Nostalgia
How Every Trivia Question Gets Checked
There is a particular kind of silence at a birthday party when someone reads out an answer and a person in the room knows it is wrong. Nostalgia trivia is unusually exposed to this, because the people playing lived through the decades being asked about. They remember.
So the questions get checked before they are printed, and the checking is written down.
The process, in order
- A question is drafted with its answer and the three wrong options.
- Two independent published sources are found that confirm the answer. Where possible one is a specialist authority — the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for an Oscars question, the Baseball Hall of Fame for Jackie Robinson, the Country Music Hall of Fame for Hank Snow, The Canadian Encyclopedia for Canadian history.
- The question is re-checked independently, against the sources, as a separate pass rather than at the moment of writing.
- Question, round, all four options, the correct letter, the fun fact, both source links and the result of the re-check go into a spreadsheet, one row per question.
- Anything that cannot be confirmed twice is cut rather than guessed.
The record
The 80th Birthday Trivia Book has 254 rows in its ledger, one per question. In the independent re-check, 247 passed as written. Seven did not: four had a fact that was wrong or ambiguous and were reworded before printing, and three had a fun fact that didn't hold up and had it corrected or removed. The 90th Birthday Trivia Book has 202 rows; 195 passed as written, and seven were corrected the same way, six of them fun facts. Those ledgers are kept as files, not as a claim in marketing copy.
It is worth being precise about what that does and does not promise. It means every answer was confirmed against two published sources, looked at twice, and fixed where the second look found a problem. It does not mean the books are perfect. Sources disagree, dates get muddled between a recording and its release, and a question can be technically correct but ambiguously worded.
If you find a mistake
Email us. Point to the book, the question number and what you believe the right answer is. Corrections go into the next printing, and we would rather hear it from you than not hear it at all. The contact address is on the help page and in the footer of every page here.
If you would like to see the style of question this produces, both free sample quizzes are drawn straight from the ledgers, with their sources shown: ten questions from the 80th book and ten from the 90th.
