juliet said:
The Australian Newspaper project allows a volunteer to proof any article from ~100 yrs of lots of newspapers.
well, that's quite different from what i'm talking about, which is to allow people to proof any page of a _book_, one that is being actively worked on at the present time.
Also, since there's no information as to whether or not anyone has looked at (proofed) this article yet, there's no way to know if one is duplicating work already done.
again, quite different. i will explicitly inform people of the exact status of every page. however, if they _want_ to "duplicate" work that is "already done" -- by proofing a page that's already "finished" -- they can certainly do so. indeed, up through the 3rd "confirmation" a page is "done", the person would continue to receive "points" for doing so... the main reason a person would go the "free-range" route, i would think, would be so they could actually read the book in the process of proofing. i think that's a useful perspective. another reason might be to do a "specialized" look at the book. for instance, i think it'd be great for a person to look through the entire book just to find cases of _italics_ and _formatting_. even a pass checking the paragraph-starts at page-tops will be a useful quality-control mechanism i'd want to encourage.
All of this ties in to a sense of progress.
indeed.
In a free-range system, there is no such assurance that anyone else will want to help finish that book.
i think it's just the opposite. if i inform people which pages haven't yet been proofed, many people would choose them. if i show people which pages need to be confirmed, i think some people will want to get their "points" that way instead. and other people will want to read straight through the book, without any regard for the state of any one particular page... by letting them choose whatever they like, rather than just _assigning_ them a page, with a choice to "take it or leave it", i think they're going to do a good job of progressing a book.
The only way I can see to achieve that in a free-range environment is by limiting the number of books that are currently available.
which is, i think, a perfectly good way to achieve that goal. the idea that d.p. seems to have settled upon is that anyone can put a book in the system, without anybody knowing who -- if anyone -- will be there at the end to pick up the pieces. as a consequence, you now have two tons of half-done books. and this has nothing to do with "free-range", as evidenced by the fact that rfrank is using a "limited-number" approach in his system, in order to make sure that books don't get beached.
If no one is likely to look again at whatever page I've just done, there is nothing to keep me from changing what it says.
ok, i guess you're talking about the australian newspaper thing. which, again, has no applicability to what i'm talking about, so i won't bother to address it here, except to say that my system is _expressly_and_extensively_ geared to checking changes made. there won't be any "graffiti" that won't be painted over very quickly. -bowerbird