I can't think of anyone I know who would argue otherwise. That's not an issue that's open for discussion, I don't think. On Mon, Feb 15, 2010 at 2:03 PM, Al Haines (shaw) <ajhaines@shaw.ca> wrote:
As a Whitewasher who's dealt with old DP productions as well as new ones, over the last couple of years, I second (and third and fourth) everything Karen says.
Others may hold DP's current system to be inefficient/slow/etc,, but it does one thing that makes it all worth while--it can produce error-free texts.
Example: I'm currently dealing with an errata report for an old DP production. I haven't looked into the problem in detail yet, but from what I've seen, at least several pages are missing, followed by a repeat of material that precedes the missing material. I'm going to have to go through the problem area of the posted text, compare it to a scanset, figure out which material is missing/redundant, OCR and proof whatever's missing, knit it into the text, then run Gutcheck/Jeebies/Gutspell on the repaired text, which will undoubtedly unearth a raft of other errors, all followed by a reformat and a repost. Also undoubtedly, many other errors will remain.
Is it worth it? Personally speaking, no. It's going to take hours to fix this text, time that I'd far rather spend on my own productions, but there's currently no mechanism except for the Whitewashers, a.k.a. Errata Team, to fix this kind of thing. (Probably simpler to just re-do this text from scratch, which is something *I'm* not about to do.)
In short, DP's current processes produce error-free texts; its old processes, from what I've seen of the results, didn't.
Al
----- Original Message ----- From: "Karen Lofstrom" <klofstrom@gmail.com> To: "Project Gutenberg Volunteer Discussion" <gutvol-d@lists.pglaf.org> Sent: Monday, February 15, 2010 12:47 PM Subject: [gutvol-d] Re: Many solo projects out there in gutvol-d land?
On Mon, Feb 15, 2010 at 7:43 AM, don kretz <dakretz@gmail.com> wrote:
Re the two-round system:
Clean, simple, and most importantly it provides each person
with the immediate and obvous positive gratification of seeing their work self-evidently closing the gap between the text and the picture.
Yes, and it often produced godawful results. If the R2 proofrer was sloppy, a sloppy text went to the PPer. Some PPers exhausted themselves reproofing the text to fix the mistakes that R2 had left. Others just processed the text and sent it off to PG, warts and all.
One R2 proofer had proofed an astonishing number of pages ... but he did so by smoothreading them hurriedly, without checking against the image. He missed many errors.
PPers complained. Readers of PG texts complained. The current workflow at DP is a *reaction* to the previous lack of quality control. That's why P3ers have to pass a test. That's why proofing and formatting were separated. OK, our quality control is strangling us. I don't think the answer is to go back to the good old days of two rounds and error-ridden texts.
-- Karen Lofstrom _______________________________________________ gutvol-d mailing list gutvol-d@lists.pglaf.org http://lists.pglaf.org/mailman/listinfo/gutvol-d
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