[PGCanada] Fixing typos

Jen Zed jenzed at gmail.com
Sat Apr 9 08:19:24 PDT 2005


Sure, auditing corrections is a big, thankless grunt-work job (sounds
a little like DP). :) I don't think that should make us wary of taking
typo submissions, though; the submissions can go into a queue and get
dealt with as we have time. Also, I bet we could reduce the number of
typo submissions if we could give users easy access to the the
original scans. For example, maybe the "Report a typo" button could
bring up the OCR of the original page. (This might be possible with
hooks into James' UniBook - not sure. We'll see.) Also, on the same
page, we should include an explanation of the (PG) proofing standards
regarding typos - fix those that are obvious printing errors but
preserve original spellings.

I'll add this discussion to the plans for this function (after I write
a plan for this function). :)


jen.



On Apr 9, 2005 1:55 AM, Andrew Sly <sly at victoria.tc.ca> wrote:
> Comments regarding this (from the wiki):
> 
>      * By fostering a community, the division between content production
>        and content acquisition could be reduced: "Report a typo" on the
>        book display page would encourage a user, perhaps, to think about
>        contributing on a larger scale (for example, by proofing a page).
> 
> Jim Tinsely, who has dealt with making corrections to PG texts for years,
> and at the present deals with most of the emails sent to the PG "errata"
> list, has reported that "about half" of the submitted "corrections" are
> actually right in the etext. That is, the e-text itself correctly represents
> the original, and the suggested correction is in error.
> 
> There are apparently some spots in Mark Twain's writing which were
> intentionally misspelled by the author for the effect in the story,
> and which are regularly reported as "errors".
> 
> Also, sometimes people will try to "fix" older spellings of words
> such as Tokio--Tokyo; shew--show; fyle--file; etc.
> 
> It takes a very patient volunteer to work through these suggested
> corrections, go about fixing those that are obvious, send messages
> back saying "thanks for your help, but..." for those mentioned above,
> and do further investigation/guessing for those in a grey area.
> 
> Andrew
> 
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