However, we've now producing very good texts at an enormous cost. We're discussing further changes. It doesn't particularly help, when one is drowning and flailing about for a handhold, to have a bystander jumping up and down, shouting, "You're drowning, you idiot!"
If I'm a bystander it is because the texts that I have submitted to DP which I thought I would be working on have been frozen in the queues by DP for the last year. What you suggest instead is that I also jump into the pool and start flailing around with you. Been there done that, got tired of it, climbed back out of the pool. Flailing harder or faster or throwing more people into the pool really isn't going to help. I have made what I consider many positive suggestions, any of which simply invoke anger and defensiveness on the part of DP'ers: One of which is post the text after P3 rather than waiting to finish PP. This would make about an additional 4,000 texts available on PG. If one counts volunteer hours worth $10/hr this represents an "unfinished inventory" of about $2,000,000. If you value PG downloads similar to Amazon's minimum cost of $1 a book, then these 4,000 would generate about $150,000 a year in additional value to society. Other obvious suggestions would be to adjust your "experience" thresholds and testing methods for admittance to P3, F2, PP in order to allow a bit more people into these areas and see how much it *really* hurts your quality and productivity -- or not! Fundamentally it is the unbalanced number of people allowed into the upper rounds (or rather not allowed into the higher rounds) which is killing you. Further, any tools that you can offer P3, F2, or PP to make their lives easier would help you greatly. Another suggestion I have made is to do what many other commercial digitizers of text using human beings do: Run two humans in parallel on the same text and then diff the results. If you get a diff on some page run a third person and vote the results. If you were to double up on the P1 and P2 efforts like this that would help the P3 queue. If you doubled up the F1 efforts that would help the F2 queue. Don't know how to help the PP queue except I don't understand why you allow almost finished texts to be stuck moldering in the hard-drives of one PP'er so long. If a PP'er just can't get it done -- take it away and assign it to someone else. Doesn't matter how good or experienced a PP'er is if they just can't get it done. Another suggestion is to auto score proofers and formatters efforts and automatically assign them to the place in your process where their level of abilities will do the most good -- or at least the least damage. It is easy to auto score the P1, P2, and F1 efforts -- it is basically the ratio of the number of fixes that they make divided by the number of fixes made on the same pages by the successive round. Have the P3s and F2s "retest" on a P2 or F1 round occasionally so that you can autoscore whether they still know what they are doing or not. Another suggestion would be to update the toolset being used to make them more fun, less time-wasting, and less tweaky. Simple common tasks ought to be simple, unpainful, and fast. Allowing higher rez page scans for the people with the bandwidth to handle them would make all the rounds easier. Another suggestion would be to get PG to allow one to query on how many downloads various texts are getting, so that people who are submitting texts to DP which aren't getting read might get some feedback about what their actions is really accomplishing, or not. Modifying bowerbird's suggestions slightly, there *are* at least some texts that fit pretty well into template forms, such as some simple novels. Perhaps an automated or semi-automated tool for turning these simpler texts into HTML quickly? Another obvious suggestion is that there are too many texts in the world to take them all on. Are the readers of PG really interested in "Annals of the Annual Proctology Meeting of 1847" ? Is there at least some way to try to discourage really bad ideas? Looking at the actual text of the English language submissions in P1 right now it looks to me that about half of them have a reasonable chance of being read. Is there any way to more actively promote the acquisition and prioritizing of texts that are generally recognized as being "better than average" aka "famous" or at least "well known"? Another obvious suggestion would be to empower PM's to have at least one active project where if that project gets stuck they are allowed to take whatever actions necessary to get it unstuck....