I am curious how many quizzes are submitted each week. There are 36 editors, and about 200 new quizzes are posted per week, so unless the list at the top of this forum is out of date or there are inactive editors, each editor puts on average about six quizzes online per week. Even if you make the standard response that "people have real lives" and make the pretty liberal assumption that half the editors are always otherwise occupied, that is still about an average of eleven quizzes per week per editor, which is not insignificant, but I wouldn't think a massive workload either.

The point of my question has to do with how it is that waiting times can be so long. Unless a pretty large portion of submitted quizzes never make it online, like half of them, I don't really see how some of the queues can stretch to a week, much less 30-40 days. The numbers just don't add up. Even if the high end of the queue ranges are exclusively for people who consistently submit bad quizzes, it seems hard to imagine that someone could have to wait that long unless they are just being ignored. Either I am underestimating the number of quizzes submitted per week, overestimating the resonable workload of the average editor, or seriously underestimating the number of available editors. What am I missing?

Most editors do this as a hobby - something to do between work, family, school, church, and what not. This is not anyone's full-time job. So, when editors go on vacation during the summer, it's not like a corps pitches in to dig out - editors edit when they get time to do so. Ergo, this (and the December holidays) are probably the times you will see the longest wait times. QMs - largely kids off from school - have more time to write quizzes, adding to the volume and thus increasing the average wait. Since these represent many of our most inexperienced QMs, their quizzes will often be worked on and sent back multiple times before being accepted, adding more time to the average wait. Conversely, summer is when most editors are taking their families on vacation, spending more time at their jobs to cover for coworkers who are on vacation (I was alone at work for part of this week - all four of my fellow analysts were on holiday!), or trying to keep their vactioning kids from starting a national insurrection. Thus, they have less time for their uncompensated positions as editors, driving the wait times even higher.

If you really are concerned about wait times on your quizzes, I suggest a rigorous adherence to the quizmaker guidelines. This will result in a quicker turnaround time for your quiz (bad quizzes take much more resources than good ones) and will move you to the front of the line in having your quiz evaluated.

Stu has raised some very good points.
I would also like to answer your question with a very resounding yes - there are a large number of quizzes that take up editorial time and never make it online. The number of players who would rather abandon a quiz then make the requested changes is fairly disheartening. The problem is that a large percentage of these players simply turn around and produce another quiz. Now, because they haven't taken the time to learn from the changes that they were asked to make in the now deleted quiz, the new quiz is usually full of the exact same kind of errors.

I know that personally I edit, on average, anywhere from 10 to 15 quizzes daily. (Exceptions are, of course, made for days where my real life intrudes.) Many of these are the same quizzes that require multiple rounds of editing before they are ready to be placed online. If I manage to put 10 quizzes online a week then I am having a really good week. That's 1/5 (or less, in reality) of the number of quizzes that I work on.

What the Canadian said!

Also, of the 36 editors cited above, some just can't get around much anymore, but only chip in when they can. Real life (military service, personal tragedy, work, raising children) will do that. Hey, if FT let ME be an editor, they obviously needed the help

There may be 200 quizzes that go online every week, but for every quiz that makes it online, at least in my categories, four quizzes are rejected. I imagine in some categories, like Music and Movies, the ratio is even higher. So, at a bare minimum, those 36 editors are editing 1000 quizzes per week. That's 27 quizzes per editor, or just about 4 per day.

At 15 minutes a quiz to edit (I am pulling that number out of thin air!) that's an hour per day for an entirely volunteer position.

In reality, it's more. At any given time, perhaps a quarter of our editors aren't editing for any given reason- moving, illness, computer problems.

So I happen to think that our little crew works very hard, and deserves accolades rather than intimations that they do not work hard enough!

I'll add my bit, about the estimate of how many quizzes are submitted. I would say that maybe 2% of quizzes submitted go online first crack. About 20% EVER make it online. If you see five quizzes go online in one category, it usually means an average of three hours editing time, counting the other sessions on those particular quizzes, and the quizzes dealt with in that session which were not accepted (and I'm a quick-working editor - others may take longer)

Sometimes the more detailed reject notes take a good 40 minutes to put together.



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Agnes (JTJ)
Celebrities/Entertainment Editor

Wow! You guys do get a lot of submissions. I had often wondered too just how many you got in a week/day or had at any given time. Reading this makes me even more appreciative of the great job you do to get the quizzes online.

As crisw said, you do deserve accolades, and I am grateful for all you do here! Thank you

I've been editing for about six years now. When I'm not dealing with real life stuff in undue measure, I can edit about thirty a week. I used to do about ten a day, but that was when I had an unusually good situation.
Right now family stuff is taking up time, and, I am only editing those quizzes that can be quickly dispatched and responding to messages inquiring about quizzes I've edited already.
I edit in music, hobbies, humanities, world and literature.

As STu said, if you want to jump to the head of the queue, your work needs to be almost perfect and glowing and, well, this is kind of hard to say, but, if you have a great deal of text it will take a bit more time to sift through unless we know your reputation for solid quiz writing without requiring lengthy spellchecking. So if you were a newer author to us and had a lot of text, it might still require a bit of sifting. If you are a new author to us, but have made a few questions that just won't work well in our format, then, it may need adjusting too. If you gave us an all FITB quiz, we would have to decline it, but it might work in another context.

If your reputation is solid and your work has not generated many errors, this will be taken into account.

The wait times often reflect a handful of quizzes that have been submitted without any notion of how to write quizzes, and some of them are resubmitted without a whole lot of learning curve in the meantime, delicately put!
We also are seeing a large number of first time quizzes submitted after someone has only taken one hundred quizzes. It is theoretically possible to get a feel for the place without more, but, I took three hundred before I dared submit one and, I write a lot!

I write out a fresh note to everyone. It takes a lot of time. When I write to someone here, it's always sincere appreciation for having tried, and an honest assessment of how it's working. Some people take that the wrong way, or resist it, but, I try my best.

The categories frequented by the youngest members of the site tend to be rather full of quizzes that need more attention and require the most patience. We get good results from most of these folks, but, music in particular is not for the faint hearted. If you are submitting to music though, we all race to anything innovative and done with care. Honestly! You'll hear a big rush of editors looking at your quiz and elbowing each other out of the way!
I suspect this is the case for other sections.
If you submit a rather dull quiz called 'all about lyrics' to the lyrics section, it might take a bit longer.

Bruyere, editor, music, hobbies, humanities, literature and world.

As the others said, editing a quiz takes a lot of time. I try to spend no more than 15 minutes on each, but that doesn't count looking over the previous rejection notices and the notes on that author's history. If the quiz takes longer than 15 minutes, then I tell the author where I stopped and ask them to make the changes I did detail and ask them to look over the remainder of the quiz. (And yes, sometimes it has taken me 15 minutes to go through only the title, quiz category, into and first question.)

Also, before I even edit the first quiz of the day, I go through and mark the quizzes in the Television category for which editor should edit them. (Some editors are specialists in certain subjects or have already edited a specific quiz.) Then I try and reject the quizzes that are submitted to restricted subcategories first, as they require no editing, just a quick note.

But the rest of the quizzes take a lot of time. And once a quiz has been edited, you may log in to find your mailbox full of questions from various authors, some of whom have just seen your name as an editor and ask you questions, whether you have edited their quizzes before or not.

We also take care of the correction notices that have been sent by the various players to the quizzes that are currently online. (Sometimes those take longer to do than the quiz editing as the correction notices sometimes require a little research!)

So why not get more editors?

Crisw - you are basically 'intimating' that asking any question of the editors is unacceptable. That is fairly unreasonable.

I don't know anyone here and don't particularly care to tell anyone whether or not they work hard enough. What I do care to say is that the wait time is excessive. I have waited six days for a response on my first quiz - and the guidelines tell me that I can expect to wait between one and thirty-two more days. Suggesting that such a situation could - and should - be better is neither unreasonable nor a slight aimed at anyone.

Many people have to wait for their first quiz. I don't remember exactly how long, but it was between a week and two weeks. It was hard to wait because of my anticipation, but it was well worth it! Many times, the wait is not the max that is posted, it just depends on the amount of time the editors have that week. I can understand that they are busy people and have other things going on.

Take it from me though, Portobello, once you have a few quizzes online and have worked well with the editors and your quizzes are well-written, the wait time gets shorter

More editors makes the editing process unwieldy because it's hard to get everyone on the same page.

Also, there aren't always people qualified who can edit AND who actually WANT to edit. It took us a long time to convince Stu to edit for us. (And sometimes where we have openings isn't where we have people who are qualified to edit in the categories/where they would like to edit.)

Edited to add:

Getting more editors is easy to say, but it's extremely hard to do in practice.

So are you saying that you don't want any more editors (i.e. that you are perfectly content with people waiting a week or more), or are you saying that you just can't find any? You can't really not be looking and still be having a hard time finding.

I'm a little surprised that you find it hard to believe that we can't find people both qualified and willing to edit. Think about other volunteer situations you know about, in your community - soccer coaches, scout leaders, literacy tutors, canvassers for charity - I have worked as a volunteer in my community, and believe me, it is not easy to get people to fill the need, even for a skill as common as driving, say.
Now take into account that those capable of editing quizzes are a minuscule percentage of the population - not only do they have to have a passion for writing trivia quizzes, (not really a huge talent pool) but they must have excellent language skills, excellent people skills, and the time and desire to edit. I'm sometimes surprised that we have found as many editors as we have!
Editing successfully also takes a certain flexibility of mind and outlook, and a wide knowledge of not just the subject area in question, but also all variations of it, in a worldwide sense. Just as an example, editors must be familiar with all acceptable spelling variations - you can't count on your spell check to alert you to British vs US spellings, and we must accept both.

It is also helpful to remember that putting quizzes online is only part of an editor's job. Monitoring corrections takes a huge amount of time and is thankless work, believe me. Then there is the sorting and categorization - my daughter and I were playing quizzes together this evening, and I kept interrupting our play when I would notice a quiz in the wrong spot, so I would have to pop it into the right place. I also noticed a couple of new categories that need to be made, as there are enough quizzes on the subject, but she wouldn't let me stop playing to do it - I'll have to remember which ones I noticed, come back later, make a category, move the quizzes into it, search all likely spots for other quizzes on the subject that were misfiled, make links to the proper other subcats, and check that all changes were done properly.

Also, please remember the following:

- Sometimes there is only one editor who knows a very technical/specific topic very well. Sometimes we will set aside a particular quiz for that editor to make sure the questions are correct and the questions aren't repeating information that are in quizzes already online. This sometimes means it may be the top quiz in the queue, but it's not edited first and/or it has to wait a few more days for a specific editor to come online.

- Quizzes wait for specific editors because they have already edited the quiz. If the quizzes at the top of the queue were already heavily edited by Agony, I'm not going to touch them because she knows what she asked the author for and already has a dialogue going with that author. So, although she may be out for the weekend, I'll move on to the next quizzes.

- For those of you with the 'green screen', I think there's a sentence in there that you should take that time to make sure your quiz follows the guidelines, make sure the quiz has been proofread well, etc. In fact, we encourage ALL authors to do this while they're waiting. It's a bit hard to see a quiz that's been in the queue for a few days that has more mis-spelled words than correctly spelled words. The author could have used those few days to run a spell-check.

Also, worthy of note is that there are ten times the number of members now than what there was when I signed up more than six years ago. With so many more members come many more quiz submissions, and as agony, LM, and gt have pointed out, this is a volunteer position, and certainly should receive more accolades than they do. With nearly 80,000 quizzes now placed online by the editing staff over the years, they have looked at about 320,000, using gt's percentages (I'm going on 25% for simplicity - which is reasonably close to 28%). Seeing that since April 1, 2006, the percentages have risen to near 30%, that is still a lot of quizzes rejected or never looked at because they do not follow the guidelines.

As LM has stated: "Sometimes there is only one editor who knows a very technical/specific topic very well." Your quiz *could* possibly need to be looked at by that editor, and if they are away on vacation, they cannot look at the quiz for any length of time if they don't have internet access or a computer. Some examples of this are math quizzes, certain television shows, specific bands, etc.

I agree with gt that a six day wait is not excessive, and also to take into consideration is if you have made a change to a submitted quiz, it falls to the bottom of the queue again, lengthening the wait time. These editors do a lot for this site, and really do not get enough thanks from the quiz authors and quiz takers alike. There is so much "behind the scenes" work that never gets commended, and without these editors, FunTrivia would not be what it is. A big "thank you" to all the editors who keep this site the way it is and also for putting up with so much from the authors/quiz takers!

In addition, to reduce wait times, it's extremely important for quizmakers to make sure that they have taken the time to read and follow all of the Special Instructions for any category in which they wish to submit quizzes. For example, the Sci-Tech category has a longstanding policy of discouraging questions on boring numerical trivia such as dates, and this policy is clearly explained in the Guidelines. If a quizmaker doesn't read those policies, that quiz may sit longer in the queue.

This is a two-way street. Quizmakers who take the time to follow all the rules of the site and co-operate with the editors will get their quizzes online faster.

Thank you gtho4, you are the only person who answered me without automatically assuming that I was doing something wrong and accusing me of slighting the editors. You gave more concrete data than anyone else and answered every single question I asked in a clear and non combative manner. You are also the only person in this thread who noted that the perspective a new member is probably different than that of someone who has been set in their ways for six years.

I read every post in this forum for the last five pages hoping to find an answer to my question, and as a result, the responses in this thread did not surprise me. It seems that every single time someone asks a question, the immediate and overwhelming sentiment is "We're the editors! You can't question us! We're the holy annointed few who are alone in the human race in being able to do what we do! You're probably just doing everything wrong anyway!" It is probably gratifying to assume such an attitude, but it really dosn't lead to very helpful answers.

Anyway, thanks again to gtho4 for the singularly helpful answer.

I tried not to give that impression, but to point out things that you had not thought of, such as the fact that finding qualified editors actually is quite hard to do. Also, I didn't put out numbers like George did because the quaterly statistics are in his realm of expertise.

I was just about to say: George is the man witht he stats every three months. I'm eager to see how we did this quarter.

As well, just to elaborate on what has been said in regards to 'getting more editors'. Often we find it difficult to do this because many of the people that express interest in working on the site don't even have a quiz online yet (or they're in the process of fixing their first correction notices). Many times, when we are a bit low on helping hands, we will turn to those who have had a good reputation in regards to quizwriting, or those with good track records on the site. Often, some editors who are in their respective categories will also have a bit of background in their area.

This has been a fascinating thread, hope you don't mind my 2 cents. I've always wondered how much time the editors put in, and how much muck you must wade through to find the quiz gems. Each week I'm on FunTrivia, I gain more respect for the way this site is run and those who contribute their time to it. Thanks to all the editors for what they do; I would love to assist someday, though I don't believe I'm an *expert* on any subject! (ok, except fighter pilot lingo. ha) Portobello, give yourself some more time to get to know the site before making assumptions about it, you will find your opinion may change.

I have to agree with djsgal about giving the site more time and about how I increasingly appreciate the way things are run and how much the editors/moderators do around here. I wouldn't mind helping out someday, though I've discovered through quiz writing, that the areas I excel in outside funtrivia do not necessarily contribute to my best quiz-making categories!