Just wanted to file a bit of a complaint. I'm finding more and more that when I add a word that's not in the Skritter database, it's already filled in with the 'placeholder' information, which of course prevents the addition of a definition. At first I usually ran into this with individual characters, which was no problem b/c I prefer to add whole words rather than single characters, but now it's happening more frequently with whole words. What happened to the "we don't currently have this word, add a definition" thing?

Anyone else running into this issue? Any solutions?

Also, why do we have placeholders to begin with?

Thanks!

I am encountering the same thing quite a bit. 同情你。

Yeah me too. The thing is these are placeholder words, where all the characters in the word are already known to Skritter. There's no reason for them to be placeholders; they should just not be added to the system, allowing us to define them instead.

Placeholder characters of course, I can understand - since they haven't been added, but this is quite different.

This has to do with the up and coming alternative language definitions. Nick has been seeding huge numbers of vocabulary words with definitions in other languages, but a lot of them are words which we don't have in our system. So all these placeholder words are words we do have in the system and can be studied, but not with English definitions...

The new list editor actually handles them, allowing users to put in English definitions no problem (or whatever their source language is set to), but it hasn't been put in for the old system.

I'll work on a stopgap measure today, so you guys can define words that need definitions. And I'll start thinking about how this can be handled better in general site-wide.

Excellent, thanks for the explanation. Looking forward to the new features!

when you say other definitions, does that include chinese? is it possible to use chinese definitions?

+ Chinese definitions

I don't have any Chinese-Chinese definition source right now, but one would be great. You can start adding definitions in Chinese (especially if you set your source language to Chinese) now if you want.

I just uploaded the stop gap measure. If you go to the vocabulary list sections, all words without definitions have links now that let you set the definition. It will be easier when the new list editor gets put in.

Nick,

This might be a good place to start:

http://www.lingoes.cn/zh/dictionary/dict_cata.php?cata=2.c

In my copy of Lingoes I have 高级汉语大词典，现代汉语词典第，国际标准汉字大字典 and 汉语大辞典 all installed.

Little confused here. Seeing as I can't add a definition from the queue, I've tried creating a custom list, but there's no word field any more? It only seems to let me add sections...

Ah, once I've clicked 'make the list' I can add words. I'm sure it's not meant to work this way, though...

Also, when I do enter a word in the list, it's coming changing to traditional with additional traditional in brackets...

And it's gone and shown up in practice as traditional too...

I also have had a couple of problems with the new list editor. I tried to add 弄皱 nong4 zhou4 "to crumple" to my queue and it came up as a placeholder word, so I created a new custom list and tried to add the definition. This didn't work:

1. When I click on "Add 弄皺 to our Dictionary" the default pinyin is duo4 zhou4, which doesn't make sense because, according to nciku, 弄 is pronounced either nong4 or long4.
2. The same popup has text "Select this if the word is rarely written with the given Kanji" at the bottom; I am studying Chinese, not Japanese, and in any event there's nothing to select there (I guess there's supposed to be a checkbox or something?).
3. When I submit "nong4 zhou4" as the pinyin and "to crumple" as the definition, I get two error messages:

Pinyin
This is not a valid pinyin.
Word
Not all characters exist in database: 弄

James

Ah I think I found the problem. There was a bug in how some of the new words were uploaded, so I'm running a script to go through and fix some values. Then they should show up correctly, both in the new list editor and everywhere else on the site.

As for the default reading being wrong, we're still trying to figure out what went wrong there. Nick will be working on that.

And I've fixed it so that Japanese specific text doesn't show up when you're in Chinese mode and will upload soon, thanks James.

In the new list editor, you go to the section page for the section you want to edit then click 'edit this section'. So there are basically three actions you can do from the list page to change around your list: you can edit info (name and description), edit sections (section names and order), and edit words (words within a single section). So there's on all in one place to go like before, but it lets you work on one bit at a time rather than the whole thing at once on one very large page.

Can't seemingly go to the section page before making the list, see screenshot...

http://tiny.cc/ymqtw

Is that how it's meant to be?

Yeah, that's correct. You make the list with a bunch of sections, list name and description, then once it's made you can add words to each section individually.

Maybe you could include the words "You can add words later" or somesuch. It's a bit counter intuitive to make a word list without any words...

@scott: to follow up on the previous report, just now I was practicing and saw a message in the practice area "Missing defn for 弄. Presumably the placeholder that I added to my queue is the cause?

James

弄 got screwed up somehow independently of other things, I think. Fixed it now and it should be good to go again.

@nick Thanks, you rock!

@Byzanti: sure that's a good idea. It's tricky figuring out what's the best order of operations for building these lists, especially now that the different actions have been split up over the list and section pages. I guess we'll see how it goes this, and probably start working on a different setup to try and make it more intuitive!

Still getting the placeholder message when I try to add unknown words to the queue.

I've just installed the new vocab list editor widget into the queue, which lets you add definitions before adding the words to your queue.

When you're browsing the queue, click the word you would like to add a definition to and you'll be able to do that on the page that takes you to.