It's Not About Lists

You will often hear - on Eggheads, for example - about quiz contestants "learning lists".

When I set out on the compilation of this collection, I didn't want to keep complete lists of information that could be found elsewhere.  I wanted to focus on the facts that were most likely to come up in quizzes.  There's no point, for example, in keeping a list of every Nobel prize winner there's ever been; there are plenty of books (and now websites) that do that. I thought it was better to concentrate on (for example) when Albert Einstein won his Nobel prize.

I still believe this, in the main; but over the years I've come to the conclusion that in some cases it is easier to learn a complete list, rather than try and second guess which individual items are going to come up.  It's also handy to have all the information in one place - and in the format I want it in; and on my website you can test yourself by leaving the answers hidden. You can't do that in a book, or on Wikipedia (to name just one example).

So you will find some complete lists on this website.  There are complete lists of national capitals and US state capitals, English kings and queens since 1066, SI units, UK prime ministers, US presidents, and so on.

But these are only a small part of this collection.  In most cases, I've concentrated on the facts that you're most likely to need in a quiz.  So for example, in the Film section there's a page called Film Stars, which lists some famous film stars and some of their films.  It doesn't list every film star that there's ever been (for that you'll need imdb); and for the ones it does list, it doesn't list every film that they've appeared in.  It just lists the ones that happen to have come up in quizzes that I've been involved in.

If, when browsing this website, you find yourself asking, "Why hasn't he included so-and-so?", the answer is probably just that I've never heard it asked in a quiz.

© Haydn Thompson 2017