You point out the biggest reason more people aren't contributing to PG, and more people are helping out at DP. It's too complicated.
The more complex the process, the fewer people will consider it reasonable to put their time into it.

Keep in mind the way the contribution process has evolved. (This is a guess to some degree...)

1. At the beginning, one person types in one text and submits it. Simple.
2. Then one person OCR's a text for something to start with. Faster, but more complicated.
3. DP comes along and divides up the work, which consists of many people fixing the OCR,
one page at a time, two people per page. Faster but more complicated, so raising the threshhold
for people who want to start.
4. Whitewashers start sending texts back for rework, rather than posting what was submitted and encouraging iterative improvement.
Major slowdown, major increase in complexity.
5. And from there DP has essentially simplified nothing and increased the complexity (and intimidated new helpers) to the point
where growth is stalled.

The path away from the quagmire needs to reintroduce simplicity, and especially single simple jobs that iteratively improve
a piece of text, with immediate gratification. There probably need to be several simultaneous small-to-medium-size units of work
that offer closure and positive reinforcement.

On Thu, Oct 11, 2012 at 10:35 AM, James Adcock <jimad@msn.com> wrote:
>Why do you think that telling me I'm not sensible for doing books that interest me will convince me to do books you think I should do?

The problem is not that you want to do the books you want to do.  The problem is in insisting that there HAS to be a "one size fits all" solution which is sufficiently complicated to handle even the most complicated book.

A different "solution" would be to come up with a relatively simple solution which fits well 90% of the books which PG has historically published -- which are relatively simple -- and then the people who want to do the really complicated stuff can still use the techniques THEY want to use to do the really complicated stuff.  We already have TeX and PDF to handle really complicated books, and those are pretty good solutions for really complicated books, for example.  Or if you want to create a TEI system to do those books, go for it and good luck. Or use PDF/A "Over" for example.

But don't insist that WE all have to buy into YOUR complexification that YOU want to use in YOUR efforts just because YOU want to do YOUR really complex stuff!

Again, most PG books are pretty simple.  And guess what, PG is *still* doing quite simple books quite badly. HTML on desktops works pretty well.  Everywhere else is quite broken.


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