On Mon, 4 Oct 2004, D. Starner wrote:

Michael Hart writes:

...

If the original source you use turns out to have errors, as nearly all books do, do you want the errors preserved?

Yes. That's way too unconditional, and there's a lot of minor errors in texts that we can just correct; but I've been reading a book on Beowulf which talks about one of the first published transcriptions that "corrected" a lot of things and screwed with work on Beowulf for 50 years. I hate to imagine us adding anacronistic spelling to a work or making a work harder to understand. On DP, people frequently ask about obvious errors that turn out to be correct. If we want to be editors, let us be editors and take full responsibility for checking other editions and writing introductions and bibliographies and keeping notes about what we've changed.

If we do take such responsibility, then we are creating a new "critical edition," which was always our goal. However, we have tried to avoid the arguments that come with this sort of thing, as per a previous discussion about this, when we argued about the punctuation in "To be or not to be." Once we get into that kind of discussion, it really never ends, take my father's word for it, he was a great Shakespeare prof. Thanks! Michael