Earlier this week on Reddit, someone posed a pretty great question. Now that the region of Southern Sudan is going to be a brand new country called South Sudan, how is Sporcle going to handle this? We realize that it’s probably not the most important question regarding a country gaining its independence, but for a lot of Sporclers out there this is a pretty big question.
So how are we handling it?
At first, there were just a lot of nervous glances and sweaty palms. Then we just denied it for a while. There’s certainly no way that South Sudan could possibly become independent was the mantra spreading around the office. As we passed through the various stages of grief (the depression stage featured a lot of Taylor Swift songs) we finally came to the realization that we’d better take action and start an inventory of any quiz that might eventually include South Sudan.
As you might expect. There are a lot of them. Obviously the biggest deal will be having South Sudan added to our Countries of the World quiz. In a lot of ways, its the flagship quiz on Sporcle, with a lot of folks working hard to get 195/195. When we add a new country for this quiz, the 319,438 people who have a perfect score on this quiz, will now only have 195/196 answers correct. We know this is going to be traumatizing for more than a few of you.
Another huge update, will be to our world capitals quizzes, the proposed capitol of South Sudan, Juba, will need to be added to all of our various permutations of world capital quizzes. Including 4 Letter Capitals and Capitals per Letter.
Finally, there are just going to be some strange edge cases. In our research, we noted that in quizzes like Snack Countries, we don’t know if most of the sesame seeds in Sudan are grown in the north or the south. Sounds like it might be time to call the U.N. (again) and get their perspective on regional sesame seed agriculture in eastern Africa.
In the end, South Sudan Independence Day on Sporcle will be much like everywhere else on the world, on July 9th, the country will come into existance, with the only difference being you’ll be up late into the night furiously trying to get that 196th country you just can’t remember.
Here’s a sample of just some of the quizzes that are going to change on July 9th:
Maybe this is oversimplification, but as this is likely to occur multiple times in Sporcle lifetime, why rename the “Countries of the World” quiz to “Countries of the World – 2008” and start a new quiz called “Countries of the World – 2011”? It also opens up the possibility of going back and doing different CotW quizzes for other significant historical years. I’ve got a popular and well-received quiz on “Countries of the World – 1959 edition” in the Contributed games. I added a link to it as my website.
I beg to differ with Rockgolf. I think updating quizzes is the way to go, not creating new ones in addition to the old. I think it would create a lot of unnecessary clutter. A solution could be to simply add “South Sudan” on Countries of the World, but to adjust it to be 79% guessed on the results page at first (like Sudan is now) rather than starting it off at zero, like Toy Story 3 in the Pixar Movies quiz.
My suggestion would be to do this for any quiz that’s easily modifiable. For quizzes like “Snack Countries,” add an “Accurate as of…” at the top and call it a day.
As far as people having to replay Countries of the World to get 196, they can suck it up (as there’s currently no leader board on Sporcle anyway). ‘Sides, any Sporcler worth his salt will know that a 195 counts as total completion.
I think that every time that a new country is added to the world, Sporcle should send out an e-mail to all Sporclers, telling them to look over all of your quizzes and changer what would be necessary. Imagine of someday, a giant country like Russia broke into a dozen smaller countries. That would be Sporcle chaos, because that is such a popular geography answer, and we would need help from all Sporclers.
I’m glad to hear that they do updates to their puzzles if the answers change. Therefore, I presume that they have, or are in the process of, changing any questions that have NHL teams in it, since one officially changed names this past weekend.
There’s also another way quizzes will be affected, even though South Sudan wouldn’t make it. Sudan will ie drop from 10th to 17th in http://www.sporcle.com/games/largestcountries.php
I did some research on the website and found that around 60 quizzes (out of just over 600) need updating. And that’s not including quizzes like “Africa’s Most Populous Cities” with a map without the Sudan/South Sudan border drawn.
Good Luck Sporcle.