I think Lojban at the current stage of its development does not yet have any sufficiently large ‘classical’ textual base which could allow judging level of speaking. The language is still very young, and forming.
For example, consider the word ‘Friday’ – la mudjed. Do you think this word must be frequent enough in a language? If you search “la mudjed.” in Google, the only reference to this word will be the link to a LFB lesson about dates. That would of course be nonsense for a really formed language. I am sure that there are plenty of words (‘zero-words’), either gismu or higher, that have been used only in the canonical lists and a couple of illustrating sentences, and nowhere else.
At this stage, as the promotional materials do state, everyone writing in Lojban becomes history. This is not compatible with competition and ratings based on wins/draws/losses.
Instead, I suggest to measure not speaking proficiency, but the level of contribution to the language (in creating its textual base). Of course, the original team that has developed the language in 80-s and 90-s, has by default an infinite level of contribution, as do many other Lojbanists, authors of translations and/or original works that we can all see on page http://www.lojban.org/tiki/tiki-index.php?page=Texts+In+Lojban.
An outline of such measuring system may be like this:
1. ‘Portions’, each consisting of one or more sentences in English or other non-Lojban language, are posted and stored on a server, categorized by topics.
2. The goal is to have a number of correct translations of the portions into Lojban.
3. Everyone is free to add new portions on the server.
4. Everyone is free to add his/her translation of the portions.
5. Everyone is free to mark any translation (by other people) of any portion as “correct” or “incorrect”, with optional comments.
6. The weight of a translation varies between 0 and 1. It is 0, IF no one has approved it, and 1, IF (no one has disapproved it AND at least one person with non-zero level of contribution has approved it), OTHERWISE it is the special function, definition below.
7. The level of contribution to the language is the sum of weights of all translations made by that person.
The definition of the special function:
Suppose N persons have marked a translation of a portion. Let Fi be equal +0.5, if the i-th person has approved the translation, and -0.5, if he/she has disapproved the translation.
Let Ri be the rating (level of contribution) of the i-th person.
Let T = SUM(i=1..N, Ri), i. e. the sum of ratings (levels of contribution) of all markers [those who mark, I mean].
Then the weight of the translation, x, equals
x = SUM(i=1..N, Fi * Ri / T).
It can be easily seen that “the special function” works for 0- and 1- cases as well. :)
I think this approach is much more efficient than the combat stylish approach suggested earlier.
Combats leave only “won / lost” info behind. Who will collect and judge those dialogs? That is a difficult problem. I won’t speak about ethical side of the question, since that was done by the previous posters.
Yanis Batura
Every sentence you write in Lojban makes the world a little better