On Fri, 13 May 2005, Geoff Horton wrote:
Geoff, I find your approach fascinating because I usually think of error-catching in posted texts as a smoothreading sort of task
That's how I do it when I'm working for PG (or PGDP). But I get frustrated when gutcheck finds stuff I should have caught, and that also causes me to worry that I've missed something else of the same sort.
Geoff, don't feel bad. In my experience, there are _always_ at least one or two small things that you've overlooked that someone else can find, if they try hard enough. A while ago, Jim oversaw a "cooperative reproofing" experiment. He would select a text already in the archive, and everyone who wanted to participate would proofread it in whatever way they wished, and correct any errors found. Jim would then collate the results, make a single improved text, and assign a "score" for each contributor based on the number of errors found minus the number of "false positives". We went through a few texts this way. The interesting point is that, apparantly, with a group of 5-7 people individually examining the same text, each person usually found at least one error that none of the others did. (Although I suppose you could look closer into the fine line between what constitutes an "error" and what is only a formatting difference, etc.) Andrew