Re 1) Debatable. You could also say that not all users shoud be allowed to add translations because they don't understand the graph structure of Tatoeba. IMO, linking is more benign.

Re 2) Could maybe use a constraint here. For example, sentences that were added within 30 minutes of each other may be interlinked.

Two linking feature requests:

1) Why not let normal users link their own sentences to each other? This should be really easy to change in the coding, right?

2) Could we consider an interlink feature for all aspiring polyglots? i.e.: You check off all the sentences in a family that you would like to link, instead of just linking two, and then they and all of their inter-combinations get linked. I say this because the number of linkings that a person who adds n translations at a time has to do is n-choose-2, which is only, say, 6, if you add four translations together, but 45 if you're super-multilingual and add, say, ten.

This one was too original to have a duplicate. I don't see how the duplicate script would be related.

Another sentence that mysteriously "disappeared":

http://tatoeba.org/eng/sentences/show/489392

Why is this happening?

(this was a joke... I don't actually believe that the name "Tatoeba" should be changed)

Can the script be improved? :-)

Neat-o!

But, question. Does your site distinguish trusted/non-trusted users?

On an unrelated note, it would be nice to be able to edit our own comments/posts directly (instead of having to delete+repost).

Yea, but I often neglect my duties.

No clue... I would actually like one of the bosses' opinions on this before I start creating (or advocating the creation of) blatant duplicates.

Well, in any case... even if it's not run every one or two weeks but one or two months, it's not like there's some committee that does a rigorous "Tatoeba Quality Check" on a weekly basis, right? (right?)

Yea, it's mythical... but I've seen it run once. It was a pretty glorious day. The number of English sentences jumped from 155,000 to 153,000... just like that!

I think it gets brought up in threads occasionally. I don't know of specific ones.

By "possibly useful", you mean "comments"? Otherwise, I think the priority ladder goes like this:

1) with audio
2) with owner
3) age

(so audio is kept... but I guess comments are lost, though technically still there for a deleted sentence?)

I can't disagree with anything you said, and hope you'll forgive my suggested portrayal of Esperantists as a sort of cult... ;-)

Good luck, I suppose.

K, I just took the liberty of demonstrating the benefits of this on Muiriel's sentence (sorry, Muiriel):

http://tatoeba.org/eng/sentences/show/574051

Here, I had five linked translations, and she added a translation to one of them. Instead of notifying her and telling her to link to the other 4 (since she could), I created a blatant duplicate of hers and linked it myself to all of the others (this was relatively fast). Now, mine will be deleted, but her original will inherit all the links (once the script is run...).

Okay, I'll add some detail.

What I mean is that if the duplicate-removal script is run often enough, it automatically fuses the links of the merged duplicates (to the best of my knowledge, or at least it should). In this sense, adding exact duplicates doesn't really do harm, and it can save significant time versus linking. It's a really wasteful solution, but this is not the environment, so we can probably be wasteful. Here's an example:

You're translating from Esperanto to English, and you see an Esperanto sentence with an indirect English translation. The sentence is really simple (say, less than ten words). To link it, it would require you either: a) leaving a comment, b) adopting and linking, c) using the linking address if you know of that trick. But all of these can take time (anywhere from 30 sec to a minute, let's say). On the other hand, if you simply add a duplicate as a direct translation, it'll take you 3 seconds, and you'll move on. Then, when the duplicate is run, it'll automatically remove your duplicate but keep the link. Overall, you've now linked by deliberately making a duplicate, and the time saved is tenfold.

I guess my overall argument is: if the duplicate-removal script is run often enough, there's no harm in having duplicates, since they just turn into links.

Deliberately Creating Duplicates Instead of Linking (because it's actually *faster*):

Should this behavior be encouraged?

The reason why I voiced concern over this:

If, in a year, someone comes onto Tatoeba and sees that Esperanto has 500,000 sentences, English has 200,000, Japanese 160,000, etc, and sees that most of the discussions are in Esperanto, and that Esperanto completely dominates the site and is the majority language, it might turn that user away because he/she will feel like they are entering an Esperanto website, rather than one where all these different languages are active.

Now, I know that you and the Esperanto contributors would probably say "what's wrong with that?", and that Esperanto taking such an eminent position on Tatoeba would be promising towards the development of this language. You have an agenda, and I'm not saying that you shouldn't be happy over such a thing happening. Unfortunately, it would not reflect reality, since it would be one that the active Esperanto contributors here built themselves.

You could also say that right now (well, it's changing, and I hope it keeps changing) English is the dominating language. This, however, is at least in line with reality. That really is what people speak in international groups, by default.

Of course, this all brings in the question of "is Tatoeba meant to reflect reality?", and maybe not. But, again, I do have misgivings about the concept of a language dominating this site just because of strong lobbying.

Hi ludoviko,

I don't see the analogy to programming. You make things easier so as to market them better to the user, but the algorithms that actually go inside the code get progressively more and more difficult as the theory is pushed. People who use computer programs and like them to be easy use them in a black-box fashion.

You could argue that people use language in a black-box fashion, without understanding all of its grammar, but the size of the black box is tiny compared to that in programming.

Regarding easy or difficult, there's a lot of things you could design to be easier and tell people "hey, if we all do this, our lives will be better!" But while some things fit in naturally with tradition, others go countercurrent to it. Esperanto, IMO, is in the latter, because it would require a sort of revolution for people to abandon current methods and take up an engineered language.

Personally, I enjoy the difficulty in learning a foreign language so as to be able to communicate with a new culture. It teaches you respect, and it shows to the people of that culture that outsiders are willing to make the steps to understand them. The difficulty there is what makes it very rewarding.

Very valid arguments.

The claims that Esperanto is attaining solid ground in China are, to say the least, incredibly surprising for me. Given the absolute English-learning craze in the PRC, I cannot imagine what parent would ever send their child to an Esperanto school, or why anybody would study it as anything but a hobby. I will just say that, in my two years there, I was being asked to give formal/informal English lessons at least 2-3 times a week. The word "Esperanto" I didn't hear even once.

That aside, I propose that this debate be closed. Obviously, there's points for and against, and people could argue forever (as this is the internet).

@Swift: Nah, it's been going this way since as far as the statistics allow (I looked at the whole trend starting from 2008). Anyway, I'm starting to sound like a broken record with "the growth is exponential, the growth is exponential", so I'll stop. But it appears to be true.

I don't know why people are saying that it's about bursts, though, since that has little impact when you look at the stats for over 2 years.

Tatoeba hits 1,000,000 in May, 2011, I say.