User talk:Quadell/Proofing swap meet

This is a great idea. As I personally do not see the point proof reading against another online copy which is possibly faulty and definitely has degraded quality, could you mark which of these are accompanied by image scans of the original? John Vandenberg 13:43, 18 January 2008 (UTC)

I was thinking the same thing. I don't think it's likely that a copy-and-paste from another website would have errors that weren't in the other website unless the person importing the text loses concentration quite badly while doing the job. For an example of something I've been working on a little, the online source for Child's Ballads is quite poor quality, and as the English is both dialect and archaic, I can't just "correct" it to standard English. On the other hand, I have seen some online scans converted to text where in the facsimile edition they used that old-fashioned s that looks like a modern f. The scan converted it to words like perhapf, feriouf, fuddenly, furprifed, etc. That would be easy (though tedious) to fix, even without ever seeing a printed copy.

Anyway, I'd definitely be interested in some proofreading if there's some text that I have access to in print form. Cowardly Lion 14:43, 18 January 2008 (UTC)

Where I could find pagescans online, these are linked in the entry already. In a few other cases, the text is available in two independent locations (e.g. Strivings of the Negro People was transcribed by Geoffrey Sauer here, and was separately scanned from Atlantic Monthly and proofread here. If those two agree, then I think we can confidently say that it's correct.)

Unfortunately, Wikisource doesn't seem to define just what "proofreading" means. Wikisource:Proofreading does not say, for instance, that proofreading must be done from a printed version or pagescan, (although that's usually necessary, I'll grant.) I think it depends on context. For The Times/The Late Mr. Charles Babbage, F.R.S., the text had been typed by one person based on a pagescan, so I proofread extremely closely, looking for errors in spacing and pluralization, etc. But for items that were already professionally proofread by multiple people even before they were entered into Wikisource, such as those from the Etext Center at the University of Virginia Library ("We have put thousands of hours of work -- and tens of thousands of dollars -- into. . . tagging and proofreading") or Distributed Proofreaders (which required proofreading by four people before a work is published), I don't think it adds much value for a Wikisourceror to re-check against a pagescan. In my opinion, in these cases all that's required is a general proofreading to make sure that the text complies with our formatting guidelines and was imported correctly. Reasonable people could disagree on this, but there's no policy that contradicts it.

So, hey, if you're willing to proofread any of these, just make me an offer! What have you imported that needs a good proofing? —Quadell (talk / swapmeet) 15:20, 18 January 2008 (UTC)

We do need better definition of proofreading. The German Wikisource rejects any new texts that do not have pagescans of the original. The French project is more moderate, in that they prefer page scans, but do not demand it. see oldwikisource:Wikisource:ProofreadPage Stats for stats.

I do not like trusting the work of other projects, as each time a digital edition is copied, transformation errors creep in. Project Gutenberg etexts suffer from degradation due to their texts being typically ASCII. They also do not record which edition was used, which means we have provenance problems right off the bat. Problems like this is a sample of the types of problems that creep in.

I would like On Mr. Babbage's new machine for calculating and printing mathematical and astronomical tables (medium) and The New York Times/Mark Twain (small) to be proofread, and will proofread anything of similar size, but only if it is backed by images. John Vandenberg 01:30, 19 January 2008 (UTC)

How about I take both those, and you take An Apology for the True Christian Divinity (scans here)? Sound like a fair swap? —Quadell (talk / swapmeet) 03:34, 19 January 2008 (UTC)

Cripes, that's 600 pages. Our page only contains the first paragraph of each proposition; if that is all you want proof read, then you have a deal! John Vandenberg 04:16, 19 January 2008 (UTC)

Oh dear. Looks like I imported an abridged version. Okay, scratch that. How about Tradition and the Individual Talent (pagescans) for one, and Strivings of the Negro People (pagescans) for the other? —Quadell (talk / swapmeet) 04:44, 19 January 2008 (UTC)

I will try to do those two. Google Books "Previews" often become unexpectedly inaccessible. John Vandenberg 02:04, 20 January 2008 (UTC)