Where to download Public Domain general knowledge / trivia question bank?

March 11, 2005 9:38 AM

I need a few hundred to a few thousand general knowledge or trivia questions that I can integrate into a application I'm writing.

Ideally I'd like to download a csv or database file of the format:
Question,PossibleAnswer1,PossibleAnswer2,PossibleAnswer3,PossibleAnswer4,CorrectAnswer
or similiar. Prefered questions would be timeless in nature (eg: "when did Columbus discover America" or "how long is the hypotenuse of a right triangle with sides 3 and 4 units long" rather than "what is the worlds tallest building" or "who is the president of the USA"). This is for a minor add on to an application I'm playing with (and teaching myself .NET) but I'd still like to be able to distribute it for free afterwords so questions banks that require payment are out. This seems like an invalueable resource for things like school knowledge bowls and the like but my google-fu is failing me.

posted by Mitheral to computers & internet (8 comments total)

Many hubs in the Direct Connect P2P application run trivia bots. I think that when you set it up, you choose what categories to include, and there must be a database for it somewhere. I can't point you directly to it, but maybe this will help your searching.
posted by Who_Am_I at 9:57 AM on March 11, 2005

Should I just start listing them now?
posted by ryanissuper at 10:48 AM on March 11, 2005

If you mean a list of bots sure.
posted by Mitheral at 11:01 AM on March 11, 2005

The open-source Misterhouse seems to have some trivia files available here
posted by vacapinta at 1:09 PM on March 11, 2005

I may be able to help you with that. A friend of mine was playing with scraping browser screens on a particularly popular trivia site and it worked pretty well. I'm not sure what format the data is in but, I know that there is about 4-5k questions and answers. I'll ask him if he would part with the data. You don't have an email listed so, email me when you get the chance.
posted by Dean_Paxton at 1:45 PM on March 11, 2005

Just remember that any of these questions, whether you have to pay to access them or not, are protected by copyright. Even incorporating them into an application which you distribute for free is an infringement. Given your altruistic intentions for their use it may not be difficult to get permission. It is probably a sensible thing to pursue.
posted by caddis at 3:03 PM on March 11, 2005

Ya that's why the bit about the public domain. If I can't find something I'll sit down with the CIA world fact book, an OED, and the Wikipedia for a day and make up my own but I'd prefer to avoid that amount of tedious work.

I just can believe someone isn't running a project like this already. I did find open trivia but there questions are missing the wrong answers.
posted by Mitheral at 6:05 PM on March 11, 2005

That is a pretty cool site Mitheral. I think I might have some fun there. thanks.
posted by caddis at 6:23 PM on March 11, 2005