I'm going to risk saying something very blunt here, and say that it's elitist to assume that the majority is somehow dumb and inept and shouldn't be entrusted with anything.

I would be curious to hear your explanation for why people who love reality TV, junk food, and gladiators would not, at the same time, love sentences and languages. I would also be curious to understand why people who loved reality TV, junk food, and gladiators, but didn't care about sentences and languages, would come on TTB to leave OK tags on incorrect sentences.

Yes, all of which have Advanced User status with tagging priviliges.

That's not a troll, alexmarcelo - that's a professional hacker.

You can propose a doomsday scenario to denounce any suggestion, or you could try something and see if it works (and then be pleasantly surprised).

Of course, if you assume that the majority of users are trolls, then no system in the world will save you. Thankfully, that's not the case (personally, if I count the number of "trolls" that I have encountered on this site over the years, I cannot reach 3, try as I might).

>> Before you want to rate sentences, you need to correct them.

I disagree. If all sentences could be corrected, you wouldn't need to rate them - you'd just say "all of our sentences have been corrected" (whatever that means, since we don't know who corrected them or why should you trust the people who corrected them). Maybe I didn't understand what you were trying to say.

No, I don't particularly "love" statistics. But if you want something done (i.e. quality of content), then you should use standard tools (i.e. ratings) as a first attempt before you resort to innovative methods that have no empirical backing and may or may not work. To the best of my knowledge, this is standard professional practice - the common expression being "don't reinvent the wheel".

Managing quality in a system that averages 200,000 sentences per active user cannot be done with tags and comments. It's inefficient and won't work. Even if you personally OK all of the sentences in your native language (even if there's 100,000 of them and you dedicate a full week or two to this), it still won't mean anything because it's just *one* person's OK, which, as you said, is subjective. It's only once you get multiple OKs that the thing begins to have some sort of statistical backing.

Anyway, I don't want to get into these arguments, so... prove me wrong and correct the sentences one by one. I hope, I honestly do hope, that you can succeed (because I like this site and would like for it to prosper). But I really, really doubt it.

Everything in the real world is subjective and prone to error, which is why there exists...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statistics

The sooner there is some systematic approach to judging quality, the sooner this website will become useful/reliable for more than its 20/30 active contributors.

I know that you didn't talk about nativeness, and I wasn't replying to you. I was replying to other people who replied to you regarding providing proofs of nativeness in order to contribute.

That being said, nothing else that I wrote was particularly directed to you, either. It was not, however, off-topic.

Not sure if I've completely understood what you meant, but some remarks:

1) boy --> girl (just for the record)
2) by mastery (though I didn't use this word) I meant the skills of an average English-speaking adult
3) this is not hypothetical - as I said, it's someone I taught
4) there are many hypothetical cases to be tapped - for example, many people growing up in Central Asia are bound to learn multiple language groups from birth
5) I agree with all of your comments regarding terminology

I suppose that it depends on the definition of "immersion". If "immersion" means constant interaction with fluent speakers, then your example of Esperanto would be immersion (I guess, provided that most Esperantists at the meetings are fluent). There's also the cultural aspect - if culture significantly influences the language, then cultural immersion would probably become a prerequisite as well.

I guess this also starts the debate of "theoretical fluency" vs. "real fluency". For some constructed languages, real fluency probably wouldn't exist, and theoretical fluency would be sufficient. Since Esperanto has official status in at least one place (a university in San Marino, I think), then the notion of real fluency probably exists for it. Probably not for Klignon, though :-)

http://tatoeba.org/eng/sentences/show/1994393 ?

You can't just say "the proof is in the pudding" and then go on to write a bunch of nonsense. Have some respect for the notion of a "proof".

Which is to say that I disagree with just about all of what you wrote, apart from the small mention that a language can't be acquired without immersion. But not just English - any language.

Perhaps, but what would these people have to gain from downrating good English/French sentences?

Sure, but don't forget that different people have different talents/proclivities.

Just because you (or Vaccari) can't/couldn't do it, doesn't mean that no one else can. I couldn't do calculus when I was in elementary school (even if I tried), but that doesn't mean that there aren't kids who can. Personally, I once taught English to a 10-year-old Chinese girl who spoke it like a native, despite not having gone abroad or having had special instruction. And I've also met people who speak languages from multiple groups extremely well, despite being very young. You shouldn't exclude these cases or place artificial limits on these people.

Anyway, so that this doesn't diverge from the main discussion: my point is that the whole "let's limit TTB to native cliques, each with their own corpus" idea is extremely restrictive and will dissuade a lot of people from participating. Such a way of ensuring corpus quality is heuristic/fuzzy (i.e. very qualitative and prone to failure), and assumes too much about the general user. If you want quality, just install a rating system, since the direct purpose of ratings is quality control (which is exactly what people are after).

In that case, you should know perfectly well what I'm talking about.

I didn't mean "mistakes on Tatoeba". Those don't teach you that much.

I meant mistakes in real life, when you live among native speakers and constantly embarrass yourself by making errors in day-to-day communication. If I may, I'd advise you to try it sometime. You'll be amazed how quickly you can learn, and even master, a language this way. Much quicker than by sitting in front of a computer.

On the other side of the spectrum, there are native speakers whose vision of their own language is so narrow and so fixed that they will swear that certain things are wrong and will refuse to shift their point of view no matter what evidence is provided to them.

There are also native speakers who will insist that something is wrong until you discuss it with them in detail and they will concede that yes, indeed, it may not be that wrong after all.

And then there are native speakers whose knowledge of their own language is corrupted either due to lack of education, lack of standards, or regional influences.

This idea of nativeness <=> mastery is a bit short-sighted.

P.S.: Regarding this mythical group of people who can simultaneously master Mandarin, French, English and Russian while under 30, I can vouch for their existence, and though I'm not there yet, I hope someday to be. And I can tell you how you get there - hard work, lots of sacrifice, and lots of mistakes.

Three reasons why I would disagree:

1) How to "prove" one's proficiency? What is proficiency?

2) As a counterexample, it doesn't require proficiency to write "Hello" in 30-40 languages (just basic knowledge of formal/informal).

3) Rules like this can't be actively enforced and make TTB more complicated.

Возможно, что "несколько" для Тома - недостаточно. В результате ему пришлось купить по-несколько семь раз.

Updated my Greasemonkey and it does indeed work.

Thanks!

(well, no, just updated my Firefox and it's still not filtering...)

Right, this is more or less what I did originally, but for some reason it just won't work. Maybe it's that I'm using Firefox 12.0 and Greasemonkey and/or the script don't work well with it?

Feel like it must be some trivial error, but can't see where.

Thanks all the same.