The world's first online crossword puzzle tournament

How to be constructive? If the question inputters and question checkers are not professional, or are quite ignorant of facts, then the mistakes will not be corrected. Just as well as correcting, an ignorant person can also correct something wrong. This is the constructive side of this message. I was lucky enough to chat with user rabapalm at the tournament, who, according to himself, has solved thousands of crosswords and rarely sees mistakes there. That's the thing, Vint solvers learn some wrong facts, incorrect spelling and some solving style "they ask: crook - the correct answer is jebejauhaa, because I once had that in a puzzle". I have solved very few and have encountered at least one mistake in every crossword, but the second crossword of the last tournament was so full of mistakes that it was simply the last straw. I had simply been under the impression before that you could overlook these nonsense. This is the direct, visible side - this error. You can't organize competitions if the facts are directly wrong. Did you have Sudoku puzzles at first, where a few numbers could be arbitrarily placed, wrongly, or chess, where you could move the king like a spear on every even-numbered move? Hardly. Please treat crossword puzzles with the same honesty. It is a linguistic game that has its own rules. The other, deeper side, however, is that every linguistic and fact-critical database simply needs a little better thought out than this "everyone does it" database that you founded with your hooray. Your ultimate goal may even be right, that we do it ourselves - we consume it ourselves - and everything is great - but in the end it is probably just a big headache for you. The point of crossword puzzles is not that I cross a Congolese village and a Moscow taxi driver and then let them think. Every good crossword puzzle is a work of art to some extent. Your effort at the moment is comparable to getting amateurs to write sentences and then my program writes a novel. It doesn't write. But you are perfectly capable of producing a monotonous, just-as-it-is crossword puzzle with your algorithm. If someone created a normal database for you. And a little bit of know-how would tell you in advance which patterns in a crossword are not nice. Which would be factual, free of nonsense and junk. But unfortunately, your machine still can't create a good crossword until it learns to put nonsense, junk and something you don't understand in the right place in each crossword, whether it stinks or smells. In other words, human sloppiness.

so if you want to be more direct: put the 2nd crossword of this tournament here, where there were questions like Estonian city -> RKVERE, sun god->HORS, cat name->MIIA .. then see for yourself and answer yourself, does it make sense to solve such a crossword in a competition?

Crossword(s) is a very appropriate term, literally. In the talk shows (well, it's a good term, isn't it), yes, mistakes were discussed, but let's still let the baby be born. Errors are corrected and new input words are added, and difficulty categories are also created in general and by topic. At the same time, there is nothing wrong with gaining some nice knowledge right now... I consider a comedy show (for example, "Herringas venuse ölal") successful for me if there is at least 1 good memorable joke in it, sometimes "foot-stomping" jokes are also suitable... Drawing a parallel, a crossword can be considered nice for me at least because of gaining one new piece of knowledge. It is not worth suffering from the so-called burps at first: eh, ah öh, möh, oeh, uih etc. They all exist in our minds and languages, even the housewife's cat Miia from Kokaviidika exists! The questions need to be corrected, which is partly hindered by technical limitations. For example, the question about the Japanese theater No proposed above should be added to the English and Noh is fine. Why is "The Golden Fleece" so popular worldwide(?) - answers are answers, but questions are good! Or vice versa :D Later, when crosswords come in different categories, we will add explanations, for example: 1. (weakest) category 13x8 - contains at least one word worth 20 points and 5 13 point values; there may be errors (repetitions), etc. etc. Rules can be designed and "professionals" can choose and solve crosswords that match their skills. Coming back to the beginning, I think that a crossword is a limited set of words that are located perpendicular to each other :) The more difficult ones could still be called `crossword puzzles`

My question was posed because, unfortunately, there are a lot of words or knowledge in crossword puzzles that don't actually exist. They are neither easier nor harder, they are wrong. It's quite difficult for me to compare it to a good or bad joke.

... or rather, first of all, it is necessary to achieve a level of being able to write a word at all. RKVERE or HORS is not one at all, at least not in the form in which it was asked. If one is able to write a word correctly, then we are talking about crosswords and crossword puzzles. Just like letters and numbers can be crossed and crossed, a crossword puzzle is something else.

Make a new database, delete this current mess.

The point is that knowledge pays, because knowledge does not arise overnight. In order to adequately edit the currently created database, a person must have read books, know written language, be up to date with diverse information and know where to get reliable information. Because if you start checking word for word, it would take forever, and in addition, a stupider person will not distinguish between correct and incorrect information. A smarter person does not always do this either. Unfortunately, a smarter person also wants to get paid for their work. In this sense, the ideology of makeup is a bit of a bust, because instead of real truth, they are currently getting "facts" written in the written language of the average active person on the Internet. Let's be honest, many of the characters here cannot spell a single sentence, and how many are interested in fact-checking as such. So at this level, there is no hope that things will start to improve. But at the same time, maybe I shouldn't be too discouraged by my rumbling as a relic character. Because your crossword puzzle can continue to function peacefully as a game, where more practiced solvers are simply like monkeys trained with electricity. They answer the question red?->banana, and everything is correct.

I fixed the typo, I found the sentence "The sun god also ruled in Novgorod, his name was Hors" on the Internet - what's the point of that now? Instead of the cat's name, I put a female name as a suffix. I put the word beta next to the crossword phrase everywhere - so that everyone would understand that this is not the final version. How to reach the final version? We probably need a process for verifying questions/answers. The verifiers would be specialists in their field, for example, users MrQb and umbluu. The verifiers would then have the right to change everything - the question, the answer, the difficulty level, the category. Or delete the question altogether. In addition, there is also a "confirm" button, which means that the question has been finally confirmed. What would these two people want for such work? Free VIP status for years, their name on Vint.ee crosswords (like Tiidu's name on Sudokus)? That's a separate topic of negotiation, isn't it? Once these 15,000 entered questions have been reviewed, we can say that this is the final version. PS! It's very easy to tell the generator not to cross two questions with a difficulty level of 40, so we can solve this problem if all answers have a difficulty level attached.

Yes, indeed, there is an Old Slavic sun god Hors https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hors https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Хорс apologies

I clarified the question: "Slavic sun god." But what do you think about verifying the questions?