[PGCanada] Fixing typos

Jon Noring jon at noring.name
Sat Apr 9 09:22:40 PDT 2005


> 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.

This shows the need and the benefit of having the original page scans
available to readers so those who submit errata can first check with
the original.

Jon




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