Help:Extension:QuizGame

Quizzes are trivia questions created by the users; answering them correctly earns you points. There is a time limit of 30 seconds per quiz; after that, answering the question earns you no points. Thus, unlike social polls and picture games, quiz games have a single "right" answer defined by the question creator, and only choosing that answer earns the player points. A quiz may have up to 8 answer choices, and of these one must be designated the right answer.

A quiz question may also have an associated image. You can either upload a new image or using an existing image, either from the local wiki or Wikimedia Commons, if the InstantCommons feature is enabled on the wiki.

Note that on uploading a new image, you will not be able to customize the file name or supply any additional metadata (e.g. on the creator, copyright status, etc.) at this point. To prevent potential file name collisions, the uploaded file will be automatically prefixed with the current Unix time (e.g. the output of PHP's time() function at the upload) and a hyphen, followed by the original file name to ensure uniqueness. This may result in a lot of files with ugly file names and inadequate metadata, so be aware of this.

You can start taking quizzes and also create new quiz questions at Special:QuizGameHome. Inappropriate questions can be flagged as such by clicking on the "flag" link and providing a reason. Flagging removes the question from circulation temporarily and enables quiz game admins to take appropriate action.

The list of users who have gotten the most quiz questions correct can be found at Special:QuizLeaderboard.

A list of all available quizzes can be found at Special:ViewQuizzes.

Quiz administration

By default administrators are given the quizadmin user right, which is required to access the quiz game admin panel. Via this UI these privileged users can view flagged quiz questions and, if needed, unflag them, protect them and also delete them.

The images uploaded via the quiz game creation page are saved to the category defined at MediaWiki:Quiz-images-category.

Quiz administrators are also able to access the Special:QuizRecalcStats page, which allows them to recalculate quiz-related social statistics for all users who have ever played the quiz game.

Restricting who can create new quizzes

It's possible to restrict the creation of new quizzes so that users will need, for example, five edits or need to have two friends before they are allowed to create new quizzes. This is similar to the same feature present in PollNY ($wgCreatePollThresholds) and PictureGame ($wgCreatePictureGameThresholds) for restricting who can create new polls and picture games, or in SocialProfile ($wgUserProfileThresholds) restricting who can edit their social profile page. (Note that SocialProfile's $wgUserProfileThresholds uses edit instead of edits that PictureGame uses.)

For example:

$wgCreateQuizThresholds = [
	'edits' => 5,
	'comments' => 3
];

This would mean that users must have made five edits (to pages in the namespaces listed in $wgNamespacesForEditPoints array in the wiki's LocalSettings.php) and three comments before they would be allowed to create a new quiz.

All supported values for restriction:

edits — edits made to pages in the namespaces listed in $wgNamespacesForEditPoints array
comments — # of comments left on pages using the Comments extension (such as blog pages)
comment_score_plus — # of times your comment got upvoted
comment_score_minus — # of times your comment got downvoted
recruits — # of users referred to the wiki via special referral links
friend_count — # of friends you have
foe_count — # of foes you have
weekly_wins — times you've been the weekly winner
monthly_wins — times you've been the monthly winner
only_confirmed_email — self-explanatory, isn't it?
poll_votes — # of polls you've voted in
picture_game_votes — # of picture games you've voted in
quiz_created — # of quizzes created
quiz_answered — # of quizzes answered in total
quiz_correct — # of points gotten by taking quizzes and getting the answer correct
quiz_points — # of points gotten by taking quizzes

In practise, one or two restrictions are probably sufficient enough to curb abuse. All of the available restrictions are documented here for completeness' sake, but it would likely be highly impractical to use restrictions like weekly_wins or monthly_wins.

Points

It's possible to give out points for both creating new quizzes and for taking existing ones. A system administrator should define the following variables in the wiki's LocalSettings.php file for that:

$wgUserStatsPointValues['quiz_created'] — the amount of points received for creating a brand new quiz question
$wgUserStatsPointValues['quiz_answered'] — the amount of points received for taking a quiz

Log

By default all quiz actions (creating a new question, administrative deletion of a question, flagging a question by a user, etc.) are logged to Special:Log/quiz.

A system administrator can set $wgQuizLogs = false; in the wiki's LocalSettings.php file to disable this behavior.

Linking to a quiz

It's possible to link to a certain quiz game question when you have its permalink ID, e.g. Special:QuizGameHome/1. Individual question view has a "permalink" link, which enables sharing questions with others.