Sure, auditing corrections is a big, thankless grunt-work job (sounds a little like DP). :) I don't think that should make us wary of taking typo submissions, though; the submissions can go into a queue and get dealt with as we have time. Also, I bet we could reduce the number of typo submissions if we could give users easy access to the the original scans. For example, maybe the "Report a typo" button could bring up the OCR of the original page. (This might be possible with hooks into James' UniBook - not sure. We'll see.) Also, on the same page, we should include an explanation of the (PG) proofing standards regarding typos - fix those that are obvious printing errors but preserve original spellings. I'll add this discussion to the plans for this function (after I write a plan for this function). :) jen. On Apr 9, 2005 1:55 AM, Andrew Sly <sly@victoria.tc.ca> wrote:
Comments regarding this (from the wiki):
* By fostering a community, the division between content production and content acquisition could be reduced: "Report a typo" on the book display page would encourage a user, perhaps, to think about contributing on a larger scale (for example, by proofing a page).
Jim Tinsely, who has dealt with making corrections to PG texts for years, and at the present deals with most of the emails sent to the PG "errata" list, has reported that "about half" of the submitted "corrections" are actually right in the etext. That is, the e-text itself correctly represents the original, and the suggested correction is in error.
There are apparently some spots in Mark Twain's writing which were intentionally misspelled by the author for the effect in the story, and which are regularly reported as "errors".
Also, sometimes people will try to "fix" older spellings of words such as Tokio--Tokyo; shew--show; fyle--file; etc.
It takes a very patient volunteer to work through these suggested corrections, go about fixing those that are obvious, send messages back saying "thanks for your help, but..." for those mentioned above, and do further investigation/guessing for those in a grey area.
Andrew
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