A while ago I studied in zh-zh mode and added some Chinese definitions. Later I switched back to en-zh.

Although I'm constantly in en-zh mode now, I still get those Chinese definitions for some of my characters (e.g. 瞥). What went wrong?

If you edit a definition, they then count as your custom definition. Custom definitions wont be overwritten by changing the language. If you hover over the definition you can see the original English one, if you wish to revert back.

Something different but related:

Sometimes I add less commonly used expressions (e.g. dialect) that neither exist in the Skritter database nor in available en-zh dictionaries (NCIKU, iciba ...). I only have zh-zh definitions from Baidu etc. and I'm not quite able or willing to translate it into English. Since I don't want to switch to zh-zh (makes no sense many categories of words), may I still add the zh-zh definition to the en-zh dictionary (the English version doesn't exist anyway) or would you discourage this?

Thanks, Byzanti. "Custom definitions wont be overwritten by changing the language." I didn't know that.

Currently if you enter a definition, it just sets it as the definition for whatever language you are studying from. So if you're set to zh-zh, you should only submit corrections in Chinese, and when you're set to en-zh, you should only submit corrections in English.

I'll be changing that in the near future though so that you can choose what language you add the definitions in. More info here:

http://www.skritter.com/forum/topic?id=84462591&comments=12

It may be samewhat off topic, but I notized the following:

I am using de-zh. When adding new words, for example 爱情, it seems that the word is added with it's German translation, which is of course fine.
But (at least with my settings) the individual words "爱" and "情" are also added to the queue and for those individual words the description will appear in English. Did anyone also stumble upon this issue? Is there a way to solve this?

Some dictionaries are more complete than others. I checked and 爱情 has a German definition while neither of the individual characters do. In fact, 爱 doesn't have a definition in German or English. However, you can give them custom definitions and press the 'submit as correction' checkbox and we'll add the definitions to our system, putting them into the correct language.

I have to admit that I cannot completely follow the fact that the issue might be due to missing dictionary entries.

Unfortunately I cannot find an example right now. Sometimes it appears that the whole word, consisting of two or more character does have a German translation. The individual characters do not have a German translation by default but as soon as I click on the reading-glass symbol I can find the German translation in the small pop-up, copy and paste it and thereby edit the English, "standard" translation.
So it seems that the characters actually do exist in the dicitionary but the system has problems when automatically "splitting" a word consisting of more than one character into its parts.
Am I doing something wrong here or might this in fact be a bug?

@scott I'm confused. How could 爱 possibly NOT have a definition in English?

I bet he looked them up in Japanese mode. Both of those characters have definitions in both German and English (and many more languages).

Oh nevermind, I forgot to filter for language when I was looking at the characters, I was actually looking at the Japanese versions of those characters instead of the Chinese ones. Both of those characters have both English and German definitions in Chinese. Thanks for the catch James.

Yes, that sounds like a bug. When exactly does this happen? Just when you add it to the queue? Or also when you practice? I'll work on this tomorrow, it shouldn't be hard to fix, as long as I can reproduce it. If you add a word to your studies and you find it doesn't show the German definition immediately but it does if you open the popup, let it be and let me know what word it was and I'll have a closer look at it.

Hehe, I called it!

Scott, there seems to be 2 definitions for 欠. One definition is shown, when it is used in a character break-down as component, e.g. 欲. The other is shown, when it is used as a character itself or when you click on this component in the break-down. I have seen this with other characters as well. Might be, this is the root cause, if there is more than 1 definition for the same character.
I'm referring to German language definition and Chinese.

Scott, there is also another phenomenon, which may relate to this: sometimes you can see, that users submit a corrections, however, the definition is empty. I have seen this even for corrections, made by myself, where I definitely knew, that I have inputted a definition. Recently, I had this phenomenon again and if I remember correctly, it was the following scenario: I edited the definition, left the definition field, however, didn't go to the next review item. Instead, I changed my reviews, e.g. from writing to reading, so that in this case, the page was reloaded. Later in baller I realized, that the definition field was empty, even the previous definition was lost. I also have seen empty definition fields from other users. So I assume, that they have then a user-specific definition, which is empty.

Scott, another bug with definitions (just to keep you busy - haha): I was just reviewing 粉饼. For 粉, the correct definition in German was shown, for 饼, the definition in English was shown correctly, (as there seems to be none for German). However, the mouse-over definition shown then, was the English definition of 粉. I have seen this quite often already, that the mouse-over definition of the 2. character is the English version of the 1. character.

Scott, the last comment is a permanent bug, not a sporadic one. It always occurs, if the 2. (or 3. or 4.) character doesn't have a German definition and is showing the English as default. If there is a German definition, it shows the original English definition of this character correctly.

I had the problem with an empty definition just now again. It was during high latency / server error.

Whew, lots to pick through here!

I was unable to reproduce the bug still as I think you describe, dreiundzwanzig. I went to my queue with my language set to de-zh and added 爱情, and when I looked at the queue all were listed with their German definitions. Are these the same steps you took?

Hi Roland, we're working on using custom definitions for single character decompositions, hopefully that will get fixed fairly soon.

Nick's looking into this empty definition problem. Offhand I'm not sure how that would happen; it seems to me either the definition would be saved successfully or nothing would be changed at all, not an empty definition saved. Strange!

The mouseover English definition is intentional, so people could see it easily without having to switch languages. I think there was a forum thread earlier where someone suggested it and we set it up for them.

Roland, how many corrections did you you notice where you had submitted a correction, then later saw it as an empty correction in the baller?

I know that there's currently a bug where a correction that's shared and then deleted will stay shared, even though it's empty--I'll work on fixing that. But I haven't found yet how a new correction could be created without the definition in there. If there was lag, and you refreshed the page, I'd expect the correction to possibly not save, but not to make an empty correction. Strange!

Hey Scott, I'm sorry for confusing you, I cannot tell if this problem appeared when adding 爱情. I was just using it as an example. As soon as I stumble upon an example while practising I will try to take screenshots to clarify what I mean and keep track of the words the problem actually comes with :-)

That actually happened faster than expected:

I recently added 服务员 to my queue.

The word 员 is added as an individual word automatically and this is what happens:

http://img864.imageshack.us/i/screen1kjvp.png/
http://img825.imageshack.us/i/screen2wu.png/

What I would typically do now, is to copy the German translation in the popup, click "X" and paste it into the description box, overwriting the English description. Of course I'd like to skip this manual step if possible :-)

Ah, I think many of the missing foreign language definitions for single characters are just because they are cached and haven't been updated in a while. It takes a long time and a powerful computer to update all those decomposition definition caches, so I'll have to wait about a week before I can start that job. After that, though, you should see much less of this.

Hope that makes sense!

Scott, I think, here's a misunderstanding. The mouse-over function is really great, I like it. But there is a bug in a certain scenario.Assume, you have word AB, character A has a German definition, character B not. When at character A, the mouse-over window shows you the English definition of character A correctly. Then you go to character B. As there is no German definition, it shows you the English definition of this character correctly. However, the mouse-over window still shows you the English definition of character A instead of nothing. I guess, one of the classical bugs: the field, which carries the mouse-over definition, was neither over-written nor re-set. It happens consistently in this scenario.

Nick, my feeling is, it happens in about 0.5 to 1.0% of the cases. I am wondering, what will be shown to the user in this case, there is a definition, but it's an empty string. Does the user then see the English definition? This may explain, why users think, that for very common characters, there is no definition in German (or another language). They may have overwritten this by themselves with an empty string as user-specific definition.
I have rejected these empty strings, but they are still there as user-specific - correct? Maybe, you can look-up, whether dreiundzwanzig has some empty definitions and ask him/her, whether these are the problematic ones. I shouldn't have one, as you have deleted mine last week and if it occurs now, I first correct the empty definition before accepting.

I think replacing the definition with an empty string will do the right thing from the user's point of view (return to the German definition, if there is one, or the English if not). There was a bug where it would stay submitted as a correction, but I think I've fixed it for definitions cleared after yesterday, so hopefully we shouldn't see any more new empty corrections.

@nick actually it wasn't obvious to me that putting in an empty definition would delete my custom definition and return me to the default behavior (es-zh in my case). I also have to say that the whole idea of definitions in different languages overriding one another might be fine for programmers and veteran users, but sounds quite confusing for new users. It might be worth explaining the whole system in detail in a FAQ section.

Something I personally find confusing and unsettling is running across an ancient item like 你好 but being prompted with an unfamiliar definition, because the underlying definition has been updated. This happened with the radical 襾 for example, which I think used to say something like "west (variant)" and now says something like "stopper". There is also an issue with custom definitions and corrections: suppose someone sees a definition D and adds something extra like an example sentence, so they have (D, S). Meanwhile the ballers run across that item and realize that D was actually incorrect and that the definition should have been E. Well, the person with (D, S) will never know and will continue to go along happily studying an incorrect definition.

I don't have a solution, but I think it's something to think about. Maybe one possibility would be to somehow notify the user when the underlying definition changes for an item for which the user has a custom definition.

Another issue, which is more social, is that when a user submits a correction, she usually doesn't know what eventually happens with that correction. By contrast, Chris Clark emails me regularly about things I send through the feedback link, and I think that makes me much more likely to send in feedback because I know it will actually be read and thought about. I have been plowing through the Spanish corrections and it would be really nice to be able to communicate with the users who submitted corrections, in some cases just to thank them, in some cases because they weren't following the style guide, in other cases because they submitted items in the wrong language.

As I mentioned before, it would be even nicer to somehow recognize publicly people who submit lots of (good) corrections. Communpro, whoever that is, has been doing a huge amount of work on Spanish definitions, but he/she doesn't know which are being used, which were rejected and why, etc. I worry that without some kind of feedback mechanism to show that the corrections are being looked at, he/she will give up.

James

Hey James! Good suggestions all, we finally got around to going over them together and figuring out what we wanted to do.

I'll tweak the popup to have a button specifically for removing the definition, so it's clear how to do it (deleting the text will also work still). When on the study page, things get a little more hairy, but I'll see if I can add an x so that there's a more intuitive way to remove the custom definition while you're practicing.

Nick's going to add an entry to the FAQ.

We thought about doing something like you mentioned before, where it informs you of changes to definitions as you study the words, but it didn't seem to be high enough priority and it would be hairy to set up. This should happen very rarely, does it happen to you often?

I'll build that communication system for you, so you can message people who submit corrections. It's on the list! In terms of publicly recognizing, I was thinking the upcoming leaderboards and badge system could include things for people who submit corrections or add definitions to the system. And of course, not only people who submit corrections but you ballers deserve some recognition! You've been making good progress on those Spanish corrections, James, we appreciate it.

Sorry to bring this old topic up again.

I recently noticed the following:
The definition for 冒 appeared in English, just as it happened before (see above). I then opened the word details and copied the German definition to the main window and checked the "shared as correction" box.

The word popped up a couple of times, as usual as you a working on new words and everything seemed fine. Today I had another review of the word and the definition switched back to English.

In fact, I think the same thing happens quite often for other words.

Is this a known issue? Is it because of constant definition updates? I don't see any changes in the definitions itself...

dreiundzwanzig, there really seems to be a bug. I already came across suggested German corrections from you (in Baller), which were exactly the same as what is in Skritter already and I was wondering why; now I know.
I had the same phenomenon by myself yesterday, when I was presented a character with English definition instead of German, where I was pretty sure, that the German existed. Anyway, I changed the English to German again and then later, I could see in Baller, that the German in deed existed.
Scott, I've left dreiundzwanzig's corrections in Baller, so that you may have a chance to check it. But why does it happen to dreiundzwanzig relatively often, whereas to me very seldom? I remember from another user in another blog, that she also mentioned this phenomenon, forgotten, which blog this was.

Hi Roland, good to hear that somebody can retrace the problem.

Is it possible that there are "update days"? I have the feeling that there are certain days when a whole bunch of words change back to English definitions more or less at the same time.

dreiundzwanzig, it looks like, that they don't change back to English, it's just that Skritter shows - for whatever reason - the English definition, although the German is still available, as you also have seen when you went into the detail definition via the magnifying glass.
I could clearly see this in Baller, but I cannot analyze it, as I'm a normal user like you (except that I check German shared corrections in Baller); it's a case for Scott or Nick to look into this.
Therefore, there is no need that you copy-paste the definitions; just wait for them, that they have found the bug.

@dreiundzwanzig: I was not aware of this bug. I tried to reproduce it though and was unable to. I switched to your account, put 冒 into the scratchpad, progress off, and studied it. It had the writing come up and the definition was in German. I clicked the magnifying glass for more details and the definition was still in German. Did you already change the definition again to fix it? Or is the process for reproducing this different? What happens when you follow the steps I took?

We'll get this sorted out!

scott: the bug does not appear all the time. Sometimes I will study a word, the definition box will show the English definition, I will click the magniyfing glass, copy and paste the German definition (which is almost always available) and put it in the definition box.
On the next day the same word does sometimes come with the German definition but also sometimes the definition switched back to English. When this happens I have the feeling that it didn't happen to a single word like 冒 but a good portion of the words that I have to study on that day.
Unfortunately I was unable to notice a pattern apart from the impression that IF it happens, it happens to several words at the same time (which lead me to the question if you do description updates on certain days of a week or so).

Regarding 冒: I probably changed the definition back to German, but I am 100% sure the bug appeared for this word just recently (probably even twice already).

When following your steps, I am now getting the German description as well.

Wish I could provide some more clues/patterns on this... :\

Scott, you get some more examples, if you look up in Baller the German part. I've left dreiundzwanzig's recent entries unchanged there; you can see, that they all have the German definitions there.
Same happened to me, but very seldom.

Any news already? ;)

Ah I figured it out! It's that you're studying with Heisig keywords. Here's what happened.

You see the Heisig definition (which is in English).
You edit the definition so it's in German. You no longer see the Heisig definition.
Roland sees your correction, accepts it, and your custom definition goes away because it equals the German definition.
You now see the Heisig definition again, because it has higher priority than the default German definition, but lower priority than a custom definition.

So you'll need to turn off Heisig's definitions to see all German definitions, or you should edit your definition but not submit it as a correction. You can turn of Heisig's definitions in the account page.

This is a good example of why the more options we provide, the more complicated things get and scenarios like this crop up.

Scott, I normally (90%) have rejected the corrections.

Rejected or accepted, it happens either way.