Automated Vocabulary and Flashcard Sharing

[jiacheng]

I was thinking that the usefulness of Pleco could be increased greatly if flashcard sharing could be a more automated process. As it stands now, I have created flashcards for a number of books, probably only about half of which I have posted to the flashcard forums. If there could be a feature in Pleco, say a check box that simply says "make my vocabulary lists publicly available", then it could be a huge help and convenience to others. It could be a huge help to projects like CEDict, who could add definitions contributed by users. I feel most users would be more than happy to contribute those definitions they couldn't find in their dictionaries and had to fill in on their own.

Also, in the age of social networking, adding a more social component to Pleco could potentially be huge.

I envisioned an additional choice in the card info section "change dictionary / convert to custom card", say "user contributed definitions" then you could select entries based on various criteria, popularity, definition language, etc.

Also, under organize cards, users could mark certain categories as publicly shared, and maybe have the option of filling in some descriptive data, stating which book or lesson this category is for.

 

[mikelove]

Thanks for the suggestion.

To be honest, the big problem here is that we're not really in the business of providing web services now (aside from our extremely simple and low-volume order processing stuff, which we can comfortably run on a little cloud VPS with capacity to spare, and can maintain adequately to our needs without needing a full-time web developer) So it's a major new initiative with major new costs attached to it and I don't know if the benefits of this feature alone would be adequate to justify it.

We do accept submissions of missing entries from users now, but these are basically just sending the text of a failed search to an email form; nothing nearly as complicated as what you're talking about.

As far as contributing to open-source projects, the issue with CC-CEDICT as I understand it is that they don't really have the volunteer manpower to review large automated content dumps like this; whatever we contributed would end up in a giant hopeless queue somewhere and could only gum up the works for entries that people went onto CC-CEDICT's website to submit in a more thoughtful / specific way. Editorial time is always a big hold-up for open-source content projects - much easier to find contributors than editors.