I see that verifying questions for the Open Trivia DB is falling behind and there are over 3000 questions in the queue to be verified, including two (test questions) of mine.
Because of this long latency in getting our questions (related to computer science) verified (note, I am not complaining at all), I am going to create the same database on our server so we can write a lot of computer science questions and get them verified by our users at www.unix.com.
I want to use the same format as the Open Trivia DB (and eventually we should send our DB dump to Open DB and you can merge if you wish). Of course, I could reverse engineer the JSON to get the basic structure, but that takes time, more time that simply getting the Open Trivia DB structure.
So, could the admins of Open Trivia DB post the DB table structure (or email to me) so I can create the same database structure for my server?
ā¦ and will be documenting our database structure if we must reverse engineer the JSON to create our own version of the DB.
Again, we are not ācomplainingā in the least and understand the good folks at PixelTail are very busy and there is currently over 3000 questions in the trivia DB queue waiting to be validated; we just want to insure that if we create our own ācomputer scienceā related DB (so we can validate faster), that we can eventually dump this DB and merge it with the Open Trivial DB.
We want all our work in the future to be compatible with the Open Trivial DB.
I get that PTG is focused on their new steam game, but this request would require a minimal effort for PTG to provide, and itās in the spirit of open contribution to the OTDB. Furthermore, it would appear no questions have been updated in at least 4-5 months. Is there potential for the OTDB to truly be made open? where the community can work on it and police it?
It is an awesome idea, but it seems remiss to let things fall by the way side with this already expended effort. Without updates or a community collaboration of some kind.
Or perhaps the database / questions / codebase collected so far could be put on GitHub so that people can fork it and build their own projects, etc.
We have a very careful approval system for questions, and that alone is why things can get backed up in the approval process. We are reluctant to open that up to everyone because we canāt seem to find anyone that we can trust to source all the questions correctly and ensure they are accurate. Making a system thatās similar to wikipedia would probably be the solution for that, but itās a lot of software code to write.
Rest assured, we are going to continue approving questions again.
Well it could be done with a system like what peer review content filters use (example OpenDNS / PhishTank).
You allow people to register, and submit question like you do now. Then people can vote on the questions and only if enough āUp votesā go to a question does it get added to the database.
Similarly, if a SINGLE Person reports the question has a wrong answer, or if the question is downvoted for ANY other reason, a PTG staff member must review it at that point.
Therefor if say 15 real people on the internet say āthis question looks goodā and 0 say thereās a problem with it itās included.
Similarly, if someone reports an existing question for any reason, it would temporarily remove it from the database until a staff member reviewed it.
There are obviously potential areas of abuse all around, and yes it might require a fair amount of effort to code. I guess it comes down to if the grand design for OpenTriviaDB is to be a more āOpen Trivia DBā
Alternatively, pretty much a facility already exists in GitHuB where the same kind of quality control checks can be done. People could submit pull requests to add new questions to the āmasterā database, and a PTG staff member would have to approve.
While still allowing people like the Original Author of this post to Fork the master database and expand on it, and if PTG chooses to pull down those changes later they can, or Neo can continue to expand his version while periodically merging in the master database from you guys.
Anyway, thanks for the swift reply and consideration however PTG chooses to proceed.
I stumbled across this resource recently, and itās extremely useful. I was wondering if itāll be updated and the pending questions reviewed in the future?
Iām currently in the middle of a rewrite of the code to make it more optimized and more stable, and once Iām done with that weāll be looking into reviewing the backlog of questions.
