>With the current systems, a volunteer knows that even if they can't do the entire book themselves, someone else will help out and it will get done.

This statement is not true, but also to the extent it is true is also be a statement of a problem:

DP has many examples of books that volunteer(s) start but which don’t get finished.  Hence the queuing system and the increasing wait times.   However, your thesis is also a statement of a problem: When volunteers start something they assume that *someone else* needs to finish it!  In turn these other volunteers may feel an obligation to finish something that someone else has started when a better answer may be to NOT finish it!  Certainly in the case of very difficult and time-consuming books that no one wants to read, the right answer may be to NOT finish it.  One can easily show other cases that are much more interesting: difficult books that people WOULD want to read if they were finished and yet the right answer might STILL be that it is better off NOT to finish it! [see for example: Bibliotheca Britannica]

When I volunteer at DP I often end up asking myself a simple question: Do *I* think that if the person who started this project had to do it all themselves would they do so?  If the answer is “NO” then I decide that my efforts are being “freeloaded” upon and I go work on something else!

Conversely, one of my proposals for changes at DP is a simple one: if person A starts a book and other volunteers do not want to finish it then at least let person A finish it rather than leaving it stuck on queue “forever”!  One simple measure of the “worthiness” of a project is that at least one person in the world wants to finish it.  Unfortunately, DP fails even that test! – the current system doesn’t even allow a person who *wants* to finish a book the right to do so!  At least put in a “time out” system or something where if something gets stuck for a year or more then DP admits they are not going to get it done in a timely manner and put it back up for grabs!

>I guess what I'm saying is that people who proof for the sake of proofing like to see progress.

To me personally “seeing progress” means seeing something I have worked on posted to PG for others to read.  Agreed that means the book needs to get “done.” Each spot on a queue for a book to get stuck on is yet another chance for a book to become not-done.

>Another issue with a free-range system has to do with abuse. 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. Think of it as a kind of graffiti.

I have had problems with this on Wikipedia, where one posts science-based answers to science-based questions and then people whose religion or politics conflicts with the science hack the postings. Certainly when someone is proofing something that they find offensive the temptation is always to “edit.”