Answer Customization

7shi

Existing courses include inappropriate formats for typing.

Allowing users to select No Type Mode is one solution, but there may be times when they want to type. But giving away editing rights to fix some of them is too big a deal, and I don't think it's a good idea to allow anyone to do so. Even if someone were to be in charge, it would be too much of a burden to handle every request.

So I would suggest that each person be able to customize their own answers. If customized answers could be shared, it would be positioned similar to Mem.

In developer terms, this means that anyone can patch a course, and others can choose to apply the patch.

I think this would maximize the use of existing assets.

neoncube

Agreed! 🙂

Actually, this is one of my big plans for My Little Word Land, but I've been keeping wraps on it, so far XD

Allowing people to clone a course but keep it linked back to the original course should also make it easy to create courses for different dialects: One could create an English (UK) course, clone it to be an English (US) course, and then have changes from the English (UK) course automatically flow into the English (US) course 🙂

7shi

neoncube It's like GitHub's fork. If we can do that, it will reduce the problem of edit rights in the creator's absence.

neoncube

7shi Indeed 🙂

I think the big questions will be when it'll make sense to let a fork graduate to fully-independent course status, where it's listed separately from the main course, and how to let people find forks that are being maintained, without frustrating the original creator of the course.

7shi

neoncube The situation will differ depending on whether it is Memrise-derived or original. I was mainly thinking of the former.

Most courses brought from Memrise do not come with their creator, and even if they come, it is difficult to verify that it is really the creator. In this case, I think forking would be more appropriate than handing editorial rights to someone else, and would rarely be a problem.

If a course is created in MLWL and has its creator, it may be more appropriate to co-edit rather than fork. Even if forked, they sometimes would prefer to merge.

neoncube

7shi That's a good point. I hadn't thought about viewing the Memrise courses and new courses separately.

With both the Memrise courses and the new courses, though, I think it would be nice to let people perform tweaks to a course that only they can see, so that if they disagree with a course author, they can still happily use the course 🙂

7shi

neoncube Does that mean "private repository"? It avoids the creator's unwillingness to fork, but it also prevents the sharing of corrections of mistakes. However, I understand that if the priority is to keep the trouble down, it should not be made public.

neoncube

7shi Another idea: Anyone can make changes to any course that they're learning, but those changes aren't visible to anyone else, except the author of the course, who can see changes that everyone has made to their personal copy of the course and incorporate those changes into the official copy of the course, if he likes.

Ideally, there'd be a setting where people could choose to not have their course modifications be visible to the author.

7shi

I think that if the visibility of a fork is limited to a specific group, then that group is like the alliance in the social network game we were talking about elsewhere. 😆

neoncube

7shi Hahaha, ah, the idea of only helping out your teammates when providing corrections to a course… 😂

7shi

neoncube If the creator is still active, I don't think it is so serious, because it is possible to request modification by talking to the creator in the forum, etc., without any special mechanism.

As I mentioned before, what I am actually having trouble with is the case where the creator is no longer active and cannot make the correction.

7shi

BTW, I once asked the creator on the Memrise forum to fix his course. Three years later, you happened to write this shutdown announcements in that thread and I was able to come here.

Recently I had used Memrise very little and knew nothing about its shutdown. I am very grateful to you for making this place.

neoncube

7shi I'm really happy to have you here! ^_^

I wish I'd had time to post announcements in more of the threads before the forum shut down :/

P.S. Sorry for the late reply 😛

7shi

neoncube I understand that you are busy, so no problem.

I write a lot, but only because if I don't write when I think of it, I forget. I am not in any particular hurry. ☺️

7shi

Deckademy has something similar to what is discussed here.

https://deckademy.com/#/help

While only you and those users you appoint as maintainers can make changes to your own deck directly, others can also contribute new items or corrections by submitting change proposals that you can review and decide to integrate on a per item basis. Change proposals are a vital part of deckademy and you are encouraged to make use of them to make decks in the community more fleshed out and better, both by contributing to decks maintained by others and by reviewing proposed changes to your own deck.