Crowd iodiocy is when 4066 people vote up the definition that is not the more complete and accurate. Only 1419 voted up the complete and accurate definition, which ranks only 3d.

That proves brilliantly that the public, on linguistic Internet sites, is not wise, and prefers to crack bad jokes and ridicule the service that is supposed to be rendered.

Hence my conclusion : crowd wisdom is crowd idiocy. QED

Only to you doesn't it look obvious, bizarrely... Logic, you were saying ??

I don't know what you're talking about with your "logic".
The topic here is "crowd wisdom" to be applied to Tatoeba sentences.
I just provided a good exemple of crowd idiocy, in an Internet linguistic service, parallel to what Tatoeba does.

Sure, here is a typical example http://www.urbandictionary.com/...hp?term=snatch

You'll notice that the correct definition is only the 3d, with only 1419 votes up, when the 1st got 4066.
That means that 4066 idiots took the pain to do this.
It's a clear proof that so-called "crowd-wisdom" is just crowd-idiocy. And it's massive.
I can't see why Tatoeba would be different, since the same people use both services...

Bon, finalement, j'ai redémarré ma machine et mon clavier perso semble fonctionner à nouveau. Il doit y avoir quelque chose (un site...) qui a modifié mon clavier en mémoire. C'est bizarre.
Le problème, c'est que j'ai créé plein de phrases avec des espaces insécables à la place des normales.
Une idée de ce que je peux faire pour les changer en masse ?

À ce propos, il y a toujours le problème, dans les phrases françaises, de phrases en double avec version espace insécable ou normale avant les points doubles ou avant et après les guillemets.
Il y a aussi des doubles (et pas qu'en français), avec les apostrophes informatiques (') et les apostrophes typographiques (’), voir celle-ci (′)

Il faudrait normaliser ça. Idéalement, à la source, à l'insertion de la saisie.

Merci, c'est sympa, surtout d'avoir les liens vers les recherches Tatoeba.
On voit qu'il y a un boulot énorme et ça prouve que les phrases de Tatoeba manquent cruellement de variété, en termes de vocabulaire.

Bon, j'ai peut-être une piste, mais je ne comprends pas pourquoi le problème est soudain survenu.
Sur les conseils de Pharamp, j'ai utilisé l'application Mac OSX Ukelele pour personnaliser mon clavier, ce qui me permet d'écrire en plusieurs langues, dont l'espéranto, avec un seul dessin de clavier. Je trouvais ça génial.
J'utilise actuellement la version 10.11.1 d'OSX, El Capitan (qui est vachement mieux que les précédentes, mon Mac connaît une nouvelle jeunesse...) et lorsque j'ai migré mon Mac vers cette version, je n'ai pas noté de changement de comportement dans Tatoeba.
Il semble donc que des mises à jour ultérieures « invisibles » aient changé le comportement du clavier personnalisé.
Lorsque je passe en clavier français standard, le problème semble réglé. Mais pas avec mon clavier personnalisé, qui fonctionnait pourtant à merveille auparavant.
Je pense ne pas être le seul contributeur à employer Ukelele, donc le problème risque de se reproduire pour d'autres.
Les arcanes des mises à jours Apple semblent de plus en plus insondables.
En attendant, je ne peux plus écrire en espéranto. Sniff.

The system, alas, seems not to learn anymore...

Je suis toujours totalement opposé à  votre système pseudo-démocratique d'appréciation de la qualité des phrases.
Le fait d'être un administrateur du corpus ou un gestionnaire du corpus n'est pas un gage de qualité, ni non plus que plusieurs contributeurs, par ailleurs peut-être ignorants, approuvent une phrase.

Une phrase est soit correcte ou incorrecte. Ça ne dépend pas de l'appréciation de qui que ce soit. C'est juste un fait.

Vraiment bizarre, parce que je tape avec le même clavier qu'avant, je n'ai rien changé. Comment se fait-il que ce soit désormais considéré comme insécable par Tatoeba ?

*** césure incorrecte sur les phrases de Tatoeba ***

Je remarque, depuis quelques jours, que les mots sont coupés de manière bizarre dans l'éditeur et à l'affichage des phrases de Tatoeba, qui, jusqu'à présent, respectait l'intégrité des mots, qui appraissaient sur une même ligne (quand ils n'étaient pas trop long)
Que se passe-t-il ?

Exemple ci-dessus, dans mon éditeur de commentaires, le mot « apparaissaient » est soudain coupé après ss...

*** Liste des mots du français absents de Tatoeba ***

sysko avait fait l'exercice, par le passé, d'extraire les mots du français, qu'il avait dû prendre dans un dictionnaire libre, qui n'étaient pas représentés dans les phrases de Tatoeba. J'aimerais bien réactualiser cette liste.

Quelqu'un aurait-il déjà réalisé cet exercice ou pourrait-il suggérer une méthode pour le faire ?

Merci

>however, I still don't see how this would lead to english writing being more prone to language change.

Prescriptions frames and slows changes. When there are no prescriptions, changes occur more frequently and erratically.

>and so you suggest that since we want tatoeba to serve an educational purpose and linguistic prescription by influential people is simply real, the site should have an orientation toward high-prestige conservative language varieties. I guess that's a relatable opinion, even if I ideologically oppose language prescription on an a priori basis.

No I don't. I think you misread me.
I'm just saying languages are not democratic. Sentences are either correct or not, by the standards of a given period of time and space, and these standards happen to be more applied (and enforced) by upper-class people who tend to have a longer education, enabling them to better master these standards.

This works the same way in large developed societies and small primitive tribes.

If, for instance, you were an ethno-linguist and you would want to learn and conserve a recently discovered language from a tribe in Central Papua, would you rather learn it from the young from this tribe, asking them to vote for words meanings and correct syntax, although these young started speaking pidgin in the last 20 years, through contact with other tribes, because they find it cool to go global, or would you rather try to learn it from old tribe members who know the myths, and tell their stories to children ?

So if voting is no good for ethno-linguists, as a tool to comprehend a language, why should it be good for us ?

And by the way, my purpose on Tatoeba is not educational, but rather conservatorial (which is not contradictory with an educational use). I coin sentences from all registers of society and I store, on Tatoeba, sentences I heard or read and that are sometimes nowhere else on Internet.

I realised - funnily through a Google search that retrieved Tatoeba sentences - that my native language was mis-represented on Internet and this came as a shock to me and that is why I've been so involved.

This misrepresentation is caused, not only by the distortion brought by the fact that more uneducated or non-native people write on Internet than educated native ones, but also because only certain things are written (and sometimes only certain things are written specifically on Internet) while others are not, for instance, sentences from the intimate or childhood register, or local turns of phrases that people deem good enough to say but not to write, and that interests me much.

Internet is the global scene on which everybody wants to act, talented or not, and it sums up to a representation that is neither very natural nor very rich or diverse, let alone beautiful.

ĉu vi bonvole povas traduki tion en esperanto, mi petas ?

>so you are saying language use should generally be dictated by a small elite upper class?

I'm not saying it should. I'm saying it actually is. Upper classes will always define ways of differentiating themselves from the rest of the people. This is their very way to exist. And language is the prime differentiator. If you don't realise that, you don't know your own society.

>what relevance do teachers play for a phenomenon such as language, which is acquired naturally by most humans?

A pity. Teachers are supposed to teach language to your children. Maybe you escaped school. I agree that their relevance is more and more debatable at Internet age. However, they're still key to language education for most, and language education is the very base of education in general. Developed countries spend an awful lot of money on teachers. I hope they actually serve some kind of purpose...
I, for one (along with millions of other French children), learnt spelling and grammar at school.

>have you ever counted the "rules" in english? do you have a statistic with an average of rules per language on the globe?

No, and I don't need it. English has no rules for vowel pronunciation, for example, when Dutch, German, French or Spanish have. That's less rules.

>you are the one speaking about there being "the" correct one.

No, society does. The elite defines how things should be pronounced (usually, with good logical grounds...), not me. I'm just immersed in the society and I merely observe the phenomenon. But, yes I do think phonetic rules are handy, because they enable people to pronounce words they've never seen or heard before (which is not possible in English, but is in Spanish, Dutch, French...) and I agree to their imposition by the elite, because once you know the rules, disrespect of them sounds ugly.

A language is a protocol. It's subject to informal acceptance. It works exactly like politeness : Some people enter a restaurant without smiling and saying Good day, others don't. You can't prevent the attendance from judging which way is more appropriate and civil and to act accordingly.

>I would say languages are per se impossible to teach.

Then all these useless teachers should be made redundant and the building of schools should be stopped at once. In France, this is the state's number one spending. Every taxpayer would subsequently pay 30% less tax.

>I do not think it applies to Tatoeba at all. Either a sentence is good or it is not good.

Good, so I misunderstood your initial comment and we agree on that. But don't go believing that we're the majority here. Far from it. I have had countless debates with contributors here, including many students in linguistics, who advocate freedom to write as they wish and democracy as a way to assess the validity of their sentences, the "Facebook" like ruling of languages as against Academies that they all consider to be bunches of useless old nutters (age being an-OK criteria to disparage people, if I understand them well...)

and what does this tell us about the quality of...what, by the way ?

for me, anything + anything = 0, because I'm a nihilist. I strongly believe all things emerge from nothingness and return to it. My theory is actually backed by most astro-physicists, nowadays.
c) option should definitely win.

"many" is not an option. You'll have to set your own concurrent poll, to make things worse...

>I'm not sure why you think its use will somehow develop into an undesirable consensus. Can you elaborate on that?

The proof of the undesirable consensus is in the pudding.

If you watch urban dictionary, for instance, you'll see that whenever a "smart" contributor coins a silly definition for a word, it's immediately voted up by many others, who think they're funny, and that is the way crappy definitions end up having a high rank.

But there are also countless exemples on Internet (and also in the media, alas) of wrong syntaxes or spellings that are progressively becoming dominant since uneducated users or non-natives come to outnumber educated natives, and their belief that what they write is correct is reinforced by what they see on Internet.

Famous French soccer players, for instance, who are notoriously illiterate, draw thousands of fans on their twitter accounts, ready to use and republish any ineptitude they write.

I know what you will retort : that's how languages evolve (or so people believe...), but it isn't true, otherwise schools and teachers would not even know what spelling or syntax to instruct.

Internet has changed it all, because now, illiterate people publish the most.

I know English may evolve a lot under this pressure, especially since English has few rules. But that is not the same in other languages to which far more rules apply, and where mistakes are more obvious in their regard.

In France and the UK, countries I know well (but it must be the same elsewhere, as far as I know), the way the language is used, relative to education, actually serves to screen people socially. Mistakes in language use are spotted immediately by upper-class people (those that are to grant jobs...)
So you may argue that all language uses are equal as long as they're popular, but that is just not real.
A parallel example in French is the following : A majority of French people mispronounce « Les haricots ». At first, you may say : "So what ? Then their wrong pronunciation is the correct one". But once you've said that, you haven't helped much the "mispronouncers" getting a job, because this mispronunciation actually works as a social/educational marker for French educated people. It tells them immediately what is the educational level of the person saying it...

A voting system would actually strengthen people in their mistakes, to their own detriment, creating havoc in language rules that would end up being impossible to teach.

PS: what would you say about voting for mathematical results ? Let's make a test.

2+2 = ?

a) 4
b) 2
c) 0
d) 5

I vote for c)

hey, I was joking. It's not because I don't use emoticons to evidence it that I don't crack jokes...