Too Many Cooks in the Kitchen

I noticed that one of my hints was missing when I tried to highlight a group of words. I tried to highlight the phrase “che allora insegnava,” when I noticed that the hint for “che” was removed. Why is this? In its place was a message about it having been removed because it received too many flags. (Something to that nature.) In any case, I’m not sure what’s going on, but if too many people are “editing and flagging” there are bound to be problems.

I am editing and removing all the incorrect or misplaced hints for Italian, so I may have deleted an incorrect hint for “che”. In any case, I have always thought that deleting the hints from the Hint Editor page would only remove them from the list of suggested hints that members see before creating a new LingQ. Maybe Alex or Mark can give us better explanations.

Thanks for your explanation, Michele. As I understand it, deleting incorrect hints should only remove them from the list of suggested hints.

What do you mean when you say you remove a hint? I thought we could only flag hints before LingQing them and when I edit a hint fora LingQ I have already created, it just changes the hint for me.

@Imani/mikebond - When you delete a hint through the Hint Editor page (access has initially been given to some users), it will remove it from the system completely, replacing it with text that says the hint was removed as it was incorrect.

The reason we decided to do this was many people may select a hint thinking it’s correct because other people have chosen it. In the case where hints are incorrect, we want to remove them, thereby informing those who used the hint that they were using an incorrect hint.

While this does then mean that these users have to look the word up again, it helps ensure that the hints they are using are more accurate.

@ColinJohnstone - mikebond is talking about the Hint Editor. You too now have access, just click “Hint Editor” in the dropdown under your username at the top.

Thanks for clarifying things, Alex. I should recheck all the hints in all the languages I’m studying. I wonder if you could restructure this a bit by making deleted hints yellow again since the data was removed.

p.s. rechecking hints—that’s not going to happen. I have way too many links.

Thanks for clarifying, Alex. I agree with Imani’s suggestion.

By the way, what happens if I edit an existing hint to correct it? Will the user who created the hint have it updated, removed, or unchanged? Just to know and see if I need to adjust my hint editing policy.

@Imani - That may make sense, though I guess if you don’t see the word ever again then it may not be worth it to correct the hint. Perhaps something for our list of future enhancements!

@mikebond - It isn’t possible to edit existing hints through the hint editor. We played with this idea but in the end wanted to avoid the situation where someone is going through and adjusting finer points like formatting, etc. because the hint doesn’t fit their preferred style. For now you will only be able to move hints to different languages and delete incorrect hints.

EDIT: Editing of hints for editors turns out to have been reenabled, so disregard the text above.

Sorry Alex, but actually I have been editing hints for quite a while now (until a couple of hours ago), by clicking on the hint to edit. I don’t know if suggested hints are updated accordingly, then. Of course I don’t edit the layout but the word form (singular/plural, masculine/feminine…). Please check this issue and let me know if my editing work is useful or not.

@mikebond - Yes, you’re right. I took another look at this and it looks like one of our developers did enable this. Rather than removing the functionality now, we think it may be better to leave it in and just ensure we communicate clearly with any editors what they are expected to do.

To answer your question above then, it currently updates the hint for everyone who is using that hint. This is why we want to discourage the editing of hint formats and encourage editors to focus on either correcting or deleting incorrect hints.

@Alex: Unfortunately, for me it doesn’t work. Sometimes spelling errors are marked as wrong, and it would be easy to change them, but I can’t do it.

It looks like we can’t modify a hint if the corrected hint corresponds to another existing hint. Just few minutes ago, I wanted to correct a Portuguese hint that reads “deculpa” but I couldn’t do it, because the correct hint “desculpa” was already there.
What I did then was to move the wrong hint to another language, correct it and move it back to Portuguese. It should be saved now, even if it doesn’t appear among the top three hints.

@VeraI, mikebond - In the case where a hint already exists, it presents a bit of a problem. For now, what Michele is doing is probably best. It’s a bit tricky dealing with duplicate hints as any changes in logic need to be made directly to the database (which more often than not requires downtime). As time becomes available in our development schedule we’ll try to slot more changes and updates in related to this!

Also, I just want to say that we really appreciate all the work you guys do to help make LingQ better. :slight_smile:

Yesterday, while I was editing and fixing some hints, I realised that the most used hints are rarely the best ones. There are some very good hints that are not visible because they are not the most popular ones.
I think you should give learners:

  • the possibility to view more hints than the three most used
  • a hint rating system so that, in the future, we can choose to view the most used hints or the best rated hints first.
    I hope you will consider these suggestions for future improvements.
    Have a good week-end everybody!
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I think many bad LingQ’s are made because the system saves a hints too quickly, automatically.

In my case, while I’m in the middle of creating a lingQ, I may decide to check the spelling or definition and then find I need to make a correction. Unfortunately, the hint with the error had already been saved automatically.

I certainly agree with you, Paul.

@mikebond - Thank you for your feedback. Our goal in flagging and removing incorrect hints is to suppress incorrect hints and allow better hints to be displayed.

However, what we have seen is that our members have a wide variety of hints that they prefer. Some like a single word and want to keep it simple, while others like to add multiple definitions and even full lines from the dictionary into the hint field. Typically those who prefer more specialized hints will click the “Search dictionary” button and add their own hint anyway. We want to provide useful hints without complicating the interface by adding too many options, buttons, etc. and are working now to make the site easier to use for new users.

For those interested in seeing more hints, just click on a LingQ and go to the User Hints tab to see a full list of hints that are in use. You can then just click on one of these hints to replace your current hint.

@pmilone - Thanks for reporting this. I’ve added this to our list and we’ll see what can be done here to prevent these impartial hints from being saved.

Today I recognized that some of my French hints were deleted and marked as wrong! I create every hint very carefully. I check ALWAYS the dictionary and add lot of information that is interesting for ME. I understand that I give probably to much information for the learners who don’t mind, but for those who are interested in the infinitive and the word form the information is great. And especially it is interesting for ME. I’m very angry!!! Hints should only be removed when they are WRONG not when someone doesn’t like it!

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@vera Could it be that you put your hints under the wrong language flag?

Typically, I flag hints under the English flag that are not in English.

@pmilone: No. This is not the case. All my hints have a German flag. It never happens to me that I flag them in the wrong language flag.