Understand spoken language

Beware the zero (0) at the end of a URL

Submitted by admin on 16 December 2014

It sometimes happens that the URL for a word will have a 0 at the end of it:

word with 0 in URL

If you notice it, you should immediately investigate what is the cause, and aim to fix things. The easy way to find out what is going on is to try the URL of the page without the 0 in this case http://lingopolo.com/dutch/word/premature:

In this case the page for the word for "premature" had been created twice at different times. This can happen extremely easily, especially as the number of words grows. It's best of course to realise before creating a new word that the word already exists, but sometimes, with a long list of new words, it's easier to just add the new words and watch out for the case of a duplicate.

There are actually 2 different cases where the "-0" appears in the URL:

The two cases need dealing with differently.

Case 1: Same word added twice

In the case of the same word added twice (e.g. as above with "premature"), one of the pages needs to be deleted. But which one?

If there is no difference between the content (i.e. the recordings both sound good quality, the breakdowns/examples are both empty), then it would be best to delete the word with the "-0" in the URL. This will mean that the other word has the clean URL.

Sometimes though there are differences in the two pages. In the example above with "premature", the "premature-0" URL page has an example of the word being used, whereas the other page does not. In this case, therefore, we should delete the version of the word which does not have the example sentence.

Another consideration is the quality of the recording. If one recording is clearly better than the other one, then you should keep the version with the better recording.

Note of course that if you are deleting a version of the word which has any Examples of "xyz" in use, then the pages with these example sentences need to be updated to use the version which you keep.

Case 2: Different words with the same English title

The other case is where there are different words with the same English title (e.g. if the French words "velo" and "bicyclette" were each created with the English title "bicycle", they would have the URLs http://lingopolo.com/french/word/bicycle and http://lingopolo.com/french/word/bicycle-0). In this case both pages should be kept, but it is still important to change the English title. Why? Well, every English title needs to be unique so that when a user is asked a question like "What is the French for bicycle?", and they have the multi-choice buttons labelled "velo" or "bicyclette" they should be able to know which is the correct answer. The way to make the titles different depends on each pair, and often it comes down to understanding the linguistic difference between the two words. Google is your friend! e.g.:

https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8#q=difference%20between%20velo%20and%20bicyclette&safe=off 

Some strategies:

Note that it is not always necessary to label both of the words with some extra part. In the bathroom example above, only the rare spelling form was changed. 

Note too that it will usually be worth adding a "see also" between the two pages, unless the words have no real connection, or (as is the case with short and long forms in Thai) the words are already automatically connected through the breakdown/examples.

Fixing the URL

If you do delete the version without the URL, or if you rename the English title, it may still happen that the URL uses "-0", so we still need one more step. This is usually because the system switched off the "Generate automatic URL alias" setting. If you select this and save the word, the system should now automatically generate the new URL.