new quizzes with American spelling required but not specified

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The only place this would matter is in a FITB answer. When editing a quiz, we try to ask for both spellings in that case, but sometimes we don't think about it and let it pass. If you see something like this, please send a Correction Note and it will get adjusted.

Jonnowales. If only 47% of the sport questions in the GC are US specific, I'm a Dutchman. Are you sure you're holding your calculator the right way round?

It never ceases to amaze me that the content of this site is solely determined by the participants, who subsequently complain about the content.

If you are not part of the solution, you are part of the problem.

I didn't say 47% of the sports questions in the GC are US specific. I said roughly 47% of the sports quizzes on the site are on US sports. The pool of quizzes (and now more recently, the single questions) are from where the questions for the Global Challenge are drawn. In the sports category in GC you should expect to see that at least 53.40% of the pool is on US specific sports. GC is in divisions based on difficulty also - if a minority of people on the site follow say cricket, then the cricket questions are going to be considered very difficult and will be thumped up to division 9 and 10, the same goes for darts, snooker and lawn bowls. As most people here are American, the chances are that more people will get the questions from American sports quizzes correct and will fill up the earlier divisions.

I spend most of my working hours with a calculator close by - I know how to use one!

In the last few divisions of the global challenge, where most of the time during the global challenge is spent, very few people score enough on the Sports, or Television for that matter, to qualify for hardcore advancement. Most of the categories get exponentially tougher, those two are usually the hardest though to qualify.