Reading this wall comment reminded me of why I decided to stop contributing to Tatoeba.

I can't understand that comments like this are tolerated and allowed to remain on the wall. According to sacredceltic, half of Tatoeba's Corpus Maintainers are involved in some kind of English supremacist conspiracy.

The term "English supremacist" is highly insulting. It implies membership in a racist movement (look up supremacism). There should be a clear policy to prohibit this kind of comment.

Now, to explain my departure.

I was finding it increasingly difficult to keep on contributing to a project where a single lunatic is allowed to have such influence. Sacredceltic has again and again insulted other users, implied that they were part of conspiracies, that they had agendas, that they weren't native speakers of their own language, added tags that were clearly inappropriate etc. He also treats his own way of speaking the French language as the one and only correct way of speaking, not understanding that there are other regionalisms, dialects, and that sometimes it's possible that sentences that he would find unnatural still be correct French in other parts of the world or even for other users from different social classes, backgrounds, etc. This kind of behavior should have gotten him banned or at least severely warned.

There's yet again another discussion right now (http://tatoeba.org/eng/sentences/show/1238047) where sacredceltic is accusing rene1596 and U2FS of not being real natives, but rather saboteurs, etc. and all sorts of other mad ramblings.

While this doesn't really affect most languages on Tatoeba, it makes it difficult to keep on contributing to the English and especially French languages for any length of time. It's impossible to avoid at some point getting into an argument with sacredceltic. These arguments are always the same and end up becoming very bitter with sacredceltic escalating quickly to personal insults. Even native speakers of English are not immune. (take this sentence as an example http://tatoeba.org/eng/sentence...1978#comments)

One other thing that I must mention is that sacredceltic's behavior is intimidating. Few users are willing to argue with him, probably because they know that he will argue forever, never answer the voice of reason and that the discussion will become extremely bitter. I have tried to argue with sacredceltic and I have only succeeded in wasting my time.

This means that few users are willing to publicly call out sacredceltic when he says unreasonable things or proposes erroneous corrections. Quite simply, even if they know that what sacredceltic said is wrong or unacceptable, few users are willing to comment or point it out because they know that this would lead them to become embroiled in a long and acrimonious discussion. This stifles the quality of discussion and disrupts the normal functioning of Tatoeba.

It also means that sacredceltic's comments often remain there, unanswered, leading new users or visitors to believe that he may be right. It also leads users to believe that personal insults, etc. are accepted behavior on this website and that's possibly scaring away many potential contributors. I also suspect that at this point the admins themselves are scared of directly confronting sacredceltic, and they rarely do so (or at least they're scared of wasting their time!).

I know that right now, Tatoeba is run by only one person, twenty year old Sysko, who is working hard in China and still manages to do a lot to keep Tatoeba up and running. I commend him for his courage and dedication to the project. I don't think that it would be reasonable to ask sysko to do more than he already does or to micromanage user behavior. That's a task that should probably be delegated to other moderators or corpus maintainers, helped by a policy on user behavior. But whoever does it, I think that something should be done to curb disruptive behavior.

Sorry for the long comment, but I decided to write this because I think that someone needs to point out publicly how disruptive sacredceltic is to this community.

@sacredceltic
I guess you know how much I appreciate your work for tatoeba. But after your last statements I want to give you a small advice. Maybe it will be helpful, if you ask yourself one question concerning your above named colleagues: "Is it possible that they really all are ill-minded characters?”