I have been debating about whether it is proper to share another site publicly on italki.com, that has features to the way it does notebooks and friends that make it easier to make corrections and that facilitates getting more useful corrections. If more people upvote this topic than downvote it, and if italki does not take it down, I will share the site publicly after a few days of discussion here about what italki could do to make it´s notebook features better.
I do not correct hardly any notebooks here because another free site is so much easier and better for me. Here are features that I think italki could also add to be more useful:
1. Line by line correction and comments, with each sentence showing and comparing all different people´s corrections for that sentence. If a sentence needs no correction, simply hit a button and move to the next sentence. This take away the problem of corrections being too long and lost when reply is hit. It also makes corrections much easier. Each line also has useful editing tools so that, for example, corrections of grammatical errors can be made in one color and suggestions to make it more natural can be made in another color.
2. This system also shows all the corrections that have been made to a line. A native speaker can simply choose to ¨good¨ someone else´s correction for a line. This gives the receiving person feedback when they receive multiple corrections. The person can look at which corrections were given by native speakers or non-native speakers and which ones got the most ¨goods¨. The profiles of persons also show how many ¨goods¨ (native nods) they receive and how many ¨thank yous¨ they receive. This makes it possible to have a better idea of the skill of the correctors. Some correctors obviously get lots of goods and lots of thank yous, others receive little. This simple system pretty well solves the problem of being mislead by bad corrections.
3. The stats of people also show how many corrections they have received and how many corrections they have made. They also ¨rank¨ correctors. Because of this and making it easy to correct entries, many generous people give more corrections than they receive.
4. The writings of all your friends show up for you on your home page, along with how many corrections or comments each writing receives, so you can easily make sure all your friends are receiving corrections.
5. They award bonus points and highlight posts that have not been corrected. I accepted a lot more friend requests there because the commitment is so minimal- being friends allows you to easily give corrections to ones that need corrections. I do not think I have ever gone more than a couple hours there without a correction.
In my experience, these improvements lead to more and more useful corrections. I do not write in notebooks a lot, but when I do, I use the other site. (If you are a Spanish speaker send me a private message and I would be happy to give you my screen name to be friends there and correct your notebooks.) I can´t make that offer here because italki´s notebooks are not very user friendly.
Susan, your suggestion #4 is exactly right. Italki used to send your friends' notebook entries to your home page, but they removed that feature during a disastrous upgrade (the one before the most recent upgrade disaster). It wasn't unusual for entries to get multiple good corrections, and it was common for notebooks to get 20 0r 30 comments. One friend of mine got over 500 views and 60 comments for one of her entries. Now I rarely see entries that get even 20 views, and few entries get more than one correction.
This feature was also the glue that made italki a close community. Removing it caused a lot of smart and interesting people to disappear because the community feeling evaporated.
No one seemed to think that it would be a problem to mention the name of the site that I think is better for getting corrections in your notebook. The site is lang-8.com
The book I read that gave recommendations about using it suggested:.
After signing up
1. Correct several posts in your native language before you send friend requests.
2. Write a brief notebook entry.
3. Use their search feature to find 12-20 people to send friend requests to who are learning your target language and who are natives in the language you want to learn.
3. Write at least a sentence in your friend request to make it feel more personal.
I followed those steps and never needed to send any more friend requests because plenty of people send requests to me and I get plenty of corrections. If you log in daily you will receive more friend requests because the search feature puts the most recent log-ins first.
@Chac mool
I do not understand your comment. TI,dr? the guys in Shanghai? If that comment was meant for me I need you to explain it more. Right now, it is like code to me. Not sure if the part about upvotes/downvotes was related to Alans concerns about any type of ranking or was related to my request that people up or down vole the topic to serve like an ¨ethics committee¨for me to consult with when I am unsure about whether it is appropriate to recommend a site publicly, before I do so. I have yet to have anyone warn me if doing so might violate italki´s terms of service. So far only Alan has mentioned that he does not think it would be a problem.
The other site does not have any paid teachers and I do not really think it truly competes with italki´s revenue model, but I can´t say I totally know what the revenue model is and would not want to do anything harmful to italki or this community. I send people from that site here too, so I do not think the cross referrals hurt italki.
Ideally if we can just get italki to listen to it´s own members a bit about the things that help or hurt the community....
While the Notebooks feature on Italki gives me the screaming irrits, it really comes down to only two things:
(a) The {5 minute long string of expletives self-censored} character limits. ALWAYS with the character limits, Italki. It's even worse that simply formatting something can push it up over the accursed 5000 character limit, and rapidly. I haven't had time to do any corrections for a while but when I do I always include explanations of my corrections, usually in line, which means that they hardly ever fit into a single post. And since I correct from start to end (obviously) and since Italki seems to put the newest posts first (the opposite of Discussions) it means that the part 3 post sits above the part 2 post which sits above the part 1 post and the person reading has to drop down and read the posts in reverse order. Get rid of the character limits, Italki (if any system admins are reading this), and the Notebook feature will improve by an order of magnitude.
(b) If you notice something that you missed and have to re-edit a correction, the formatting buttons are different in edit mode. Specifically the strike through button is gone. In addition to hoping that you have left enough from your meagre character limit to do the edit, you also have to deal with the fact that you cannot strike out something any longer.
A "nice to have" would be the ability to pre-define combinations of formats for particular purposes (like "corrected text", "replacement text", "explanation" and so on) which would make the task of formatting so much easier.
Fix these things, especially the character limit, ..oh for the love of Mike, now I've hit the post character limit.
Sometimes I don't get any correction for my essays ):
While my IELTS exam is near and really need to someone's help.
