[PGCanada] Fixing typos

Andrew Sly sly at victoria.tc.ca
Sat Apr 9 01:55:17 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.



Andrew




More information about the PGCanada mailing list