So Bohan recently brought up an issue where words that he was adding to our system were having their definitions changed, and we're curious about what behavior people would generally prefer.

The way it's currently set up, when you add a word to our system that we didn't have before, our ballers (particularly Chris) go over the new word and often edit the definition to match our guidelines, and those changes go back to the person who added the word. For Bohan, he'd rather have the word stay as he entered it, but when we set it up we were thinking overall it's better to push (just) those initial edits back to those who added them, the idea being that the edits will be generally higher quality, and you'd want those tweaks, and most people don't intend these definitions to be custom definitions. Now we could go either way; it's really up to what people would generally prefer. We don't want a setting or control or anything like that for something so small though, so it does need to go one way or the other.

What do you guys think?

I think a good compromise would be to let users know that an updated definition is available and they can either Accept or Reject. Such message could be prompted whenever the user runs into a definition he/she has customized.

I personalize quite a few definitions so just like Bohan, I'd rather have it the way I changed it, but it'd indeed be nice to know when definitions are updated on some words.

I love that I got a shout-out! I feel like a semi-celebrity right now~~

I'm with balsa.

If handling this as Balsa suggests is not an option, I'd rather have my definition changed according to your guidelines; I have very few custom definitions.

I like the accept/reject option as well.

What happens if you enter a word and then someone changes definition entering wrong information?

I'm changing a lot definitions in swedish as many have the keyword (in bold) in english (so I change it to swedish) and some are a bit off according to my dictionary - I check some strange words using the brand new chinese-swedish dictionary from Norstedts.
Some characters obviously only have english definition.

As I think my changes will be useful for other swedes, I then select the public button to share them.

I hope I do the right thing - where are thoose guidelines? ;)

That would be a good automatic system, though it would be a bit complicated to set up. We'll talk about it at the next meeting (which may be a bit; we all have weddings to go to/be in these first couple weeks of June).

@Mats: Definitions you enter only automatically go to everyone else when it's a new word, or it didn't previously have a definition in the language (so if you enter a Swedish definition for a word that didn't have it before, it'll show up for others right away). Whether or not they are pushed to everyone instantly, all submitted definitions are gone over by ballers, and accepted, rejected, or tweaked by them.

http://www.skritter.com/style_guide

Here's the style guide for how to enter definitions.

@scott there could just be a "New Defintion" button which opens a window (like when you click on "Edit Section" or "settings") and displays the updated definition, and prompts the user to Accept or Ignore, this way it'd be less intrusive.