The intention of this post is to verify my understanding of the several aspects of content creation/editing. I would appreciate if people who did it or at least thought about it would confirm my understanding or point out that it is incorrect.
It looks to me that the existing content (lesson, podcast etc.) can be edited by anybody anytime for any reason. There is no any ways to authorize or prohibit editing, to give permission to edit the content or any method to protect the content from further modification (unless it is a “private” content).
If my understanding is correct, it makes it unacceptable for me to do any content modification for the following reasons:
Somebody had created/modified the content and made it suitable for her/his purposes. My attempt to make additional changes will overwrite the existing content and might completely ruin somebody’s efforts and will waste their time and efforts spent. In my view, that is not acceptable.
If I spend my own time and efforts on modification of the content according to my own criteria, taste, purposes etc. all of that can be overwritten by the next person who might have different ideas about how this content unit should look like. In my view, that is also not acceptable.
At least one possible solution for this dilemma (“to do or not to do”) is to add a simple feature “Save As” that currently doesn’t exist. Then I would be able to open any content unit, modify it and save as my own copy (clone) of the original content unit. Then I can make this copy (clone) “private” or “shared”. If I make it “private” nobody sees it. If it “shared” it can be visible to anybody and can be used by anybody but without any modification.
And yes, I realize that even in absence of “Save As” feature I can open an existing content unit, to extract it’s text, audio etc. and to create from scratch a new content unit based on these ingredients. But such an approach obviously is much more time-consuming and not exactly user-friendly. And of course I will have to keep this new content unit as not shared to protect it from modification by somebody else. And that would defeat the point to encourage sharing the content by the members of LingQ community.
Despite having used LingQ for a long time now, I only recently realised that changes I made to a Lesson applies for everyone. This is pretty problematic, and thus in now importing my own lessons, I’m keeping them Private despite likely being of value to others, mainly because I want to ensure that they are not modified. It feels like Lessons should support being marked as ‘read only’ for others, or have it such that modifications need to be approved by the original author - where the alternative would be for the person modifying to duplicate a copy for their own private use.
I’m not sure but I think I heard something about being able to restrict editing to yourself (and LingQ Head Librarians or something), haven’t looked into it as of yet, but maybe someone who knows more about this can chime in?
P.S. If this feature is only availible to LingQ staff or something this would be a great feature to add to LingQ. I recommend started a thread to request this feature (control who can edit your uploaded public/private content) if this turns out ot be the case.
Yes, it’s unfortunate and unacceptable to figure out how the system behaves based only on the observations and experimenting with it. The key solutions like allowing to destroy anybody else’s changes to content units (lessons etc.) should be stated explicitly when the feature is still on the phase of requirement definition and design. Proposed design decisions should of been discussed publicly on the forum and only after reaching a consensus they should go to implementation phase.
There is enough smart and experienced people around here who would see and point out the possible design flaws and who who will speak up against implementing such a design.
I don’t think that authorization of changes by the original author is a realistic solution. After all we are here to study languages and not to be heavily involved in system/data maintenance. I can’t imagine the author that spends a lot of time comparing several proposed “improved” versions of his/her content. I think it will be enough if anybody is just allowed to create his own modified version with the name reflecting new ownership. Even if each modified version is “shared”, anybody else can pick it for the use “as is” or for further modification with the still another name.
You can find some interesting discussion (see the link below) related to the same topics that we have here. Please join us there!
Obviously the members of development team can assign ouselves any access privileges to any content of any author. But they should use it only in emergency situations if absolutely necessary for any reason, such as violation of copyright or some others serious problems.
In all other cases the content created by the author is owned by the author unless she/he explicitly gave the right to edit to somebody else. But that is not how this issue is handled in LingQ.
You can find some interesting discussion related to the same topics that we have here: