carel said:
You don't need to talk to me about having your time wasted. I am the somewhat infamous Carel that left DP nearly a decade ago (after spending around 500 hours creating a front-end and revamping the horrific code that resided on the back-end).
oh, hey, glad to meet you. :+) i do believe i am the one who has grabbed the "infamous" crown at this point in time, however. i see they still let you post there. myself, i've been banished, so as not to corrupt the youth there.
It is nice that DP strives for quality in the work that they do.
yes, it is. :+) and it's nice that vancouver is finally getting some snow... ;+)
I am not however surprised that they ultimately became backlogged.
well, yeah, quite a few people saw that coming... when you have 3 rounds of proofing, and you want all of your material to go through all 3 rounds, and you have thousands of proofers in p1, and hundreds in p2, and only dozens in p3, a backlog is pretty inevitable... especially if you expect your p3 people to take _more_ time on each page than your p1 proofers. it just will not add up...
DP has managed to produce a huge number of etexts
and they could have produced 3 times as many if their workflow were 3 times more efficient, something it could _easily_ attain... according to brewster, internet archive scans 1,000 books a day. (google probably scans twice that many before their lunch break.) d.p. digitizes 2400 books a _year_. i predict they cannot keep up.
and for that their efforts should be appreciated.
i appreciate the proofers who volunteer their time _immensely_... and the people who format, and postprocess. they're champions. but the "powers that be", who _refuse_ to change a bad workflow, and clamp down on dissent that reveals why that workflow is bad? i have no respect for them at all. not even one shred of respect...
Their etexts also have a decent level of quality.
i'm with michael hart on this. (even if he refuses to see that.) i think the first mission is to get text up with acceptable quality. (which, by the way, most of the in-process stuff at d.p. is _not_) and _then_ we can use the _public_ to drive it toward perfection. (and no, i don't get the impression that that's what the current "pre-release" plans will entail; seems to me it's "post and forget", which is the attitude that p.g. takes towards _all_ of its e-texts.)
If the volunteers at DP are blissfully unaware that their time is being wasted then they do not feel like victims of the process
but they _are_ victims, whether they _feel_like_ victims or not... and because they are being used so inefficiently, they are _not_ receiving anything near the satisfaction they _could_ be getting. and, like i said, despite a constant influx of volunteers sent there by p.g., the steady d.p. base seems to be a fairly constant number, which means they are experiencing severe "churn" and "burnout", neither of which bodes well for the future. the well _will_ go dry. (especially since more and more people will come to see google as "the source" of the books that they try to find online, since google offers people several million more titles than project gutenberg.)
If the volunteers at DP are blissfully unaware that their time is being wasted then they do not feel like victims of the process, but rather champions of the cause.
well, they _are_ champions. too bad they're not treated as such.
So, efficient or not, no harm is being done
well, as i just argued, harm _is_ being done. it most certainly is.
and books are being produced.
some. not nearly enough. and not nearly efficiently enough.
If the inefficiency bothers you and me (and others), it's a moot point because it is not our time that is being wasted.
but the potential of our society _is_ being spent inefficiently, and the time of _good_people_ is being wasted, for no good reason. so i think the point is _not_ moot. i believe i should _speak_up_.
And, we have no power to change what is at DP. At least that is the way I look at it.
i'm not looking for "power". i'm looking to enlighten people. -bowerbird