How Trivvy checks its trivia questions

Written in advance, never made up while you play

Every question in Trivvy is a card that is made and checked before the game starts. Nothing is invented while you play. That matters because a card can be checked, corrected and improved, and everyone who gets the same card sees the same question and the same answer. The question bank has more than ten thousand cards.

What is on a card

A card holds the question, the solution and a list of accepted variants, for example a surname alone or a number written as a word. It has a category and a difficulty. Many cards exist in several languages, and the app accepts an answer in any of them, so typing a name in another language is no problem.

Cards also have a permanent number. If a card is found to be wrong, it is rewritten under the same number rather than deleted, so games already in progress and your history are not affected.

The rules a question has to follow

Three rules do most of the work. A question has exactly one answer, and the answer is something a person can type: a name, a number or a place. If several answers are reasonable, they are listed as variants. A question must still be correct in five years, so anything that changes, such as a current office holder or a record, is anchored to a date or relationship (“reigning since 1991”, not “the current king”).

A question must not depend on a definition people argue about. “The largest glacier” or “the country with the most islands” depends on how you measure, so such questions are rewritten or dropped. A good question is also short and clear enough to read on a phone screen, with an answer that is easy to type.

Checked before and after it goes in

A new card is checked for facts, wording and language before it is allowed into the bank, and cards already in the bank are reviewed again, category by category. A card that has been reviewed carries the date of the review, and a card that is changed substantially has to be reviewed again.

Local cards in local languages

Questions about a particular country are written in that country's language, not translated from Norwegian or English afterwards. A question about German history should be phrased the way a German would phrase it, and it is reviewed with that in mind. Cards that apply anywhere are called global cards; cards for a single country only appear to players who choose that country.

Where you come in

No process catches everything. When the solution is shown, in rooms and in the daily quiz, there is a button, “Something wrong with this card?”. Tap it, write what is wrong if you like, and we receive the card, the answer you gave and where it happened. You do not need an account. Every report is read when we review the category.