A long time ago I had a discussion about this with the very first person to ever help me code Tatoeba.

He suggested an alien :)

"Tout comme le pingouin de linux, le renard de firefox, ou encore le phénix de thunderbird, Tatoeba-project pourrait avoir une mascotte comme par exemple un extra-terrestre qui serait sur tatoeba-project pour apprendre à communiquer avec les terriens."

Not a bad idea in my opinion ^^

I can draw it :)
I really like the idea^^ but I think Trang should chose the design/animal/etc. before... you what would you like?

+1 though i've no idea yet

Yes, it's a bug. A small one. We'll be fixing it soon :)

Refreshing won't solve the problem by the way. The sentence you had submitted will be submitted again and it will create a duplicate.

Bump - for great justice.

Actually, you'll soon have even better than that =] Just wait and see.

me too :P ポールご主人さま！！

I too :o

[not needed anymore- removed by CK]

This is very sound advice.

I have reformulated rule #5, previously "Do not change the meaning of a sentence", and now "Do not edit a sentence if, by itself, it is correct".

The content has also been readapted to include the problem you are mentioning.

http://blog.tatoeba.org/2010/02...eba.html#rule5

Well actually concerning the grammar thing... There's some hope to have the tags done soon (not this weekend but the next one?). So it's probably better to wait for us to integrate tags :)

For mining from other website, you can as soon as the content is licenced under a CC-BY compatible or you've got the authorization of the original author to do so (for the last point a email of that guy with say "Me , XXXX YYYY authorized the use of my content under a CC-BY licence by tatoeba etc." would be enough, we're adult people uh?)
for Wikipedia unfortunately the content is licenced under CC-BY-SA and the SA (which mean you can reuse their content only if you keep under the CC-BY-SA licence) is incompatible with CC-BY (which authorize people to make derivative/extanded works based on ours under the licence they want)

for grammar point and so, we will add in few times a tagging system, linking some of this tags to grammar page explaining this, can be considered, but I first prefer to see how we will integrate it etc. but it can be a good idea :)

for the political/controversial sentences, maybe for legal reason we will need to add something like "people are responsible of what they post", but for myself I think we mustn't forbid them for a simple reason:
if we begin to forbid some, what will be the limit betweem a "not controversial one and a controversial", there will always have a category of people to find a sentence controversial/illegal, and them we will have loooooong and looooong discussion about "hey why this sentence is authorized and why this one is not?"
moreover I don't know about you but I find these sentence the most interesting because if they're controversial it's because they're real sentences about a given point of culture, and they have more value for someone than "I'm eating an apple". I didn't join tatoeba to make it a database of puritan-ready sentences
furthermore tatoeba is an "example sentences" website which mean it's here to give you all the kind of sentences you're likely to hear/read/say in a given languages, banned "controversial" one will be truncated this and it will not reflect the truth, only the "politically and moraly correct" (I want to be able to find sentences with "fuck" etc.). and example sentence means it's to show you an example of use, not to convince you about the idealogy one sentence can contain (otherwise we removed all the bible sentences, quote from philisophy books etc.).
I hope people who come on this website, and who will come, are adult enough to understand that, and I think things will balance themselves, you will be able to find controversial sentences which desagree each other. and you will have somewaht a status quo
I think our role is only to keep the controversial part in sentences only, (i.e comments like "Jesus sucks")

I will chat with trang and give you the general point of view,
"be conservative in what you send, liberal in what you accept"

(for tibetan, if you find someone able to contribute in it I will be glad to add it :) )

MY (have to discussed a lot longer with Trang and the others to tell you what is TATOEBA
s one) position

you're so banned.

Things are already political in a way. For example: It's illegal in China (where I live) to show the blue Uуɡhuɾ flag used on the site based on it representing a ѕераɾаtіѕt movement. I completely agree that it's the best choice to use it to represent the language, but any time I'm looking at sentences here I'm technically breaking some law here. So if/when they add Τіbеtаn (please add Τіbеtаn), same thing. Use the Τіbеtаn flag? I think they should, but it's still potentially a politically charged decision.

Yet another question. What about orthography?

What if I were to add Pushkin’s sentences in the way he wrote it, with lots of obscure letters? ;)
«Цвѣтокъ засохшiй, безуханный, забытый въ книгѣ вижу я».
(Modern Russian: «Цветок засохший, безуханный, забытый в книге вижу я».)

We do have inconsistences in orthographies already: British and American sentences. Also, I mark macra in Latin sentences, while Muiries does not (btw. we have i/j and v/u too :))). Now I abstain from writing Cæsar and pœna, but it’s so tempting to use these wonderful ligatures...

> what's Tatoeba's position on using sentences that are:
> political, controversial, etc...?
> how about ones that express conspiracy theories?

I obviously have the same opinion as sysko on this. But if question is whether we're ready or not, we're not ^^
Which doesn't prevent you to add such sentences.

But we will be more ready when we have at least tags and a way to filter out by default the controversial sentences. We can then let users search, browse or export them only if they have checked a little box.

Anyway, I'll write a blog post about it, to make this more "official".


> how about tagging vocab and grammar points in sentence
> comments and linking them to sites that explain
> them...would you recommend it? would a specific format be
> easier to integrate later on?

You can link to other websites in the comments but that may flood a little bit too much the comments.

I'd rather recommend to create lists for each grammar point, and add the sentence to the corresponding list(s). Then, in the title of the list, you add the URL to the page explaining the grammar point.

I think that's the best thing you could do.

corrected :) (Yep I've forgotten to add it to the list :$ )

Hi Mane!! Great to see you here!!
I loved this project and I know you'll love it too. Thanks for joining ^^
Kisses

Welcome Maria,

and for questions about the website itself, how to do this or that, you can also ask them here :)
the same for suggestions/problems, we really want our project to be usefull for our beloved contributors.

Hi Maria,

If you have any questions about any of the Japanese sentences please feel free to ask them in a comment there. Good luck with your studies.