michael said:
Let's just forget the whole idea of error free texts. . . .
well, that's going a bit overboard. better, let's try to achieve perfection, but let's not let that high goal get in the way of making work available even if it's not yet perfect...
I would prefer just to get these materials in circulation-- then worry about approaching perfection along with Xeno.
yes, except i don't see any part of project gutenberg that is doing very much at all in the way of "approaching perfection". once a text is posted, people seem to forget it completely... even when the whitewashers "correct" an e-text, they aren't doing nearly what they could be doing in order to improve it. it seems like there is a constant mad dash to do new books, but almost nothing is being done to fix up any older books. i asked at 10,000 books for a review in terms of quality control, and again at 15,000, and again at 20,000, and again at 25,000. i didn't bother to ask again at 30,000, because what's the use? but at some point, some hard questions will need to be asked...
Does anybody have a serious objection to putting the 8,000, or so, books that were listed earlier as being in limbo, in something like our "PrePrints" section, where we put eBooks that are admittedly not ready for prime time???
well, i certainly don't... but many of the volunteers over at distributed proofreaders do. indeed, according to a poll (which has now received one of the highest number of votes on any poll that has been done there), there are split evenly -- right down the middle -- on this issue. i don't know what to make of that. but that's the way it is. it's also worth mentioning that those 8,000 books are _not_ "almost done". some of them really aren't even very close... some are full of typos, still. most contain pseudo-markup, which really should be converted to something more useful before the books are ever put in front of the general public. lots contain "proofer's notes", which would confuse people. it should also be noted that many of them are not in english, which might (or might not) have bearing on the question, but since i only speak english, i wouldn't have any idea what it is. considering all this, it would _not_ be a simple procedure to free up this matter. it could use up a lot of time and energy, and for very little benefit in return. (does any use "preprints"?) what _would_ be useful is for this material to be put on a wiki, in order to test notions of public postprocessing collaboration. instead of saying "here, take this unfinished work", we _should_ instead be saying "here, come help finish this unfinished work". at one point, i was tempted to build such a postprocessing system. but then i realized i didn't want to help d.p. get over their backlog; d.p. deserves to suffer the consequences of their terrible workflow, or they'll _never_ be motivated to fix it... so i decided to let it be... -bowerbird