even then, i just don't think "confidence in proofer" will actually work.
or, to be more accurate, i think it'll work just well enough that rfrank will put lots of energy into it before he finds out it doesn't work well enough.
or, worst case scenario, he'll convince himself that it really _is_ working, and other people believe him, and we all end up with non-perfect
i said: pages. good thing i posted that yesterday. because today rfrank posted his first "informal analysis". and it looks like i was right... rfrank did his analysis on 32 pages that were marked as "done" but then subsequently proofed again, as is done for a random sample... he admits this is a small number of pages, and that there are also "many factors at play", but then goes on to draw conclusions anyway. of the 32 pages, two had added proofer notes, and 1 error was fixed. he doesn't tell us if either (or both) of the proofer notes were good, in the sense that they pointed out something of value, so we'll have to assume that they were meaningless and just added noise to the text. but even then, we have 1 error missed in 32 pages. on the face of it, that means that 3% of the "done" pages had an error. so, for a 200-page book, that would cumulate to a total of 6 mistakes. again, by my 1-error-every-10-pages criterion, that's fully acceptable. but by the (unrealistic) standards of _most_ of the volunteers, it's not. rfrank concludes that "this seems to say that making sure every page is seen by two proofers is not warranted"... so that's his take on this. *** partly the decision rests on the abundance of proofers. if you have lots and lots of proofers, like d.p., then you can afford to send a page through them 2 times or 3 times, even 4 or 5 times. but if your proofers are scarce, like they are over at fadedpage.com, then you might be reluctant to have them view a page even twice... i think i'm pretty good about making sure proofers are used _wisely_. i don't think i abuse their contribution, or that i take 'em for granted; neither am i afraid to use their resources if it is responsible to do so. and i think having 2 people verify a page as clean is responsible use. *** the other thing, though, in evaluating all these experiments, is that you need to know how many errors there _really_ were on each page. only _then_ can you accurately access the accuracy of the proofers... remember that there are lots of pages in these books that have _no_ errors on them, none at all. is it any surprise, then, that they were _actually_ "done" when they were _marked_ as "done"? not hardly... likewise, it isn't really a surprise when a page with _one_ error on it has that error fixed, is then marked as "done", and is _really_ done. what you have to pay attention to, in such cases, are the pages where an error is _not_ found by the first person, who marks it "done", but is then found by the second person. rfrank isn't making nearly enough information available that we can analyze the results in a reasonable way. so i guess we just have to "trust" him. i just wish i had more faith in his reasoning. -bowerbird