So I notice looking at Dracula today that the old edition has been replaced with one made by DP using an edition from archive.org, so apparently that does happen sometimes. However, archive.org doesn't actually have a good edition of Dracula - the Grosset & Dunlop edition used is the altered American version of the text, rather than the original British, as were all the other editions available there last I checked. -- Peter Hatch On Mon, Sep 23, 2013 at 5:10 AM, Jon Hurst <jon.a@hursts.eclipse.co.uk>wrote:

Last Winter I did a bit of investigation into methodologies for improving the quality of works in PG's library. Rather than write a long report, I will skip to the conclusions.

1. The best method for getting a "better version" into PG with the least amount of effort by any one person is:

i. Choose an edition from archive.org based on information from a respected academic source, e.g. the "Notes on the Text" section section of an Oxford World's Classics edition.

ii. Get DP to digitise it.

iii. Improve the DP version by comparing it against the extant PG text. The found error rate for a DP produced text averaged 1 error per 10 pages, a rate I consider more that worth the effort of correcting. Access to F2 output and page images is required for this step. Page images are nicely archived at DP, F2 is more of a problem. It is perfectly possible and useful to find errors in editions as different as the 1818 and 1831 editions of Frankenstein.

2. The PG errata system is utterly broken. I generated errata for the new Huck Finn and sent it to the original contributor, who confirmed the errors. This is errata against a known edition with known page images, and even in this best case scenario neither I nor the original contributor managed to get the text updated. PG should really be considered a write once library, and all references to an errata system should be removed from the site to avoid people wasting their time.

3. The single biggest impediment to improving quality is the PG policy of never replacing a text or in any way advertising the existence of a superior one. A modern DP produced text sourced from a carefully selected archive.org print edition will almost certainly be superior.

4. Very, very few people access PG texts via PG. Normal people go to the Kindle store or to the iTunes store. As such the greatest contribution that PG can make is to provide a digitisation of a well regarded print edition and get the words and punctuation right. Any sort of reasonably sane HTML skeleton, including those produced by DP, is fine. Master formats are not required.

* * * * *

Based on these conclusions, my recommendation:

For each major text, one of the PTB (i.e. Greg, Marcello or a WWer) needs to select a well regarded print edition from archive.org and commission DP to digitise it with the assurance that the extant text will be replaced. A link to the archive.org PDF needs to be added, and DP needs to keep page images and F2 available for anyone willing and able to do the edition comparison; errata from such an edition comparison needs to be prioritised.

* * * * *

And no, I don't think that there is any chance that this will happen. I think PG is rudderless and the PTB are unwilling or incapable of taking the sort of meaningful action required. From a user standpoint, for "classics" I have given up on PG entirely, preferring paperbacks from a reputable publisher, despite all the advantages that e-reading brings. It saddens me greatly, because PG should be a great "open" project on a level with GNU/Linux and Wikipedia. Then again, if Linus Torvalds had mandated that no line of code could be changed in case it upset its contributor, and Jimmy Wales had locked down updates to 4 people, those projects probably wouldn't be very good either.

Regards

Jon _______________________________________________ gutvol-d mailing list gutvol-d@lists.pglaf.org http://lists.pglaf.org/mailman/listinfo/gutvol-d