Hello,
Did I miss something or has there also been an update with the MDBG import.

I've just gone through importing at least 20 words, and I don't think I've ran into the placeholder message which used to often pop up.

Also, I was adding 長袍, defined as "gown" in MDBG, and Skritter processed it with the message "长袍: (chángpáo). nightgown" added to your your queue for study."
When doing an import, if the word already exist in Skritter, does the Skritter definition takes over the MDBG one? If that's the case, it would be nice to have a little message letting users know that the defintion already exist, and so the Skritter definition will be used instead of the one getting imported.

I am not sure you want the MDBG definitions over-writing skritter definitions. Some of the MDBG are quite dodgy.

When you import a word from MDBG (or anywhere else) just the character is imported. The definition that appears is the definition in Skritter's database. Skritter's definitions are a bit different than dictionary definitions as the goal is pedagogical rather than reference.

I believe the only place we import the definition as well is from ChinesePod.

@Bob, I was hoping to avoid a Skritter def. vs MDBG def. debate, but the topic looks unavoidable each time I raise it, hehe. Actually, I've talked to some of the MDBG editors, who said that most of the so called dodgy definitions dates from the beginning, when new entries were added in the database without a real checking system. Nowadays though, they do have editors looking at new entries or annotation requests, and they are much more rigourous about it. I've relied on it ever since I started studying chinese, and it's always been a big help, especially with obscure sentences. So yes, I would still take MDBG definitions over Skritter's.
I find that the Skritter definitions aren't all perfect either, though on one occasion, I did find a word better defined in it than on MDBG, so Skritter gets a point on that ;)

@Doug, thanks for the clarification. By the way, what do you mean by "pedagogical definitions". I'm just trying to understand, not complaining ;) Thanks.

Skritter definitions aim to be a lot shorter than MDBG definitions tend to be, which is the main difference. ChinesePod and MDBG both will create words with their definitions if it's not already in Skritter, but if it's in Skritter, the existing definition is used.

@nick thanks, knowing how long some MDBG definitions can be, I understand your point.

Before if we had the word, but didn't have the English definition for it, we did not put MDBG's definition for it. Since we now have a much larger database filled with words we don't have English definitions for, I tweaked it so now it does import the MDBG definitions. That went live the other day, so the sudden change wasn't in your imagination!

But yeah as Nick said, we only import definitions from ChinesePod and MDBG if they don't already exist in our database.

I stand corrected then. Pedagogical definitions are ones that are more geared to learning Chinese (versus say understanding an article so they don't include rare meanings, etc.)

Today I noticed, that quantity and what's more important, quality of russian translations had significantly improved. Now, much better. Have something changed? New vocabularies switched on?

Not yet, although we are going to rerun the script after some fixes, and both of those will improve a lot.