Tatoeba day #2 (Jan 23rd, 2011)

We have decided of a date for our next Tatoeba day, and it will be January 23rd, 2011. Just like the last Tatoeba day, it will start at 0:00 and will end at 23:59 (France time).

There will be 2 objectives for that day:

• Banners for Tatoeba
• Quality of the corpus

Banners for Tatoeba

For those who are not sure what I'm talking about, what we call a "banner" is basically an image that represents a website. Let's say you are a fan of Tatoeba and have a personal blog. Because you are very supportive, you would like to put a link to Tatoeba on your blog, and perhaps you would like the link to be graphical rather than simple text. Well, we don't really have any standard image for people to use in such situations and we'd like to create some.

So we're organizing a little contest for our contributors with artistic/design skills (or who just want to give it a try): create banners for Tatoeba!

Everyone can participate and if you want to, here's what to do or to know:

1. Make 2 images with the following sizes: 88x31 and 392x72. You may re-use our current logo in it, but don't hesitate to make another (better) logo if you are inspired.
2. Send your 2 images to trang@tatoeba.fr with the title "Tatoeba banners" and indicate in the email your Tatoeba username. I will reply you back to confirm that I have received them.
3. The current deadline is January 23rd, 13:00 (France time). However, we will need at the very least 5 submissions, otherwise it's not very interesting :P I do hope there will be more than 5, but if there isn't been enough submissions, we will extend the deadline to the next Tatoeba day: February 20th, same time.
4. Shortly after the deadline I will publish the banners that were sent to me. Then Tatoeba users will have one week to vote for their favorite banners. I'm not sure yet how we will do the votes but I will write about it in due time. IMPORTANT: I don't want people to be influenced by "who made the banner" during the vote so I will not indicate this information when I first publish the banners. I will ask you as well to keep your work "secret" the whole time (don't show it to anyone and don't say "I did this one").
5. Once the votes are over, I will reveal the participants and announce the winner who will then be venerated forever by everyone for his/her talent :)

Quality of the corpus

Since Tatoeba is open for everyone to contribute, one of its biggest problem is quality. Contributors aren't necessarily professionals and we inevitably have many sentences that contain mistakes or don't sound right. For our 2nd Tatoeba day, we will be focusing on quality. The goal of the day will be to check, correct and improve as many sentences as possible.

We've got plenty of sentences sentences tagged "@Needs Native Check", "@change" and "@check", and it would be really nice to remove as many of these tags as possible to replace them with the 'OK' tag. We've also got plenty of orphan sentences that desperately need parents.

If you want to participate, don't be shy and join our IRC channel #tatoeba on January 23rd (cf. our help page to learn how to use IRC, in case you are not familiar with IRC). This way you can discuss in real time with other members about what to do with a sentence (among other things)!

The next day, I will be publishing the following stats:

• The number of sentences modified.
• The number of comments posted.
• The number of sentences tagged 'OK'.
• The approximate number of sentences adopted.

I'll be honest though, things might be a little disorganized at first. I don't know yet how many people intend to participate and I don't how yet how we will coordinate with each other to work efficiently together. But this second Tatoeba will be the occasion to experiment and hopefully figure out something :)

NOTE: You may want to read these articles to learn a bit more about how we handle quality, even though they are not up-to-date anymore.