I was recently going through user submissions (a big “thank you” to all who contribute by the way!) when I came across the following question/answer:

“question”: “Bu nasıl işliyor?”
“answer”: “Bakalım”

According to Google Translate, the language above is Turkish and translates to:

“question”: “How does this work?”
“answer”: “Let’s see”

This inspired me to write a brief blog post on what happens with submissions, error reports, and e-mails.

New trivia submissions

When a user contributes a question/answer, the submission is entered into a temporary, private database which requires approval before the question is added to the public database for all users to see. I have not enabled alerts so I usually set aside some time each week to check the database and approve the submissions. The great thing about trivia lovers is that the submission is already in a great format so all I need to do is a bit of research to verify the question/answer before approving it. Some questions require a bit of editing, such as formatting or spelling. Another group are the questions with incorrect answers, which get updated and approved. I have nothing against incorrect answers because they go through a verification process and once fixed, they are a great addition to the database. And there is the last group of questions which are more posed as corrections. I don’t mind those either and treat them all very seriously.

Error Reports and E-mails

Both of these end up in my inbox and I get an alert on my cell phone. If I am not busy with work, or the family, I try to respond to those as quickly as I can.

So that’s it – everything is still manually done by humans. Although it would be awesome if there is some bulletproof AI that writes new trivia, verifies submissions and fixes existing errors. If you know something like this, or can do this, let me know!