Methodology

Scoring for the daily pin-drop game works like this. Each question is worth up to 200 points. If your pin is within 50 km of the answer you get all 200 points. From there the score falls in a straight line to 0 points at 5,000 km and beyond. Scores are rounded to a whole number, and five questions make a total out of 1,000. Distance is measured in a straight line over the surface of the Earth (the great-circle distance).

On the answer screen each question is coloured. Green is 150 points or more, yellow is 75 to 149 points, and red is anything lower. An exact hit, within 50 km, shows a trophy.

The daily questions are the same for everyone in the world. A new set starts at 00:00 UTC. Each set has five questions from as many different parts of the world as possible, and an entry does not come back for at least 60 days. The answer point is a real named place, such as a national park, and not the middle of a country.

The quizzes have ten questions per round. In the picture quiz the wrong answers are similar in size and from the same group. In higher or lower the two values always differ by at least 25 percent, so the answer is never a coin flip.

Names in other languages come from Wikidata labels. Where a label is missing we show the English name and note the gap so it can be fixed. Interface text in languages other than English starts as a machine translation until a person has reviewed it.

Sample scores