Aaron posted a letter from Barbara Reed to the gutvol-d list: She wrote, in part:
- one wonders what the attitude of Project Gutenberg is to different editions, and indeed to history in general! For example, it seems extremely odd that there is only one version of Aesop's fables, which contains a very strongly-worded criticism of other peoples' work, with no mention of when it was made - the latest date I could find was 1864, so it's evidently after that, but doesn't seem to be a modern one. Similarly with Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, although there is a plethora of notes I saw nothing to show when the edition was made, which is an absolutely central feature of an intelligent reading of anything ...
Obviously, this shows again the *importance* that the source(s) for each and every PG text be mentioned. Any PG text which does not include this information is inherently broken. Hopefully, when Distributed Proofreaders begins the process of redoing the earliest PG works, this problem will finally be fixed. Jon Noring (p.s., as I've noted before, any PG text which "ASCII-ized" any of the characters in the original source, such as accented characters, is also broken -- these texts should also be repaired or replaced.)