With all the seemingly abandoned courses

Community-Created Courses Course Creator's Corner
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With all the seemingly abandoned courses that need correction why not build a community support system where users who can see something is wrong in a course can fix it and if is a better correction or is right then you get points toward a goal or for your rank? You could require a vote by users of certain ranks or higher to implement the changes?

The problem I have seen is there is no way to contact course creators who have abandoned courses and no way to become a contributor without them. And since the course search doesn’t seem very reliable it will clog up the site to have courses in repeat because of abandoned courses that are good but have some errors. If Memrise made the course more of a community maintenance project with rewards for good additions/ corrections and idk penalties in rank or something for troll entries it could potentially have better courses instead of just more courses. Since the courses are mostly user designed in the first place if you make them more community maintained or designed then it could be better then being frustrated with course errors that can’t be fixed.

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But if so, there needs to be some criteria for what counts as an abandoned course, and this is where it all gets tricky.

If the creator has not been online for… how long? Weeks? Months? A year?

But the creator can very well be active and using the site, just don’t care about an old project. So how do we measure course creator engagement?

The last time the user logged in to the editing interface? The last time they added an entry or made a change? That’s problematic as well, maybe the course is finished, there is no need for additional levels, and with no obvious platform for feedback (I am not convinced about this new community forum as an alternative) how would they even know that something needs to be fixed?

On the other hand, if someone is active and is constantly developing and caring for their course, it wouldn’t be right for someone else to step in and make changes. (I’d be livid if someone could “fix” my course, and I suspect I’m not the only control freak in the house.) Suggestions? Absolutely. Changes? Absolutely not.

I could imagine a flagging system of suggestions, and if the creator doesn’t respond within a reasonable time (I don’t know how long that would be, two months?) then some public voting could be conducted.

But then again – who would be qualified to vote? And how many votes would you need for a change to come to effect? It would be easy to find users who can speak both English and Spanish and can therefore decide, if the correction is legitimate or not – but how many users are experts in for example Persian and Slovak? Should we need different numbers for different language pairs? That would complicate the scenario even more.

And how would the creator see that something is up? There is no messaging system – something could be added to the editing interface, maybe, but not much has happened on that front lately, (apart from the messing up of the database search.) If tickets come up, there needs to be an interface, where the creator can approve or decline the suggestion, mark it as done, and maybe even reply to the sender.

That all would be an awful lot of developing and coding for a “minor inconvenience” which can be “fixed” by ignoring.

I agree that this is an issue, and a big one at that. I’m just not sure that there is an easy solution. People are annoyed with good reason. But the solution needs to be quantifiable so that it can be implemented automatically, and I’m afraid, this one is just isn’t worth it.

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I agree that there needs to be a better way to contact the creators in the first place first. And there needs to be a way to report errors. And I’d prefer it to be something that required either creator approval or if they are ignoring it community approval.

I get that courses are generally made with a lot of effort and care and so you might not want it to be changed and some courses are done but there are a lot of issues with the system right now. And this is a suggestion that could help. Do I think this is the best and only way, no it could help but this is really just meant to get people discussing it.

A community maintaince project would be relatively easy from the business side of memrise, they would have to moderate some I’m sure but it’s less intensive then if they had to maintain the courses themselves. And if you want a course to be private for just you and or ypur friends then it can be unlisted.

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I can see where you are coming from, and you are right, I think.

However making courses unlisted just for that “strangers” shouldn’t have access to edit its database seems a little extreme, I think :slight_smile:

What I had in mind when I wrote an awful lot of effort, I didn’t mean moderating. What I meant was more the coding, programming, website developing effort. They have to:

  1. come up with a viable private messaging platform (maybe avoidable, but some kind of notification system)
  2. make a new interface where the flagged/reported/problematic entries come up for review for the course creator
  3. and possibly a ticketing system, so the user doing the flagging can explain what’s wrong in their opinion – and where the creator can reply and say when they have made a correction or the reason they don’t want to make a change
  4. come up with an algorithm which selects the reports that are old enough and have not been responded to, and put them out to
  5. a voting interface where speakers of both languages can vote up or down a certain suggestion,
  6. maybe with a chance to make corrections to the already suggested correction, and
  7. have a script make changes in the course database if a sufficient number of votes is reached, while backing up the old entry, just in case.

And this list has not included key points that must be decided: how long should we wait for the creator to respond; who can vote in which languages; which are the crucial numbers, after how many votes can a change go through; what happens with an audio – or even a video –
file if the corresponding record was changed; figuring out some reward for those who go through correctional suggestions (otherwise it will be a handful of overly motivated individuals doing the work, but not a large number of users) and so on.

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