Quiz-Making: More Hints

Answer: It's often very hard to predict all the correct versions of the answer

For example, assume the answer to one of your questions is 'President Kennedy'. How are you going to provide for answers like John F Kennedy, John F. Kennedy, John Kennedy and JFK - perhaps even J.F.K. and other variants?

Answer: Answers requiring punctuation are not allowed in 'fill-in-the-blank'

Experience has shown that punctuation in 'fill-in-the-blank' questions causes problems. Problems include different conventions for spacing and different default characters for apostrophes - for example, ` and '.

Answer: All of these

Always remember that computers don't have common sense. For example, you want to know the name of the inquisitor in George Orwell's "Nineteen Eighty-Four" and you type in the answer as O`Brien. How is the software to know that people typing in O'Brien know the correct answer? You want a list and even go to the trouble of giving the hint 'three words separated by commas'. You fail to put spaces after the commas. What is going to happen to people who follow the standard convention of putting in a space after each comma?

Answer: False

'Fill-in-the-blank' works best where there is only one single-word answer, or at most two. Be very careful with foreign names. If you ask for the capital of Bavaria, for example, you need to allow for Munich, Muenchen and München. Be particularly careful if the name is transliterated from another alphabet. Only use 'fill-in-the-blank' if you can give a really clear hint, too.

Answer: It's one-sided opinion presented as fact

Opinion should never be presented as fact. Regarding Elizabeth I as a bastard (in the plain legal sense) implies 1. that Henry VIII's divorce from his first queen, Catherine of Aragon, was invalid and 2. that Elizabeth had no right to rule England. This is exactly what many of her enemies said during her reign. So, it's an opinion but with all kinds of implications and suggests that you support a particular faction.

There is massive bias built into the question.

Answer: Yes

Sri Lanka, which used to be called Ceylon, was first a Portuguese colony, then Dutch and then British. This means that you must give a time-frame. Moreover, there are many different names for Britain.

Answer: All of these

It would be much better to formulate the question along the lines: 'What triggered the outbreak of World War I?'

In subjects like history, questions about causes need to be handled very carefully, and it's unwise to take for granted any simple inevitability. In fact, in all the social sciences (in the broadest sense) causality doesn't have the neat precision of, for example, mechanics in physics.

Answer: Try a different approach, such as finding out about HMS Devonshire and HMS Dorsetshire

Obviously, there's no simple answer as to what to do when you find conflicting information, but very often a useful starting-point is to look under different headings. You might even find a site on the Dorsetshire and the Devonshire - with luck even one maintained by the families of men who served on these ships.

Answer: The answer is very obvious and uninteresting

It might be better to ask when Australia adopted a decimal currency, and even more interesting to ask what currency Australia had before decimalization.

Answer: Yes

This answer is a grandiose overview and very remote from actual events in Italy in 1919-1922 and is only one of many reasons for the rise of Fascism, so it's an incomplete answer. (Other reasons include Italy's poor reward for fighting in WWI and a widespread fear of Bolshevism; moreover, ongoing tensions between Church and State since the unification of Italy had weakened democracy in that country). Common sense should suggest that a one-sentence answer to a necessarily complex question is unsatisfactory.

Quizzes offer all kinds of opportunities for combining education and pleasure, but they have their limitations, too; and it's important that you should be aware of them. If you want to ask a question about something complex like the reasons for Mussolini's (or Hitler's) rise to power, the collapse of the Soviet Union or the origins of European integration, it may be best to list three reasons and one 'non-reason' and ask for the odd-one-out. In you want a discussion of the causes of complex events, try starting one in the FunTrivia Community Forums.