Hozzászólások - Johannes Buckbeak

"In Lord Of The Rings what animal does Gandalf use to summon the giant eagles?". The answer given as correct is "moth". This question needs to make it clear that it refers to the film - in the book there is no moth, and the only possible correct answer is "eagle" - as Gandalf might be said to use Gwahir to summon other eagles, but that is fairly weak. In fact he doesn't really "use" anything to summon the eagles at all. As it stands the question is clearly ambiguous, perhaps written by someone who doesn't even know there is a book.

Well oddly enough, I just got this question to answer - did you re-submit it? As far as I can see, the wording was exactly the same.

It seems to me that the first few questions you get are the current set that we all recognise, the "questions of the day" that keep rolling round all the time. But then the categorisation disappears and we start getting different questions - actually I think they are "old" ones from the database, but it really is great to see questions that you haven't already answered 20 times in the last two days. This change has improved my enjoyment of the quiz - it was getting very tedious answering a batch of (say) 50 and seeing the same questions in the same order rolling around for the third time. So good job whoever made this change, though I can see it's a shame for someone who needs to do a lot more categorisation. Maybe the old questions are already fully categorised.

I can't see anything wrong with this - an excellent question, by the way, it has taught me a bit of trivia that I did not know before, and I am pretty well up on WW2 history. Maybe the evaluator thought "Iceland" was a mis-spelling of "Island", but who knows. This is one of the worst aspects of this game, you can have a perfectly good question rejected, and you never even get to find out the reason. Whatever is wrong with this question, it's not spelling - fix the system for 2012, folks.

Except from fire, acid or other similar chemicals what else can cause a burn?
Extreme cold
Polarized light
Expired milk products
Intense wind

Intense wind can also cause burns, known (surprisingly) as windburn. E.g. "Windburn is a condition caused by exposure to strong and frequently cold winds for extended periods of time. ". This one really should have been rejected as ambiguous, or change the last answer to something else.

Idézet: ChaoticGemini - 2011.12.21. 01:15:52

Sorry, Chaotic, but that is simply not true. Maybe it ought to be, but we could all name dozens of questions where the answer "All of the above" is included, and it's usually the right answer too. It's usually found where someone has realised the same word means several entirely different things, and decides to make a question out of it. Now I don't mind if this is allowed as a "type" of question, or if it is forbidden - personally I think they are usually quite poor questions. But what I want is consistency. What we actually get is completely random, we're told such-and-such a question type is forbidden, and then you go off and do a bit of the quiz and find loads of the same type of question.

If that's true then it is yet another poor response from the evaluators. An Acorn is an old type of computer, if you want to go looking for invented reasons to reject it. This is a perfectly good question, based on the little known fact that an almond is a seed, not a nut. My guess is that whoever evaluated it thought that an almond was a nut, and rejected it because they didn't understand it. But that's just a guess, and that's my main grouch with the evaluation system - questions get rejected or accepted more or less at random, and we are left to guess.

Which is the highest mountain in Europe?

Correct answer is given as Mt Blanc - this is plain wrong. The correct answer (which isn't even given as an option) is Mount Elbrus.

I'm not sure which topic to post this in, but does anyone else think that the quiz randomisation process suddenly seems to be broken. I keep getting three different questions about dragons, one after the other - one about the Niebelung, one about the Hobbit, one about Harry Potter - always in the same order. And then the same three questions about famous couples - Trsitan and Isolde, Orpheus and Euridice, Romeon and Juliet - always together and in the same order. And today suddenly it seems to be stuck on capital cities. I thought they said they didn't like questions about capitals, but today I got a string of twelve or more, one after the other, all different and all about capitals. It only stopped when I reached 300. Is this something to do with categorisation? It's very odd.

The Prerequisite text for the Alternate Advancement skill disease currently reads:

Prerequisite: !!HSZ!! (af_elofeltetel_9)

I posted this in the Quiz fixing thread, but I think it probably belongs here - that other thread is for spelling mistakes, I now realise:

Which of these is a colour and also a flower?

Violet
Pink
Red
Blue

How did this get through? A Violet is a flower, of course, but so is a Pink - Dianthus Plumarius.

Which of these is a colour and also a flower?

Violet
Pink
Red
Blue

No no NO! How did this get through? A Violet is a flower, of course, but SO IS A PINK - Dianthus Plumarius.

If the 13th day of the month is a Friday what day is the first day of the month?
Sunday
Friday
Saturdary
Monday

"Saturday"

Yes, agreed, but I think the (slightly) ungrammatical version is a bit clearer. But either would be a lot better than the one which has got onto the database.

From what has been made a giant mythical Jewish Golem?

"What was a giant mythical Jewish Golem made from?"

Thank you, sbart. I suspect that you are right in thinking that this is why the question was rejected, but I still disagree that it is an "odd one out". You offer a different way of phrasing the question, which you think would avoid the problem, but it is exactly the same question. All my version does is offer a bit more information (the fact that all four died in office). Both you and I are asking the reader to identify the fact that Zachary Taylor died of natural causes, the only one of the four to do so. This is the only possible corerect answer to the question.

The rules are quite clear. An odd one out question looks like this:

"Which of the following four US Presidents is the odd one out? Zachary Taylor, Abraham Lincoln, John F Kennedy, James Garfield".

This is unfair, because there are many ways in which any one of the four could be the odd one out. JFK was the only Catholic, for example. So there is no way of knowing which is the correct answer, you have to guess what the person who wrote the question was thinking. So it is ambiguous and unfair.

What you are saying is that by adding a bit of free information (the fact that the other three were assassinated) I made it look as if this was an odd one out, and some evaluator just rejected it. But it's not. This is what irritates me about the evaluation system, perfectly good questions rejected for reasons which we are forced to guess at.

I sympathise with your final comment ("I gave up on the quiz system and the way quiz questions are approved/rejected a long time ago.") but the problem is that I enjoy thinking up questions and presenting them in an interesting way - as compared with "Israel: What colour is the flag?" which I have to answer five times a day. Constant rejections like this irritate me, and they ought to remember that I am a customer. Constantly irritating your customers doesn't seem a very sensible business model to me.

However, I thank you for pointing me at the probable reason why this question was rejected, even if I disagree with their logic. I will make my questions more boring in future, and less likely to be rejected.

No it isn't an "odd one out" question. It asks which one died of natural causes, and gives four possible answers, only one of whom died of natural causes. That's how all good questions work - they give four possible answers, only one of which can be right. It would be an bad question if it simply listed the four Presidents and asked which one was the odd one out - because there are lots of ways in which one might be different from the others, so there is no definite answer, and the question is ambiguous. But in this case I specified what the difference was - only one of those presidents died naturally, and so there is only one possible correct answer - the question is not ambiguous at all. How could "Abraham Lincoln" be the right answer - he did NOT die of natural causes. Same for Kennedy and Garfield. By your logic every question would be an odd one out.

All these US Presidents died in office. Three were assassinated - which one died of natural causes?

Zachary Taylor
Abraham Lincoln
John F Kennedy
James Garfield


The question is valued as "Bad, incorrect question"!
According to evaluators your question is ambiguous.

Why?

All these US Presidents died in office. Three were assassinated - which one died of natural causes?

Zachary Taylor
Abraham Lincoln
John F Kennedy
James Garfield


The question is valued as "Bad, incorrect question"!
According to evaluators your question is ambiguous.

What is ambiguous about this?

Arnold Schwarzenegger is the governor of which American state?

(California marked as correct)

Well no he isn't, he was replaced by Jerry Brown at the start of this year. This is a classic example of a question which should have had a "current date" attached to it. It is now simply incorrect, and needs to be amended or retired.