Create or propose a questionTour
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Playing Knew The News is completely free. The game uses a virtual, fake currency to allow the player to make predictions on news events. To start with, each user is equipped with $1,000 at registration.
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Question Creation
This page should give you some insight in the process of creating questions on Knew The News.
Introduction
The questions on Knew The News are user generated, and any user is welcome to contribute his own questions.
Technically, creating questions - or "markets" as many like to name them - is a straight forward procedure: Hit the "Create Question" link on top of the page and simply fill in all fields of the dialog. The dialog will detect any errors and will only allow you to submit complete and correct questions.
To transform an idea into a Knew The News question is the most challenging part.
But: No one will be banned from the site just because he created a question which isn't easy to settle!
Basic Knew The News market question considerations
- You have to find a topic which will have a near future development. and you have to determine what kind of development could happen; what would be reasonably imaginable.
- You need to set an initial likelihood of each of these possibilities.
Step 1: Simple, known events
Many upcoming events, like matches in sports or awards in entertainment, results in business, elections in politics, are well known upfront. In these cases, the second part is easy as well: There is a limited set of possible outcomes.
Many questions of this type are already provided by Knew The News, they are generated and eventually settled in an automated way.
Step 1: Unknown events
More challenging is the creation of questions where the event is not that clearly known in advance such as in developing stories. Like to ask for the result of political confrontations. To line up all possible outcomes isn't possible at all in various occasions, and therefor an option like "other" should be included. Additionally, one has to be very cautious to keep the options mutually exclusive, which means that they may not overlap and each of the options must be settleable exclusively if a certain event happens.
It is very important in such cases that the settlement details contain the exact circumstances which qualify for the settlement of each of the options. Keep in mind whether you phrase the question as being event-based or time based: The first kind of questions will settle on in case the event actually happens, and the suspension of the question is adjusted so that the question stays open as long as possible. The latter kind of question simply settles on the suspension date of the question. Best practice is to explicitly mention an intended event based settlement in the settlement details.
Step 2: Initial likelihood
Third part is, in many cases, the hardest. And to be honest: Nobody can exactly say at what percentage a certain outcome may get real. Therefor, you should simply go by what you think is reasonable, and think about it this way: At what percentage value would I be uncertain to buy or to sell? That would be the obvious best case: The option would not be over- nor undervalued.
Getting started
To get started, you can use bookmakers as an inspiration. One of those which I like much is PaddyPower, from Ireland. Additionally, you could visit an bookmakers aggregation site, like Oddschecker.com to get an overview on a broad range of non-sports betting questions. Each of these could also be a Knew The News question.
And what is best: The hardest part, determining likelihoods, is already solved by them. The only thing we have to do is to convert their odds (either in decimals or in fractions) into percentages. This can easily be done using a little Excel spreadsheet.
Whenever you create a question, please be sure to know the (few) question creation rules Knew The News defines for question creation.
