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Distributed Proofreaders Posts 5,000th E-book

Posted by timothy on from the error-checking-and-correcting dept.

bbc writes "Distributed Proofreaders has posted its 5,000th ebook to Project Gutenberg. The book, a Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature, by John W. Cousin, was proofed for this special occasion by over 500 volunteers. Distributed Proofreaders is a project that distributes the otherwise gargantuan task of correcting scanning and recognition errors in an OCR'ed text. The project has thousands of volunteers, of which many hundreds are active on any given day. It is currently the main supplier of etexts for Project Gutenberg."

4 of 144 comments (clear)

  1. Hm! by martingunnarsson · · Score: 4, Interesting

    They should offer their services to authors and magazines, and raise some money from what they do. It wouldn't be enough to split between the involved proof readers I guess, but the project itself could get some money to buy...well, whatever they might need. Perhaps they already do this, I'm too lazy to find out :-)

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    Martin
  2. Re:I need a new job by jonathan_ingram · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Luckily, you do not need either grammar or spelling skills -- just the ability to match text against a source image. Indeed, it may even be an *advantage* to not be a great linguist! One of the key things we emphasise is that we want an exact copy of the source material -- we do not want people 'correcting' or 'updating' the originals to bring them into line with the way the language is written today.

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    -- Help Digitise the Public Domain at DP.
  3. Re:because by jonathan_ingram · · Score: 4, Interesting
    because playboy hasnt lapsed into the public domain yet...


    Very true, although several of us do keep talking about searching for some Victorian Porn to put through the site :). There's actually quite a lot of public domain 'erotica' (anything written and published before 1923, for example) -- we just need people to scan it and contribute it to the site! We've had a couple of 'racy' books, and not surprisingly they tend to be proofed very quickly.

    --
    -- Help Digitise the Public Domain at DP.
  4. Request for MATH experts by jhutch2000 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Right now, we've got plenty of old math intensive books ready to move through the DP system. Because of ASCII terrible ability to handle equation formatting, we use TeX layout. The average DPer doesn't know TeX and it's a rather high learning curve to get started on. So, since Slashdot is full of self-professed geeks...all you TeX geeks should join up and help with the TeX formatted MATH texts. I've got plenty of books scanned and ready to go, so don't think you'll run us out of 'em any time soon!

    JHutch