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.

I feel your pain about the Sports questions! Others have said this, but I'll chime in too - I'm American and I also have lots of trouble with those questions. And...

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The 'Global Challenge' is a bit of a misnomer, since in some instances it is anything but.

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"Global" in this sense doesn't refer to the "world", but is used referring to FunTrivia in toto, with the other meaning of global: adjective 2. comprehensive, general, total, thorough, exhaustive, encyclopedic. So, it means an overall challenge from all of the quizzes that are found here on FunTrivia.

Jonno - if the total Sports section was made up of country specific sports I would agree with your contention that the US is under-represented. However, many of the Sports quizzes are not country-specific as the sports, eg the Olympics, swimming and tennis, are played, known and reported on worldwide. If you exclude those and all the other non-country specific quizzes from the total number of Sports the picture would look very different I am sure. And where does NASCAR fit?

However, there are other factors which influence this issue. For example, US sports such as baseball, football and hockey have a long tradition of statistic keeping - baseball even has it's own society with 7000 members devoted to statistics - and sports statistics are a hobby in themselves. The type of questions which are in the quizzes, such as Jersey numbers and colleges attended are irrelevant in many non US sports so there isn't the potential to redress the balance by similar quizzes.
Also, and this is a qualitative observation, Sports questions do not seem to repeat as often - maybe there are proportionately more questions because there are more quizzes - does anyone know whether there are equal numbers of questions per category in each round? Because this is an issue for me, I count the number of questions in each round which are in categories which begin US, MLB or NHL - 10 is not unusual.

With regard to Hardcore, like Richie I'm nipping at the heels of those in line for the badge but don't score in Sports - in the first week alone, when Sports appeared 9 times out of 14, I missed out on scoring on 4 of the games. The last time I checked, in Division 6, Sports (by far my worst category) had appeared 24 times compared to 13 for my best.

My problem is that I can't see any way of actually improving my scores on US Sports questions. I'm fine on rules and terminology for most sports but I can see no way of getting to grips with jersey numbers, colleges, batting average, seasonal rankings. Anyone got any hints?

Actually, Verbonica, in the introduction to the Global Challenge, there are several references to playing against people from all over the world so I would suggest that this is a valid interpretation of the phrase. With regards to the globality of the question pool, Video Games is not in the challenge and for hardcore members, so far this challenge, Entertainment has not been asterisked. If this isn't deliberate, the odds must be amazing.

I do know one stat - Joe DiMaggio had a 56-game hitting streak in 1941 - the "streak of streaks" used as the basis of an essay on probability by Stephen Jay Gould in his book "Bully for Brontosaurus". I don't recall coming across a question on it though. Apparently he also wrote an essay on the decline of the .400 hitter. See, I have nothing against baseball or football, am just frustrated that I can't answer the kind of questions in the games!