Personally I do find them typically very difficult! Of course, everyone thinks that a question to which they know the answer is ridiculously easy, and one to which they don't is impossibly hard. I always look at the quizzes in both threads but don't answer very often because I generally don't know the stuff.
I agree that they do have a tendency to over-focus on both Europe and military history, but of course we have a number of posters here who are more interested in other things. I see nothing wrong with people setting quizzes that reflect their own interests, having done a number myself. If someone is taking the time to set the quiz it is really up to them what subject they cover.
In contrast to most people who've answered, I often find the format rather off-putting, especially the pictures. I like seeing the picture questions, and I agree that it's good to have things that aren't just text, but I find them among the hardest of all questions. For example, there are often questions that ask us to identify towns, which seem to me completely impossible - one medieval central European skyline looks much the same as another to me. I particularly wonder how it helps having questions like this in the researchable quiz, because I don't see any way of researching it. Aion's example of the Hess picture makes a lot of sense from the point of view of the researchable quiz, but a lot of them don't, at least to me.
I do think it makes sense to keep the researchable and the non-researchable quizzes separate. I started the former because there was a discussion about how researchable the quiz should be, and since some people seemed to like the idea of researching (because it encouraged them to learn new stuff) while others didn't like it (for fear of turning it into a Google-fest) it made sense to separate them, and then people could do whichever they liked, or indeed both.
It is particuarly important to try to make the questions in the researchable quiz researchable *without* being too easy from a Google point of view. If you look at the first quiz in the researchable thread, which I did, I tried to do this in a number of ways. For example, question 1 has a date and a language, which I thought would give people enough of a clue to start researching, but it doesn't give enough information to get the answer immediately. Number 3 is a picture, of course, but I hoped that it looked sufficiently distinctive for people to be able to make educated guesses and then check them. The same with number 4, an apparently metal Christian symbol. The pictures in number 8 might have been harder, but I anticipated that everyone would get the first one (Hannibal!) and probably the third one (Gordon Brown) and might be able to work out the second one (Robert Johnson - obviously a pre-war blues singer, and he's by far the most famous). Reading up a little on these characters, especially Hannibal and Brown, should give a clue to what the link is, and that would be enough to guess the fourth. I liked question 14 because I basically told everyone how to work out whom the pictures portrayed, so it was simply a matter of looking at the distinctive elements in each one and finding out which saints they are associated with!
So personally, I would like at least the researchable quiz questions to feature a few more clues like this, so that those of us who don't know the stuff will have some idea of where to start looking. I think this doesn't apply so much to the non-researchable quiz, because there you either know it or you don't. Ideally, I suppose the non-researchable quiz would have less obscure questions, for obvious reasons (I wouldn't have expected most people to answer most of the questions in my quiz discussed above if researching hadn't been allowed).
I agree that they do have a tendency to over-focus on both Europe and military history, but of course we have a number of posters here who are more interested in other things. I see nothing wrong with people setting quizzes that reflect their own interests, having done a number myself. If someone is taking the time to set the quiz it is really up to them what subject they cover.
In contrast to most people who've answered, I often find the format rather off-putting, especially the pictures. I like seeing the picture questions, and I agree that it's good to have things that aren't just text, but I find them among the hardest of all questions. For example, there are often questions that ask us to identify towns, which seem to me completely impossible - one medieval central European skyline looks much the same as another to me. I particularly wonder how it helps having questions like this in the researchable quiz, because I don't see any way of researching it. Aion's example of the Hess picture makes a lot of sense from the point of view of the researchable quiz, but a lot of them don't, at least to me.
I do think it makes sense to keep the researchable and the non-researchable quizzes separate. I started the former because there was a discussion about how researchable the quiz should be, and since some people seemed to like the idea of researching (because it encouraged them to learn new stuff) while others didn't like it (for fear of turning it into a Google-fest) it made sense to separate them, and then people could do whichever they liked, or indeed both.
It is particuarly important to try to make the questions in the researchable quiz researchable *without* being too easy from a Google point of view. If you look at the first quiz in the researchable thread, which I did, I tried to do this in a number of ways. For example, question 1 has a date and a language, which I thought would give people enough of a clue to start researching, but it doesn't give enough information to get the answer immediately. Number 3 is a picture, of course, but I hoped that it looked sufficiently distinctive for people to be able to make educated guesses and then check them. The same with number 4, an apparently metal Christian symbol. The pictures in number 8 might have been harder, but I anticipated that everyone would get the first one (Hannibal!) and probably the third one (Gordon Brown) and might be able to work out the second one (Robert Johnson - obviously a pre-war blues singer, and he's by far the most famous). Reading up a little on these characters, especially Hannibal and Brown, should give a clue to what the link is, and that would be enough to guess the fourth. I liked question 14 because I basically told everyone how to work out whom the pictures portrayed, so it was simply a matter of looking at the distinctive elements in each one and finding out which saints they are associated with!
So personally, I would like at least the researchable quiz questions to feature a few more clues like this, so that those of us who don't know the stuff will have some idea of where to start looking. I think this doesn't apply so much to the non-researchable quiz, because there you either know it or you don't. Ideally, I suppose the non-researchable quiz would have less obscure questions, for obvious reasons (I wouldn't have expected most people to answer most of the questions in my quiz discussed above if researching hadn't been allowed).
), my initial idea was:- 
And the questions are also mostly beyond me, esp the pix ones.
)...
