That's an amazing project, and I loved reading all the ways you worked through the problems as you encountered them.

There was just one final problem: occasionally items would pop up that were definitely NSFW, or just made you feel icky when reading the description. To make the quiz more family-friendly, I filtered out anything related to adult entertainment (quite a few porn stars in the top 10,000), as well as contemporary people notable principally for violent crime (whether as perpetrators or victims). There are just… some things you’d rather not read about while eating lunch.

I can't help but think it would be fun to take the version with NSFW content still in, or even limited to only those items.

It would be really interesting to use that to see how certain subgroups are aware of this content. E.g. Certain subreddits and 4chan...

Wouldn't it make more sense to ask country first and then generate examples? I'm from the U.S. and 10% of my examples were Bollywood actors.

I'd love to do exactly that, but right now I get my popularity stats from English-language Wikipedia pageviews, which is majority-influenced by the US but also has significant traffic from India and the UK.

If Wikipedia ever breaks down its pageview stats by country, so I can generate different quizzes per-country, that's the first thing I'll do!

Not to nag you, but have you seen my suggestion of using the number of translations of each entry as an indicator of their cross-cultural value? What do you think if it?

You may wish to check out the MIT Pantheon project which ranks people not just by page views, but also by the log of birth year and number of languages that their biography has been translated into. With that metric, knowing Aristotle would be much more valuable than knowing Justin Bieber, whose name is likely to decline in importance well within one lifetime, and is perhaps hardly known at all outside certain countries.

I wonder if you're mostly measuring someones interpretation of "uniquely identify" and "already knew existed"?

Did you consider making it an actual quiz with options to verify if someone actually knows what they claim? (Only skimmed the article, sorry if you mentioned it)

Thanks -- it's something I thought about a ton.

At the end of the day, your personal result will be for however you interpreted the instructions. But population-wide results should remain comparatively valid assuming each population is comparable in terms of being conservative/liberal with what they claim to know. E.g. you can still measure the difference between 25-year-olds and 30-year-olds because they're answering it in the same way collectively, and it's the differences I'm more interested in for research, than the absolute values.

I thought about making it something like a multiple-choice quiz, but it would have made the quiz a lot slower, and therefore either a lot longer or a lot less accurate, so checkboxes seemed like the only way to go.

Agreed that this is the hardest part is taking the quiz. Not sure if you'll see consistent interpretations based on age/education, but curious to see your analysis of this!

I thought the explanations in the "more info" box was very useful. I'd suggest keeping it open by default on the first page (closed on other pages) as it seems a critical to read that box before taking the quiz. Just a thought!

This was also a bit confusing to me. "Goodfellas"? I knew that was a film (I've heard the name before), but I haven't seen it, and I couldn't tell you who's in it or what it's about. Does that count as "uniquely identifying?"

> Uniquely identify means you can identify the specific person or thing — not just a category. > Just knowing someone is an “actor” isn't enough, because there are lots of actors. But if you can name their role in a specific movie or recognize them by sight, that’s uniquely identifying — so check the box!

So I would say no.

I realize you had to boil down a giant pile into a representation, but how? Some cultural categories seem to be under-represented. E.g. I didn't see a single composer in the whole lot ... or cathedral ... very few artworks ... too many films ... And it's pop-culture heavy.

Reminds me of Kenneth Clark's definition of 'Civilization' including only Europe ...

You've got the start of something here, but is it culture or people magazine?

Have you ever seen this sketch? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vZ9myHhpS9s

How are you throwing Indian cultural entities? It doesn't seem to make sense, though I have not read your literature.