I'm sorry for correcting people's English on the wall, but just since both you and SC have now used this and because some English learners might start to think it's correct:

*"have difficulties understanding English" ("have difficulties to understand" is not correct)

Sorry, again. I don't mean to play the know-it-all.

That's not what a self-proclaimed native is. I suggest you have a look here: http://www.thefreedictionary.com/self-proclaimed

Regarding your accusations... not only are they not true and invented by you, but you are perfectly alone in them (so I suggest you stop).

And no, nativeness is not so easily established. What is established by your illustration is mastery of a language.

Okay, I'm done. Sorry everyone for digressing into another scuffle with SC.

To get back on topic, Alan would be a good CM because:

- he is polite
- he is responsible
- he is mature
- he clearly cares about the site, having contributed and proposed to contribute to it in more ways than expected of a normal user (i.e. helping with coding)
- he is willing to clean up sentences in a language that needs some cleaning up
- no one, with the exception of a single notorious user, appears to have voiced any complaints about him

*maintain

Newsflash:

"self-proclaimed native" = every user of Tatoeba who states their native language

Never mind, I checked the page myself.

French has 140,000 native out of a total of 195,000. (~71%)

English has 195,000 native out of a total of 320,000. (~61%)

So, both ratio-wise and absolute-number wise, English is worse off. That being said, more French CMs would not be bad either (or more CMs for any language, for that matter).

What's the case for English?

It would be interesting to see the numbers, if it's not too much trouble.

Because I don't believe your claim.

(I also support Alan's request, btw. He seems to be very fit to be a CM.)

What are the proportions?

There I would agree.

>> Another thing that it lacks and that any user must know is that you shouldn't trust a sentence unless it's owned by a native speaker or tagged OK.

This might be up for debate. A sentence written by a native or a sentence that has been tagged OK is *more likely* to be trustworthy, but these conditions are neither necessary nor sufficient.

My 2 cents on this: dialects will always be an issue, but an approximate solution is better than no solution at all.

This would be another argument for limiting any such system to Advanced Users.

I don't know what others think, but personally I have faith in Tatoeba's Advanced Users.

Was the system open to registered users or to everyone?

For your first point, note that there's multiple other languages without dialects with very few representatives. They wouldn't get many OK tags, either. It doesn't mean that you can't try the system anyway - it just won't progress as quickly for those as it would for languages like French, English, and German. Sentences would be accepted slower, they would be judged as correct slower, but so what? Right now nothing is being judged as corrected/accepted at all.

For non-natives, I repeat what I already wrote - the opinions are averaged and their opinions are worth "less". Now, whether it's right to do this by natives/non-natives is another question (I personally do not agree that it is). Also, since the discussion is about tagging, and therefore about Advanced Users, it's a bit too much to assume that so many Advanced Users will decide to tag as correct sentences that are wrong. Most are a bit more prudent than that, I would wager, and know their limitations when it comes to a language.

In case that fails, you also have feedback. For example, the numbers that tatoebix proposed could be tuned. You could start with 3 OKs for natives and 10 for non-natives, and if you, a trusted member of TTB and "a trusted expert" on Spanish, see that a lot of bad sentences are getting through, you simply increase the number for the non-natives from 10 to 20 (for example). You live and learn. My honest feeling is that you'd be pleasantly surprised by what you can achieve with 10, though.

And no, no system is foolproof. Of course you'll have a bad sentence get through now and then, just like once in a rare while you get spam that gets through your spam filter and a good e-mail that goes in your spam (by the way, spam filtering, to the best of knowledge, is a great example of a weighted system that works pretty well).

Okay, so you give vague answers instead of actually proposing concrete solutions, and you resort to digressions, insults, stereotypes, and false accusations instead of trying to have a productive discussion.

Fine, SC, fine. I'll remember, for the upteenth time, that beating my head against the wall is more productive than trying to discuss anything with you.

On a personal note, I suspect that the reason that you want to keep things as they are is because it suits you just fine, and that quality on Tatoeba is not an issue that you actually care about solving. In fact, I would extend this accusation to a lot of other people, as it doesn't take a lot of thinking to realize that the current way of doing things is going to go absolutely nowhere.

My thanks to tatoebix for having proposed what he/she proposed, though.

I'm sorry, Shishir, but I have to disagree with you. Non-natives' opinions on what's good and what isn't doesn't amount to 0.

The basic nature of tatoebix's proposal is quite wise and elegant - it's a weighted system. It gives more priority to those who are expected to know more and less to those who are expected to know less. This is much more flexible than a Boolean system of 0's and 1's, where something either is good or it isn't, and a user either is qualified or is not.

Regarding this dialects argument, I would be curious to have an estimate on what proportion of correct sentences from one region would be judged as incorrect in another. If it's 50%, then you have a problem. If it's less than 10%, then I'd say take the hit.

...which is why I proposed, in my last (long) post on this, to rate users based on the quality of their translations/sentences (instead of rating sentences individually).

Your arguments are inconsistent. Just now, you argued that there are too few advanced users to make a rating system work, and yet you expect these same advanced users to correct all of the currently flawed (or potentially flawed) sentences/translations (of which there are millions).

Let me turn the tables and ask *you* to propose a solution to the Tatoeba quality problem, instead of trying to poke holes in this one.

Or, to simplify, let me ask you a much simpler question:

Why should a TTB user/visitor believe that your 80,000+ French sentences are correct and trustworthy?

Again, I'm not talking about your majority - I'm talking about the Advanced Users of TTB. The original post by tatoebix talked about OK tags. Your gladiator-loving majority cannot place those - only Advanced Users can.

Also, please stop putting words into my mouth.

First, any rating system could easily be limited to Advanced Users (and probably should be), so that's not an issue.

Second, you cannot "avoid subjective judgment". It's by averaging a lot of subjective judgments that you get something quasi-objective. That's what statistics is.

Third, you cannot compare TTB to FB. The latter caters to everyone while the former caters to a small niche.

Fourth, of course there are difficulties in implementing any system, which is why you implement something, see how it's working, and then modify it. Regional varities could present a partial challenge, but that's not an argument for scrapping the whole idea without even trying it.

Fifth, 173,384 sentences is already a lot, but what would be more relevant would be the derivative. Is the ratio of bad sentences to good sentences increasing or decreasing? If it's decreasing, then we don't have to change anything, as eventually, at some point in finite time, the bad sentences will be such a minority that it won't matter. If it's increasing, then the current approach, whatever it may be, may not be working so well. Of course, since we have no objective means to judge if a sentence is "good" or "bad", we can't even answer these questions.

Sixth, you also need to remember the quality of the links/translations, and not just the quality of the standalone sentences. How many links do you think need checking? I would bet that it's at least the number of bad sentences... squared.

Finally, all of this discussing is probably close to useless anyway, since 99% of the ideas that appear on this wall don't really get implemented. There was a time when Tatoeba would get updated every weekend, but that time is long gone.