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[this rant needs to be prefaced with my thanks and understanding of the difficulty in designing and maintaining a software project of this complexity on a part time basis]
I've just gone through a random 20 or so sentences and found 2-3 errors that have been highlighted in the comments in the past (both in terms of easily verifiable spelling errors, and also links between non-direct translations). Sometimes the comments are 6 or more years old.
I feel like this site is far too conservative in not allowing people to fix up other people's mistakes or omissions.
I understand that there is a danger of a well meaning but uninformed newcomer from vandalizing a load of content, but it's very disheartening to not be able to fix obvious things.
Also I don't think the concept of links between sentences is all that mysterious, and some more power should be given to normal contributors in this regard.
I.e. as a new member, it's possible for me to link two sentences together by adding a translation which matches an existing sentence, so why should I not also be trusted to unlink sentences from each other?
[end rant]
There is a similar, to me surprisingly strong, take on authorship at some other communal websites. Maybe most people are not willing to have others edit their contributions with impunity? There clearly needs to be some restrictions to stop vandalism, in any case.
Getting the right to add and remove links can happen fast. Just translate or add sentences to your strongest language for a while and then ask for the privileges: https://en.wiki.tatoeba.org/art...d-contributors
With smaller languages it might be that there is no highly active user with privileges, which will slow everything down. With bigger languages, the number of active users might be too small. You can at least comment and maybe mark sentences as OK / unsure / not OK. If you later acquire privileges, then you can go through your commented sentences or the sentences you have marked in a particular way, or sentences in a particular language marked in a particular way, and do the clean-up.
If you add a sentence identical to another, those two will be merged and all translations of both sentences will remain as translations.
> Just translate or add sentences to your strongest language for a while and then ask for the privileges
My strongest language is English and I'm noticing errors in a secondary language, so I don't think that is achievable; what I'm looking for is 'gardening' functionality.
> maybe mark sentences as OK / unsure / not OK
Yes, this is a great function, but there is there any feedback when someone resolves your 'OK/Not OK' (if ever)?
I don't think there similar functionality to draw attention to a link/relationship.
Also, adding tags should be opened up for any member, no?
You can always leave a comment on a sentence to point out problems with it, even if the sentence is not in your strongest language.
If you mark a sentence "OK", "Unsure", or "Not OK", and then the sentence is modified, the marking will then be displayed with "(outdated)" or a similar string. You can always change or remove your marking later, though you won't get a notification reminding you to do it.
The tag system is open to abuse. Requiring people to stick around the site for a while and explicitly ask for the next level of privilege before they can add tags tends to reduce the amount of abuse.
> My strongest language is English and I'm noticing errors in a secondary language, so I don't think that is achievable; what I'm looking for is 'gardening' functionality.
You can get the gardening functionality by being an active contributor for a while. Hence the suggestion on what is the easiest way to do that.
This search, for example, should have pretty much every Irish sentence without a direct translation to English: https://tatoeba.org/eng/sentenc...o=&sort=random
Maybe you could translate those?
Another fruitful thing would be to add sentences in English that others are unlikely to add. Maybe sentences particular to the Irish culture or geography, or maybe sentences related to your expertise (your particular hobbies, work, education, etc.). Another good way of contributing is to check vocabulary people want to see more of, https://tatoeba.org/eng/Vocabul..._sentences/eng , and add sentences that use those words.
People are typically discouraged from contributing in non-native languages, but contributions in endangered (or contructed or dead) languages are less frowned upon or happily accepted. I do not know enough about the situation of Irish to comment further on this.
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The link https://tatoeba.org/eng/collect...ghanM/outdated should contain your outdated ratings. I think a rating becomes outdated if the sentence is edited.
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The tags were, at least originally, meant to contain objective information about the sentence; see https://blog.tatoeba.org/2010/1...uidelines.html . However, they might not be curated effectively at the moment.
Lists are a way of collecting arbitrary sentences in an arbitrary connection. I have not used them much; maybe someone else can tell you more.
> should have pretty much every Irish sentence without a direct translation to English
Thanks! Have worked through a few of those.
Go n-éirí an bóthar leat, a hEoghan.
(Happy Trails, Mr. Eoghan)
> Lists are a way of collecting arbitrary sentences in an arbitrary connection. I have not used them much; maybe someone else can tell you more.
For example, lists can be used to:
- import sentences into a flashcard program like Anki
- collect sentences that you would like translated into another language
- collect sentences in a language that you would like Tatoeba to support
- collect sentences that you want to process on your own computer
One thing that makes lists useful is that you can download them (though currently this is restricted to lists containing 100 or fewer sentences).
> Maybe most people are not willing to have others edit their contributions with impunity?
As they should be. "Obvious mistakes" is a very dangerous concept. Some people might consider something they've never heard in their life an obvious mistake even before asking the author. For inactive users, that's a little bit different, but as an active user, I would be quite upset if someone were to correct my sentences without noticing me.
> it's very disheartening to not be able to fix obvious things.
That's a beginner feeling, trying to do everything by themselves before thinking about the community behind.
If I have a problem with an English sentence, I can contact one of many people.
If I have a problem that need an admin privilege (privilege that I don't have), I contact an admin.
etc. And there's no need to worry about the 30 seconds you would save by doing it by yourself ^^
I think that overeager users would cause some damage, but the overall effect on quality would be good.
However, the problem would be malicious users. What if someone created, say, a bot that would replace words in a language with an obscure script with "Pepe the Frog" written in that script? It might take quite a long time before anyone noticed anything. Or started making obscure mistakes or removing or adding single letters to words. Etc. There would have to be a highly convenient way of reverting such edits en masse over vetting them.
I think human oversight in giving people editing privileges is necessary, given the highly fragmented community and large corpus.
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However, the real problem here is that there are many housekeeping (or gardening) tasks that are not done reliably. This is doubtless true of small languages that do not have sufficiently active native contributors, but also might be the case with English due to the large volume, I guess.
Leaving comments on sentences is not satisfactory, because they might very well be missed. Tags such as @change and NNC are better, since they are task queues. But I meet Norwegian bokmål sentences with @NNC all the time, because there is at least one prolific none-native contributor, but no sufficiently active native ones, at least with privileges. There are lots of unadopted English sentences. Some tags are not objective designators of facts. The same tag can exist in multiple versions.
Is it possible to view all sentences, starting with the ones with the most "not OK" tags? This would also work as a nice queue of sentences requiring actions, and would be something even a newcomer could contribute to by marking sentences.
>> > it's very disheartening to not be able to fix obvious things.
> That's a beginner feeling, trying to do everything by themselves before thinking about the community behind.
@Aiji I think you missed the point I was trying to make in that there were people who had pointed out the problem with the sentence 6+ years ago in the comments and nothing was done.
So the disheartening part includes the aspect that there's no point in commenting either.
The fact that someone pointed out a problem years ago and got no response does not mean that it's useless to post a comment now. Something might have changed in between. For instance, perhaps there was no corpus maintainer for the language then, but there is now.
If you post a new comment, it will show up at the top of the most recent comments. Also, if you can figure out the name of a corpus maintainer for the language, you could try adding their name to the comment, preceded by an at-sign (@). They will then get a notification.