So glad Heatherjean that you feel cheered up by the responses you've received and that you're planning to adopt a new strategy and perspective.

Excellent idea to ask yourself when carrying out editing tasks is this helping your own learning and if not, deciding to do something else. 

Well done rokkvi - for all your hard work on Icelandic.

Excellent idea regarding copyright.

Librarians, particularly head librarians take note and make sure LingQ implements something as copyright is a big problem - especially at LingQ.

Whilst at it, please ensure that LingQ includes instructions not to like your own private imports as your own private imports risk becoming visible to all and sunder, simply because you happened to like your own private imports. For more information, see this thread:

https://www.lingq.com/en/community/forum/open-forum/private-imports-showing-up-in

Apparently LingQ is aware of this problem and is planning to "look into it" sometime in the future. In the meantime LingQ urgently needs to make people aware that private imports run the risk of being made public as a consequence of this bug. Simply adding a warning message alerting users of this risk is sufficient while Lints solves this problem.

It's a matter of personal integrity, copyright and respect for members here who wish to remain private - and who have been reassured both their person and their imports are private.

1) I feel LingQ is as cheap as it is because most of the material is input by users. While it may seem unfair "use" of the people who add the material, I think LingQ would have to be much, much more expensive if the LingQ staff had to add all this material. Or it would be the same price but have a fraction of the material it has.

Just be aware that as a user or librarian, you need to be aware that this is not a paid job. You do help LingQ financially by adding material but you do also help other people who are learning languages here. Just weigh your options and how you want to use your time.

2) The points system for contributors is way off. People who contribute LingQ courses like the 60 mini-stories, Eating out, Who is she etc do not get any points, the weight of adding translations that get used is way too high and the weight of adding quality material is way too low. It is hard to quantify the points for lessons read but if I remember correctly you just get points for lessons opened, regardless of their length, which does not make sense.

A more realistic system would be that lessons read give more points proportionately and that when a translation is used, both the user who added the translation AND the user who added the lesson where the translation is used get a point. I for example, provided more than 90% of what is in the Icelandic library but I think I'm at #3 in the all time contributors, because others provided more translations.

Having said all of that, I'm not sure I care about the points for contributing. I know what I have contributed and I know it helps people, hopefully more people down the road. If I get vain about stats and wanting to score high, it tends to be towards my known words and learning stats, but not the contribution stats.

3) I agree about the potential problems of copyright violations. I think LingQ should implement input slots about copyright when you import lessons. Some textsbox and checkboxes/radio buttons about whether it is in the public domain, whether you are the author yourself or when and how you got permission from whom to publish, if neither of the first two is true.

Hi HeatherJean,

I found this thread informative and enlightening about the librarian's role.

Many users genuinely appreciate the lessons you created in such a format. On a side note, how many correctly timestamped lessons with English translation are needed for a user to achieve their goal(e.g., follow along with the text at the speed of audio) or acquire a specific skill(e.g., derive word meaning from the context) in the language? Any language with 50-100 hours of content in this format is more than sufficient IMO.

Considering the law of diminishing returns, it would not be advisable for learners to lean on such a crutch in the long run. On the other hand, it would be a godsend if the recording and replay buttons could be developed and implemented by the Lingq team along with the correctly timestamped sentences.

Hi,

as many librarians say that the copyright issue is a big (may be the biggest) problem. I don't think I can create contents even by importing youtube videos without much hesitation.

Putting the names of youtube or podcasts on the Spreadsheet of the LingQ can be done, but preferences are so different from each user.

When I would be asked what is good resource (in my case, Japanese as my mother tongue) not officially, but "privately", I could answer that. This may be a little time-consuming, but I could do as voluntarily.

There are lots of materials available on the website (audio with (or without) transcript) for not only for language learning, but also learning something interesting through language learning, for which more advanced level might be necessary. There is no reason for not taking advantage of it.

Thank you for LingQ

Hi, HeatherJean.

I'm one of the LingQ content managers.

My first advice would be taking some time off.

Second, this is meant to be fun, since it's a voluntarily activity.

If it brings you down, shift your focus to something else.

After all, editing is not the most exciting job in the world in my mind.

Bottom line, you can always reach out to me, if you need any assistance or struggle to find a way to contribute.

Hi, just for anyone to think about it:

For a 7 minute YouTube video or a 5 minute Podcast - both already with transcript - I need all in all about an hour to upload, edit the text and put the right timestamps on...

Hello, yes I agree. I think you should be compensated for what you are doing, especially for providing lessons. Providing lessons is not easy. I experienced tutoring before and creating a learning material or a plan for your student to get the information and to learn as much as they can is difficult. You also do English translations right? That's a whole new job in itself. I think you really should talk this out with your manager.

Hi Heather (and the others who have posted here),

Thank you for explaining some of your thoughts on the librarian program. It's a fairly new program and we are still building it up and deciding how we want it to work.

I just want to make a couple of points:

1) Everything is completely voluntary, you don't need to do anything you don't want to. If you edit a single sentence, we appreciate it.

2) We encourage Librarians to first and foremost share content they have been learning with. This is the most painless activity since it can be just a few button clicks when you've found a new video or lesson somewhere on the internet. Timestamping is really time consuming, and although we appreciate it we are working on improving the auto-timestamping for various languages.

We are giving out a small prize for the biggest coin-earner in December. We will also be giving out some free months whenever we see a Librarian has volunteered a lot of their time as a small thank you. The program rewards are still being fleshed out but we hope to slowly expand on them with time.

Let me know what you think about this,

North

If LingQ did offer a useful number of points [free memberships, etc.] I would feel obligated to say yes to almost anything they asked of me. Right now I'm very comfortable saying no since there are no explicit financial rewards,

Perhaps years later when I have reached very comfortable levels in the languages I'm pursuing I may feel more generous with my time. But for now I only do things that advance my own goals.

Working on timestamps is a great way to improve your listening abilities. I don't think I would be listening to audiobooks on 윌라 right now if I had not spent countless hours correcting time stamps and listening to many sentences over and over again.

But of course, now that I can work with audiobooks, I spend less time correcting timestamps on LingQ

I wouldn't bother about editing other people's lessons. LingQ is riddled with copyrighted content (a problem that is slowly being worked on). Unless if it's a lesson published by the LingQ staff or someone trustworthy in particular, you have no idea if it's copyrighted content or not. If it turns out to be copyrighted content, when the crackdown comes to your language, all your hard work is going to waste, because that lesson is just going to be removed or switched to an 'external' lesson.

Occassionally I edit a misspelling (because it's a blue word) from an upload from one of the LingQ staff, but on Android, this takes an exorbinant amount of time, due to how it is currently set up. Afterwards, I always regret the half a minute or minute I wasted doing it... It's faster just to click the 'bin' button.

As far as I understand this opaque system (https://www.lingq.com/en/help/points/) you only get points by sharing lessons, not editing, so you are right on that one.

I agree with bamboozled, there's no will nor possibly capacity for any significant compensation.

I want to believe that is a matter of time, that they discuss in private the state of the libraries and that a fairer compensation is studied in order to incentivize better and more curated content. That maybe a new metric for the contributions' value and monetization is being developed so they can assess more precisely the librarians' share if they were to go with a higher compensation etc. But let's be real lol...

The only current metric is how many times did other users click on your lessons once you shared them. This, to no one's surprise, just promotes easy and short beginner content in mainstream languages. You've beaten the placebo game if, I don't know, you scrape a newsletter in a mainstream language and add TTS to it (looking at you NHK...*).** And I say this, half because I hate it, and half because if LingQ were to increase the compensations some day, I'm (probably unnecessarily) worried that the libraries will be even worse, with everyone posting their tik-tok 15 sec lessons on how to say hello in X language***.

On the bright side, once you have realized how useless/unfair this whole pseudo reward system is, you can just contribute as you feel like it with no pressure. Don't do translations nor timestamps if you think it's too tedious (I've never done them in Japanese tbh), and, from time to time, even though I know it's difficult with all this gamification, remember yourself that you are here to learn a language.

* I'm jk, I've read an absurd amount of those, keep uploading them <3

** To add insult to injury, sometimes, like I just noticed right now, the point delivery also fails and you have (as I have in the past) to mail support to fix it.

*** I guess mainstream sites like yt cope with this with the balance "longer the video, the more adds"?

It just makes you feel used, I guess.

You are being used.

LingQ is a commercial entity that has cleverly enlisted volunteers to do some grunt work for them. Personally, I wouldn't believe any promises of compensation, considering that there are probably more than 200 librarians, I doubt they could possibly pay all of them, or even give them free memberships. But, technically you do receive points for your uploaded lessons, but those amount to a mere pittance. Please check your current balance here: https://www.lingq.com/en/learn/ja/web/settings/points

I suggest adopting a casual attitude toward the librarian program, spend only as much time as you're comfortable with and never feel pressured or a sense of obligation.

I guess the typical librarian is someone who uses LingQ to learn languages, and after studying they realize the content they have benefited from, could be of use to others, and click share - low-effort and non-committal.

Editing timestamps sounds like a waste of time. Generating timestamps is, from what I understand, a purely technical / mathematical problem. This needs to be solved by the developers. Working around a technical problem by throwing human resources at it, is rarely a good idea. In the real world humans are a finite resource, and their time and effort is expensive. Only on LingQ.com are the normal rules of business suspended, and work is performed by unpaid volunteers. Further, I believe that incentives are powerful, fixing timestamps manually, removes an important incentive for LingQ to improve their software. That is why I don't touch the timestamps. In fact, Chinese (traditional) on LingQ doesn't even support generating timestamps, which in combination with a slew of other issues results in a much worse user experience than in Chinese (simplified). (The only difference between those two "languages" is that a subset of characters look a little different.) My hope is that these deficiencies will lead users to complain, which in turn might result in LingQ allocating resources toward fixing these issues. Adding timestamps manually would not only waste my precious time on a grueling task for no apparent benefit, but it would also interfere with this virtuous cycle, ultimately leading to stagnation.

Take it easy, have a nice day and please don't get bamboozled.