I’ve uploaded a bunch of audios for transcription and created several courses with these audios. I made the lessons public and for a while they were visible on the platform and people were using them. Then at some point in time the lessons got rejected. I wrote to the support staff and no explanation was provided. I’ve tried again to make the lessons public, but again they have been rejected with no explanation. I’ve followed all of the requirements set out in their guidelines for making lessons public, so I’m not sure why they are being rejected. Question: Does Lingq discriminate against certain types of content? If so, then I do not want to support them any longer by paying for their services.
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I’m not LingQ staff, but my guess is that the most common reason a lesson is rejected for sharing is for copyright reasons. Do you have permission from the author to share their content? Or are you the author of the content?
In terms of topic restriction, the only topic I think restricted is that of religion. You aren’t allowed to share anything related to religion.
Content also needs to have a human audio and a transcript.
If you are interested in contributing to the LingQ community, you can become a volunteer Librarian and read the guidelines. You can find out more on the LingQ homepage > Community > Contribute
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You can reach out my colleague north - north@lingq.com from the content team and he will be able to give you the explanation.
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Common reasons why lessons get rejected. (I’m not LingQ staff but know a bit about this through discussions etc.)
- Copyright infringement
- Religious preaching. You can at least to a degree post things about religion, like the history of religions, demographics of religion maybe or laws on religion, like which countries have state churches and which have freedom of religion etc. - but you generally can’t post material that promotes a religion or religious beliefs. At least some of this is due to people uploading massive amounts of stuff promoting their religious views in the past (spamming the libraries basically).
- Stuff that is in some way pornographic or hugely objectionable in some way, though I don’t know much about the exact boundaries there. I think old texts may often get a pass where modern stuff would not. Many classic novels have really racist views but people couldn’t necessarily know any better back in the day, where as now they should. I doubt LingQ would reject a novel that has an erotic description in the story at some point, but if the story consists of little else than that and it is very graphic, I think they probably would.
- If the same lesson or a lesson containing nearly the exact same text has already been posted.
But like Zoran said, North should be able to tell you the exact reason.
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Actually, let me add more reasons why lesson can get rejected:
5) The audio is really bad
6) The audio is TTS (text to speech AI) generated and not the real voice of a person
7) The spelling and grammar is really bad
8) (This sort of relates to some previous ones) You have used AI to transcribe the audio and the AI has just not done it well enough. This is more likely to happen in a micro-language where the speech to text just doesn’t work that well. I have rejected a lesson like that in the Icelandic library, because it would have hurt the learners to read the text, thinking it were proper Icelandic.
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Ideally users should receive the reason why their lesson was rejected. Additionally, these rules should be stated in the FAQ/Knowledge Page or the sharing page.
Some of these rules are clear, others might be open for discussion. Would religious texts be allowed? Some of them are among the most translated texts in the world, and I find them very valuable for language learning. Would two translations of the same text be allowed, being one colloquial and the other literary? And there’s the point about objectionable content you’ve already made. Maybe some of these issues might be solved by the tagging system, such as hiding some tags, or having them hidden as a default. Regardless, the rules should be clearly stated somewhere.
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Religious texts are apparently permitted. Have a look at “Latin”. There are plenty of them there, and that’s a good thing. Without religious literature, there would be far too few texts here to learn Latin properly.
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Generally they are not allowed, but that does not mean they will always be deleted. It depends a lot on the librarians for each language as LingQ staff may not have the time to reject all of them. I also suspect there may be a higher tolerance for religious texts in languages that are really lacking more material in their libraries.
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It certainly would not hurt to make the rules clearer. There will probably always be a lot of gray areas, even if the rules get listed in great detail.
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Okay, now I understand why they were rejected, but I agree, that an explanation should be provided for the rejection. I had uploaded some Lebanese Arabic children’s renditions of some Bible stories (that are freely available to the public) simply because I thought they might be useful to others like me who have an extremely hard time finding content for the Lebanese dialect of Arabic (look, there’s almost no content whatsoever for Lebanese Arabic specifically) and because they were some of the only material I had that was open and free to the public. While they were publicly shared, I saw that many people were using them, and some people even wrote me asking me to upload more content in this series. So obviously some people were interested in the material. I understand that you may not want religious content on your site, but what frustrates me is that there are many Arabic texts that discuss or promote Islam. And maybe not everyone who learns Arabic wants to learn about Islam. For me being in the Lebanese community, that material is not helpful whatsoever because it doesn’t represent the demographic that I live amongst. If you’re going to block religious materials, then please consider blocking them in a fair and equal manner. Additionally, if you don’t want to people to be bombarded with religious content, then why don’t you just create a new category for “Religion”? That way people can choose to click on it if they want or avoid it if they don’t want to use those materials. I’m not interested in all of the politics that bombard LingQ, but I don’t complain, I just avoid those topics. It’s that easy.
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