This is all very true. Many people probably enjoy the science, but they are less accessible for people who do not have degrees in science to write them, or at least have some study under their belt. Celebrities would be a much easier category to write something about. You could pick any of your favorite celebrities and ask anything from their hometown, their birthday, their height, their college, etc. etc. And then repeat that a thousand times. There are only so many ways to ask "What two numbers are used in the binary system?" or "What base did Ancient Babylonia use?" I guess I should write a quiz on bases now.

To the last part of your statement, that would be more easily accomplished by going to Wes's recommendation to go to Expert categories which I like as a proposal. That would get us closer to the balance we're seeking than the proposals I've heard.

I like this. Those categories do not really resonate with me. They are arbitrary. The person who said we could have Disney Music had the right idea. Instead of being disjointed, they are thematic like you say.

As to the sports, I would want to avoid a Cricket category. Now, for most of the English speaking world that isn't America, I suspect the responses might be a bit different. They might on the other hand say they don't want Baseball. I think the difference between something like basketball and cricket is basketball is played in many countries, including China which has more basketball fans than there are people living in America. NBA has an extension in Europe, and basketball features as one of the most popular sports in the Summer Olympics. Moreover, players such as Michael Jordan and LeBron James have risen to larger than life status. They are recognized almost everywhere on the planet, even probably by people in North Korea, whose dictator is a huge fan of basketball. Can any of the same be said for cricket? I'm not picking on cricket either. In baseball, the same is true for legends such as Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, and Joe DiMaggio.

This is not to say that there shouldn't be an equitable distribution. But to develop agony's point, if the membership are more inclined to this or that, then some deference should be paid to those preferences since it is a business. I may be undermining my point. I haven't checked the numbers. Perhaps cricket, rugby, etc. are more popular by far than American sports. But I suspect for an English language site that is based in America and who has probably a larger American membership base than any other country that that is not the case.

My concluding point is to say that invoking a Sports category must do its best to pool on the most general and most widely patronized of the sports and personalities of those sports to which the average person would be familiar. There are a number of sports that few people have seen on television or would know if they saw them, and for whom celebrities on par with the Michael Jordans and Babe Ruths are scarce. So the more general the better and the more specific on rarer bases. But with an Expert style selection process I don't think that would be in the cards. It would be a pure percentage and whether it is baseball on one day or cricket on another will be purely respective of the relative frequency of their representation in the subcategories in Sports, which I have no reason to think would not ultimately be acceptable to most players, more acceptable than the current system (since so far, of all the responses, people seem to like bringing back Sports, even if they know on some days it will be a game that they don't follow or watch).

With 21 general categories in Sports and one per 15 days, you'd expect any given Sport to show up every 315 days, thus a little more frequently than once per year. (The occasional specialist category will somewhat shift this - a sport like Baseball with a LOT of specialist categories might statistically come closer to one per 200, while others with none might be closer to one per 400).

I think the advantage of seeing the one sport you really love once a year outweighs the disadvantage of having to rely on your teammates on the one you absolutely don't care about once a year as well. Remember that a game like Heroes is meant to hit weak topics for everyone - that way, everyone gets to shine and the "team" aspect of performance is emphasized. It's not supposed to let the star players just breeze through the commonly played topics for a 90+ point contribution every day!

Well said, Wes!

TriviaFan,

If you do write a quiz about Base Numbering Systems, please call it "All About That Base, No Treble".

Isn't Cricket played in several different countries (UK, Australia, South Africa, various islands in the West Indies, etc.) including India, the second most populous country in the world? Not that I should argue in favor of it since I know very little about the sport but I am suggesting there are likely more cricket fans worldwide than baseball fans.

Another day, another repetition. Yesterday was Lyrics Mixture. Today is Music from TV and Movies. That's two days in a row where a large share of the questions revolved around lyrics, even though it is ostensibly on a 14 day cycle, according to Wes. Even more evidence that the game proffers many of the same style topics, even though the root categories are different.

A quick Google search says basketball has 825 million fans while cricket has 2.5 billion. Perhaps basketball is played in many countries, but perhaps there are more cricket fans in some or many of those countries than basketball fans, so that my point was actually just incorrect for failing to take this into account. So that when it is all added up there are indeed more cricket fans than basketball fans, even if basketball is played in more countries (I'm not sure if it is).

Are you giving me an Author Challenge?

If you want to submit it in the Author Challenge section, I will do it!

Done.

Lyrics Mixture from Humanities or from Music?

The site is never going to differentiate between the contents of the subcategories chosen. Just because we might get 'Cats' from Animals one day doesn't mean we won't get 'Cats in Entertainment' or 'Cats' (the musical) in Humanities the next day, and that's just taking into account the idea that the subcategories might contain the same key word (which 'Lyrics Mixture' and 'Music From TV and Movies' really doesn't).

As someone who manually curates an aspect of this site on a biweekly basis, choosing variable subcategories and whatnot, it's very time-consuming and someone is always going to be disappointed, regardless of the choices made. I would suggest that the system is working fine (and as intended) in this instance.

Random chance is still going to see coincidence.

The number of fans of any sport, or indeed any THING, worldwide, is not very relevant to this discussion. Of more relevance is the number of fans on Funtrivia. The number of quizzes online on the subject can be a rough guide , though a very prolific author or two can throw off that metric, as has been noted.

And a great job that you and your fellow administrators/editors do curating this site. I thinks it's important that every once in awhile we remember to take a minute or two to thank the volunteers who make Fun Trivia such a great place.

I agree with gracious 1. We watched "Thank Your Lucky Stars" (1943) on Turner Classic Network last night. It starred Eddie Cantor, Dennis Morgan, Joan Leslie, Humphrey Bogart, Bette Davis, Olivia de Havilland, Errol Flynn, John Garfield, Ida Lupino, Ann Sheridan. Now THAT's entertainment!

Movies like "Gaslight" will be classic no matter what era you happen to be in.

Heroes just seems like it repeats itself, you can have "Death becomes them" in two different categories and there are others like that.

Just counted four separate "Entertainment..." ones on my Expert list.

"Entertainment by themes"

"Entertainment by decades"

"Entertainment Grab Bag"

"Entertainment Other"

DireWolf is correct. On 3/10 I believe, we had Animals by Region come up again, a topic which according to a member here who keeps a record of Heroes topics, appeared 5 weeks ago. This is odd given that Wes says it is a 2 week rotation so I'm not sure how this would have happened. But he says it and I think he is probably correct, unless he was rounding or something. But he said 35 and so I trust him. Now what is that the 3rd or 4th time we have had a category repeat within around a month's time and happening with multiple categories and then in some cases we would have the same basic kind of topic come up in multiple times. Like one day you might have a UK Geography quiz and then the next day it would be UK History. The question is is there a system that could replace the current system that would fix the problem without also adding newer or worse problems than this one. I'm not sure there is because as another poster said, there will be someone to complain about any kind of arrangement for doing things. I suspect there are also people that will find something wrong with any system and that no system could ever be designed to their liking. I hope I'm not sounding like one of those people. But I think it's something other people have experienced, that there is a thought or inkling about what the resolution might look like or be, and then all that I think is missing is a consensus that it's not just a few people that are talking about something that no one else is really thinking about. If a lot of people are thinking about it, then maybe it's worth it. Otherwise maybe not.

To respond to a comment from Thursday, it has been pretty thoroughly discussed, I think, why number of something is not a proxy for its popularity. One point that wasn't hit though is that there are quizzes online from 2001, maybe even before. So even if Movies is extremely popular, even by a 6:1 margin let's say, then is it still so if you break it down by year? How many of those people are still playing? Less or more? More of them have probably left. Has the ratio decreased or become even more pronounced in 2014-2019 compared to 2001-2005? So even if there were a lot of people writing a lot of Movie quizzes from 2001-2010, many if not most of them may not even be at this site anymore. Why should the current membership be held hostage because a small group of players wrote hundreds if not thousands of quizzes about topics that no longer interest them? It's like the membership is now saying they think there is too much of this and you're saying, "Well there are more quizzes in that area too so we should really defer to membership (using total # of quizzes as proxy" while ignoring what membership is actually saying! So I think using that as a proxy proves nothing.

Just look at the links on this page: https://www.funtrivia.com/authors.cfm

In many cases, not all, but some of these players who have hundreds and thousands of quizzes online have written more about television and movies than any other topic. Like someone said, if you have a 22 episode season, you could literally write a quiz on every single episode for every season. Even if you only do one quiz per season, if a show lasts 10 seasons, you have 10 quizzes. Do that for 10 shows and you have 100 quizzes.

You can't do that for math or physics or something else. Like Wes said, there isn't a lot you can write about before long winding up in something that someone would have to have a degree in to know what the question is talking about. But tv you can write thousands, millions even if you lived long enough.

I suppose the response to that could be, "Yes but these quizzes themselves also have a lot of plays, much more than a quiz in this other category." This is true but some of it is also promotion I think. If I had a teammate who published a quiz, I would probably never play it unless they posted on the board about it or someone posted it that they had written a quiz. I just simply never knew that they published it. I suspect some of these people have come from the historically really large teams and were not shy about announcing when they had a new quiz online, and because of their popularity and reputation for quiz writing, people played them. I also don't deny that in many cases the subjects were very popular.

Yet another confounding variable is when you have challenges like The Biggest Fan which makes you play certain member's quizzes to win the award. That means for every writer who wrote a quiz about physics but only wrote 1, or 4, or 7, they don't get the opportunity for someone to come along and play their quiz they otherwise would have never played. But in the many cases of players with hundreds of quizzes just in TV and movies, the chances of someone coming along and playing 150 of their quizzes is greatly magnified, so that it actually does not even make a lot of sense to say, "Look, these quizzes have been played thousands of times!" Yes they have been played thousands of times. But when you have challenges that put people to playing those quizzes (mini-badges requiring you to play movie quizzes, daily challenges requiring you to play movie quizzes, Biggest Fan challenge which almost inevitably leads most people to playing movie and television quizzes from authors with hundreds of authors quizzes), these numbers become inflated.

Another data point I discovered, 3,468 people have the 24 Hours of Movies badge. But for 24 Hours of Science only 2,457 have it. That's about a 1,000 difference. The badges require 200 correct questions. At an average of 10 questions per quiz and assuming, a very generous assumption that none of those thousands of players got a single question wrong, that's 20 quizzes times a thousand persons, that's 20,000 plays. In reality where people are averaging 7-8 questions correct per game, then it may be closer to 25,000. 24 Hours of Movies is also apart of Hall 1 challenges and many new players start by tackling the earlier challenges first. 24 Hours of Science is in Hall 3 and so movies topics are actually being emphasized even in the 24 Hours mini-challenges. Again, all this goes to prove that the number of quizzes and number of plays says basically nothing about what people want or what people like.

And quiz lists. I forgot to mention quiz lists. If you are a player with 500 quizzes online, I suppose one thing you might try to do to get more plays and more ratings, you make a quiz list. And with that many quizzes, you can probably make a lot of quiz lists. So then you run into the same problem. More people playing the same quizzes or same category quizzes, massively inflating the numbers in those categories but reflecting nothing since those people are not actually interested in the topics, they are only playing it so they can win a badge so they can say "I won this badge" or "I am top 10 in badges" or whatever their goal is.

When you go to a public trivia night, you will find most of the questions are in fact oriented towards topics like movies, music and television. They are the type of category where a lot of people feel they will recognise something, unlike areas that require a more academic background. While most people have forgotten over 90% of the math and science they learned in school within ten years of leaving (a very depressing statistic for those of us who teach in those areas, but one which is consistently reproduced in research), they have been watching tv, listening to music and going to the movies on a regular basis for a long time. It's not just on this site that players show a definite preference for "light" topics in their trivia.

"DireWolf is correct."

I took a screen shot of that to save for later.

We clearly had a hiccup in the category rotation - possibly related to leap day. I have noticed that the last Sci/Tech fell on an unusual weekday as well.

I see nothing wrong with these divisions.

Me neither. It just catches people off guard thinking it's the same topic when it's not.

If you're going to have TV, sports and entertainment...why not video games?

It's as good of a topic as any of the other ones.

I don't see why very many should be excluded to begin with.

And then you have days when the category is The Law and questions like this one come up:

"The Mounties were frequently portrayed in literature and movies. Who starred in the 1940 film "North West Mounted Police"?"

Pop culture somehow seems to infiltrate almost everything. I'm sure somewhere there is a math question asking about who played John Nash or how many Academy Awards "A Beautiful Mind" won.

That's a post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy. You are assuming what you set out to prove. Moreover you are reasoning from the macro level that because people in general prefer lighter trivia topics that therefore people at this website prefer it as well, without explaining how you deduced that the demographic at this site is equivalent to the demographic who plays pub trivia.

But obviously, even if everyone here thinks the preference is far too biased toward movies and television and pop culture, it is SO OBVIOUS that the vast majority prefer it that way, even if the majority say they don't.