On Fri, Feb 12, 2010 at 8:47 AM, Jim Adcock <jimad@msn.com> wrote:
OK, but I can also point to texts that were almost "good to go" before they went into DP, only to molder indefinitely there. Is there some way to make a decision on this one way or another. How about letting the PM make the decision whether or not to post a "preliminary version" to PG?
The poll that's up at DP right now has the respondents just about evenly split on this issue. I would be OK with doing it, but I also understand those who feel that the "preliminary" posting might hang around for years, displacing the final, polished, ACCURATE product.
Is it possible to split the queues and the efforts into "esoterica" vs. "books that will be actively read?"
No. That's like recommending that publishers solve their financial problems by only printing best-sellers. Some books that YOU think are esoterica might actually be of great interest to a small but appreciative community, such as scholars the world over. Take, for example, the Baburnama, the memoirs of Babur, the Turki conqueror of northern South Asia and founder of the Mughal dynasty, as translated by Beveridge. Fiendishly difficult text, took a year to get through P3, will probably take a lot of time in F1 and F2 and PP, a real slog ... but it's an essential work in South Asian history and I'm sure that it will be of great use to students and scholars once finished. I don't regret the time I spent on it.
I went there recently to try to help and it looked like "the powers that be" were trying to force through books that really no one wants to work on -- books that were really hard and not very interesting even to the people who volunteer their time to DP.
There's no forcing going on. The policy from Day One has been that we work on what the content providers submit. Sometimes works that look enticing or valuable to them aren't appealing to the proofers, and then take a long time to wend their way through the system. (Some texts, like Greg Week's science fiction stories, zip through in days.) The problem is that the mouldie oldies clog the queues. There have been quite a few proposals for changing the queue system and the round system, and some experiments are running right now. We'll see what happens. DP made a HUGE change when it moved to five rounds rather than two, and I think it will be able to change again. -- Karen Lofstrom You can't force people to work on things they don't want to work on. Either they work on texts that they want to work on, or if DP is not willing to present any of those, they they go on with their lives, or maybe, like in my case, they "route around damage" and work on books outside of DP.
The problem is NOT that there is "esoterica" vs. "books that will be actively read" -- the problem is that the "esoterica" takes so much time and effort compared to "books that will be actively read" that "esoterica" ends up swamping the other categories.
Are you really saving a book if you pickle it for posterity without it getting read? Isn't that like locking up a ballerina's shoes in order to preserve ballet? Or locking up an artists paint and brushes in order to preserve art? To my taste books exist while they are being read. Otherwise they fail to exist -- beyond little magnetic domains stuck somewhere on the internet.
A simple answer would be to put in separate queues for the differing levels of difficulty and/or categories of books. Then people who want to work on esoterica can do so without impacting people who don't.
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