I had the fictional Vicar of Dibley in my set today - Geraldine Granger is the answer.

I'll see if I can change that to be part of the Dawn French description.

American photographer
Your answer: Minor White


Kinda bare on the ID? How about adding MIT Prof/Photography 66-76?

He was there in Cambridge when Edwin Land built Polaroid into a giant. They must've met. During this time Harold Edgerton of strobe photography fame, was teaching photography at MIT. He was also a curator of the George Eastman Estate in NY state.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minor_White

Thanks, I hadn't seen his name yet - now to fit the information into 100 characters (makes me understand why the database has so many incredibly brief entries, as deciding what to include as the most memorable facts can be tricky).

Two from my set today:

Racehorse - Makybe Diva

Initials PF - Perry Ferguson

Sorry if they've been mentioned before - I don't have time (inclination) to plough through the whole thread.

I just add everything to my list,and check it when I get there- all information is useful.

Dutch sailor; explorer; lead second European group to land in Australia

Your answer: Dirk Hartog

Should be "led". Not sure why it has become common (mis-)practice to spell the past tense of lead like the past tense of read.

The entry for Michael Bryant includes his initials.

Fictional Character:

Fictional character; mascot & iconic cover boy of Mad Magazine

Alfred E. Neumann

Tommy Cannon = English comedian: 'Cannon and Ball'. This could be reworded as 'English comedian: partner to Bobby Ball', which would be less of a giveaway.

Raphael Semmes has his initials at the end

Fictional character - Archie Andrews

L_T,
Please don't change this game. I thought before it offered a name and we had to see if we knew the owner of that name whether it was real or imagined, human, animal or fiction (I wondered why some place names weren't part of the mix). It was laid out in a standard format too: ethnic descriptive followed by some particulars (ie, Scottish-American engineer, famous bridge - not: Engineer of bridges from Scotland and America). I have seen a couple now that state mid descriptive that a USA background attaches to the answer. The related countries were always in the fore. And the trailing initials usually were part of extremely obscure answers. I often take an extra moment on a guess answer to scan the right side of the answers to see if there is a matching set of initials. Takes me a little longer, sure, it is easier but I pay the time penalty for that. I learned some names that way. Too often on a wrong guess it is easy to ignore the correct answer when it follows that big red X. Much more informative to do the learning by the question itself.

This is just a request to limit changes in the game to corrections of typos, wrong origins and such just as JMElston did before. Please don't build a whole new game.
mehaul

Mehaul, some of the previous descriptions of family background, national origins, etc were wrong. It was not correct, for example, to call Rudyard Kipling "Indian-born" simply because he was born in India. It's fine to say he was a British author born in India, but not right to imply he was ever Indian. Salman Rushdie on the other hand was Indian born but is now British. Looney_Tunes is doing her best to correct these issues within a very limited space but they do need correction even though many earlier requests were ignored.

Many of these issues arise because the people concerned were born in the days of the British Empire but there are also issues stemming from pre-WWII Europe, when there were many more groups of people with one nationality living in countries with another. I don't know how LT has decided to refer to Kafka, for example, but saying he was a Czech is wrong, even though he was born and lived in Prague. But if he was described solely as German without any reference to his Czech residence then this would be equally confusing.

Solving some of these issues doesn't lend itself easily to the old format. 'Indian-born British writer' may be correct for Rushdie but for Kipling it's not quite right - whereas 'British writer born in India' is correct for both of them.

Looney_Tunes will no doubt produce a consistent format over time but it will take time to do this. In the meantime, as players we have to get used to the occasional hiccough while the errors are corrected and the best method of incorporating change is worked out - but in the end we should have an even better game.

Why did you choose such a world traveler as Kipling as an example? He was practically a Green Mountain Boy from his time living in Vermont, USA. And though I cannot find records of it, he must have resided (vacationed?) for a short time (like Sebastian Junger did to write "The Perfect Storm") in Gloucester, Massachusetts to pen "Captains Courageous". I'd hardly expect any of that to show up in a 50 text character resume. But the India born bit is good to help people understand his background for his two "Jungle" series of work.

I chose it because the old FT description said Indian-born but in British English that implies he was either an Indian or had Indian nationality, whereas he was the British child of British parents who happened to be in India at the time of the Raj. So saying he was 'born in India' is correct, implying that he had ever been Indian is not.

Here is one: Immanuel Kant
Born 22 April 1724
Königsberg, Kingdom of Prussia
(now Kaliningrad, Russia)
Died 12 February 1804 (aged 79)
Königsberg, Kingdom of Prussia

So rather than have him German, that means that by today's land borders, he would be Russian.

Most would say Immanuel Kant was a German philosopher.

9. Northern Irish political activist; youngest woman elected to Britsh Parliament

Your answer: Bernadette Devlin McAliskey

"i" left out of British


10. Soviet military commander; WWII hero; lead the suppresion of the Hungarian Revolution

Your answer: Ivan Konev

should be "led" once again, and an "s" left out of suppression

Minor, I know, but you can add them to the list.

Mehaul, I agree with you in principle, but you've arrived late in the game. The removal of the fictional and animal names has been going on for quite some time already.

The game is called 'Who Am I', not 'What Am I', so I'm in agreement with the animals being removed. There are plenty of real people to include, without having fictional ones and (as I've said previously) I'm not keen on descriptions which give away the answer. If the person is worthy of inclusion, there should be a way of describing them without needing to use their initials, or repeat their name in some way. I'm glad to see the game evolving.

There are two versions of the game, one easy, one hard. The easy one shouldn't have clues. The hard one should have them when necessary.

The two 'versions' draw their questions from the same pool of names and definitions. The selection is based on apparent difficulty according to the proportion of correct identifications in recent play, which is a dynamic statistic, so every name could potentially appear in both pools. (I am not familiar with the actual algorithm used, so cannot say for sure, but I expect that there are actually three ranges of questions, with easy and medium success rates being drawn on for the easy game,and medium and hard for the hard game, but that is pure speculation.) This means that every description has to be suitable for both games.

The changes that have been made recently involve expansion of information, not change of question format. Previously, there were far too many descriptions that were generic,and could apply to many people. This is a problem when two of them appear in the same set of names. It won't be two with exactly the same description (you'll only get one Australian former cricketer at a time), but similar descriptions can appear - British film & TV actress could appear along with English TV & Film actress, for example. That is an unfair 50-50 decision when including a bit more information (within the 100 character limit) could make it clear which one is appropriate for the name in the question.

Not all entries start with the country of origin, although the overwhelming majority do, and that still applies. Removal of initials is not simply removing them - it involves rewriting the description to make it easier to identify the person without having to resort to initials. This should reduce the number of guess answers, and allow players to learn about the people as they play, assuming they take the time to read the description and don't just match on the basis of nationality.

It is most constructive to offer here the specific names that you encounter with which you have some issue, since I need to enter a specific name in order to access the description in the database.

Fictional character - Hazel-Ra

Monica Dickens - English writer; great-granddaughter of Charles Dickens

Thank you L_T for the reassurance that the games will remain essentially the same. And, thank you for fixing some of the errors. I hope you understand I know that not all changes please everyone all the time. I only wanted to express that if all the 'reported errors' are acted on, the game would be different.
I always was led to believe by JME's postings that the easier game came from a separate database. If they don't then my thoughts on clues was errant.

Two more for your list:

John Dee - his initials are in the question

Alexei Sayle - his name is part of the question