In a near future, you will have million of sentences, most of them will be owned, let's forget the "reliability" aspect for the rest of my post
A sentence on tatoeba is not an article on wikipedia, it's too small to be considered as something made "by the crowd", it will always be the production of ONE guy, tough it may be revised / agree by other people in the future. So at the opposite of a wikipedia article, at one moment for one sentence, you always have someone who can explain you WHY did he wrote it this way or did he considered the sentences as correct (by adopting it).

So 2 big cases in tatoeba

1 - The guy who added the sentence is a native.

I'm also a native and I think there's a mistakes, so yep without "ownership" it would be faster, I would be able to directly correct the sentence.
BUT:
a - I can also add a mistake when correcting it (while rephrasing it)
b - It can be a rule that I'm ignoring myself (for example with the new orthograph in french please can both be written "s'il te plait" or "s'il te plaît" with or without the ^ on the i, and without ownership a lot of users would have corrected it tough it was correct)
c - It can be a "local" way to different from mine (American english vs British english , same for French etc. )

For all these case, with the ownership, it oblige you to "request" for your change, if it was a typo, it will be corrected soon (well maybe in some days, which can ben consider as long, but I want you to remember that tatoeba is 4 years old and we hope it will be much more older, so having a mistake during some days is not important for me, as long as it is corrected)
For the other case, the owner will be able to explain why he disagree with you, and then we're really in a "collaborative" (we're discussing even arguing, but well it's part of the game) project, otherwise for me it's only a "parrallel" contributive project, (i.e I add and I leave, I correct and I leave etc.)

I'm a learner, by having an owner, I know that i will be able to ask for explanation to someone, and so making once again tatoeba much more valuable than a phrasebook, as you can contact a "real human"


2 - The guy who added it is not a native

Then I maybe add it waiting to be corrected, so yep once again, it would be faster if someone can correct it directly, but that will not help me, I would like to know why I was wrong. Moreover maybe the native who propose the correction does not know the language I was translating from, and so maybe his correction, tough more "natural" than mine, is maybe no more "sync" with the other language.


I know for some of thes points, we can imagine a "being warned when changed occurs on this sentence" to replace this, but for this, in addition to the fact that tatoeba is not finished, so yep this feature will be great, but ownership was easier to code and is already present, it will not present an other case where ownership can be usefull

3 edition war

I added a "contrervial sentence" for example, "the guy who is coding the new version of tatoeba is a retard", (replace this by any political/religious/football sentence you want) then, there's no reason to edit the sentence, it is correct and not against French law (which is the only reason we will delete correct sentences). But maybe some not "open minded" people (Hey guys, tatoeba is "example sentences" database, it's only to illustrate words / grammar rules, so don't take it too seriously) will be tempted to edit, and others to revert it etc. etc. etc.

The 2 only reasons I see against ownership is

1 - what if the guys is a retard who add mistakes without correcting them etc.
2 - what if the guys is no more active on tatoeba
But for these two things we do have moderators, so we can correct them directly (we do have this power) even if it's owned. And if it's really "huge" (the guys owns thousand of sentences) then can simply "free" all his sentences.

I'm writing the second part

I will say in a far future when the number of sentences from the original Tanaka corpus will only represent a non consequent part of the corpus (now it's only less than an half, and a big part of the English sentences has been proofreaded), own or unowned will no more indicate if it's reliable or not.

But anyway even now, as when you do a "google fight", the goal is not to say "if it's owned then it is realiable, math rule guys" but rather it permits you to know who added it or at least the guys who says "I take care of this sentence" so if it's a well known user (CK for english, Sacredceltic for French etc.) then you already know it's a quite reliable sentence. Otherwise you're still able to go on the profile of the owner and be able to ponderate "how much" you can trust the contribution of this user in this language. As you will do when you want to know if the information on a given website is reliable or not after a google fight.
The fact the Times is the one or not which has written the piece of text displayed by google is not important, for you what is important is that if the Times decided to display it it's because they think it is reliable, so as the Times is "reliable", what they rely can be considered as reliable. And if it's an other website, then you're supposed to go on the website to evaluate it by yourself. So it's the same things with sentences, the fact a sentence appears as owned is not a DIRECT proof that it is reliable, but it permits you to judge, by judging the own who's owning it, if you can trust it or not.

I know that then "you can look on the historic" can be also an answer BUT, going on the historic supposed you to click on the sentence, I know it sounds stupid and lazy, but well when I'm at the pause and seeing some random chinese sentences to learn some stuff, I really don't want to have to click to know that, 80% of the chinese sentences are owned by 3 users which I consider as reliable, so it saves me hundreds of clicks, and when I see a sentence which is from a "unknown user, then and only then I will click on his profile (and once again clicking directly on his profile rather than the sentence and then his profile trough the historics save me a click, and a page loading, which is an eternity here)

Then you can answer me "well so instead of having an owner we can replace the place saved by removing it by a "ok" / "not ok" /"dunno" icon" to indicate a somewhat "objectif" reliability. But it does not solve the problem "WHO" will put this icons ? A vote system ? As anyone can own, anyone would be able to vote. And as previous discussion here has shown, defining how such a system would work is not something on which everyone agree.

So this was for the "if you consider "own/not ownn" has a link with reliable / reliable"

But for the me it's not only about that.

oups seems I've forgotten to do it, what about now ?

yeah it would be great, because with such a list, I will be able to construct a sentence aligner, a beginning of really free "Cantonese" dict (with the same license as tatoeba), and in a near feature, a Cantonese translator. so having this "word by word" rather than character by character can really help :)

ok I can understand ;) I will change that tomorow
by the way i've seen that some words are still not considered as "word" for example 英國人 is still considered as 3 distinct characters not a word composed of 3 characters.

was they already present ? Actually I've just put your list to the end of current one, so if there's some duplicate, then my software keep the first one (so the wrong one). If so I will just take care of removing the duplicate to keep yours

\o/ thanks a lot :) I try to implement it before going to bed.

hard question, i would say on the target language and precising for which source language i'm talking, or even the id of the source sentence, as after we don't know if other translation will be added, but there's no "best answer" i think. As the best things would be able to comment the translation link (which would be possible in the new version, again I'm just able to say that this last months ^^)

I've just corrected it, thanks

i've just fixed it :)

perfect thanks :)

http://tatoeba.org/eng/sentences/show/697656 posted my comment here
as I don't know if this user speaks English, and I speak neither Russian nor Esperanto, if someone wants to translate my comment in one of this language :)

ok it seems it has been all added by the same user, so I'm going to contact him

otherwise one should ask the author to have the permission to do so. If you don't do so or he doesn't want, then you just must not add them in Tatoeba. Can you give me here some of the links to these sentences ?

yep this feature is still missing.

interesting, if it's possible to express it in a textual format, then maybe a "standard" already exist for this ?
Anyway I've never tought about sign languages, and it seems challenging, and we love challenge :)

yep it is possible, the new database allow to put whatever metadata you want on sentences, but after I'm not sure if the mouseover will be the best way, because I also plan to make a software to auto align the sentences and its direct translation, so that when you will mouseover on a word/expression, it will highlight the corresponding expression in the translations (or highlight nothing if it's something which is not tranlated / too hard to align, to avoid mistakes)

http://tatoeba.org/eng/sentence...nd/indifferent

the first one is also possible, "not directly translated into : all languages" means in fact "orphaned", but seems it's not obvious, so maybe replace in the select "all languages" by "orphaned" ?

no problem