What can we learn from the cup competition?

Open Forum
1

If we assume the Cup competition is fairly balanced (and I’m not sure it is), why are the winning teams winning?

Are Polish learners (currently #1) more dedicated than others? Or, is LingQ just one of the better resource available for Polish, so they have a lot of heavy users?

And what about the bottom of the ranks - do those languages lack resources in LingQ? Or is there another reason? Will we see the same strong and weak teams in similar positions each year?

Just curious what people think about this.

2
  1. Not to put banners on the browser constantly.
  2. It’s not clear if people gain points from when they join or not. So why bother?
3

There should be various factors, including but not limited to:

  • Teams are ranked by average coins per user. Thus, the worst a team can have is a high percentage of (rather) inactive users who bring down the average. This can also lead to the fact that even highly active users have rather little impact on the average. Furthermore, people may get discouraged by experiences that their Team average goes down even though the have contributed several thousands of coins on a day - or on a day where people could get a fixed bonus of 500 coins and the whole team hardly moved (people not taking their bonuses).
  • it seems plausible that a considerable part of participants joined the cup out of curiosity but never really cared about it and thus does not create many coins (e.g. switched to being active in another language)
  • Script of the language: Having a foreign script may slow down the reading speed
  • How close is a language to other languages for learners, e.g.: A German may run through massive content in Dutch very rapidly; same for Portuguese natives with Spanish or Italian language etc.
  • How many absolute beginners are there on LingQ in the Teams. English may benefit from a higher percentage of intermediate or advanced learners who might be able to create more coins in the same time.
    Some languages may be in Fashion for people to try out (thus more beginners), but those may tend to create fewer coins.
  • Similar words in a language: Some languages have words with many different endings, allowing to create more Linqs quicker (and also known words).
  • Inhomogeneous Teams with some very active users: Some languages have a number of highly active users who can drive up the averages (as long as such effects are not counterbalanced by other users with little to no activity)
4

Because their per capita activity is higher.