Gabriel Farrell wrote:
On Tue, Feb 03, 2009 at 10:09:54AM -0500, Walter Lewis wrote:
If we had to correct it all: a) it would never get done and b) it would
be better than some of the originals which are rife with typographic
errors.
Hence the genius of Distributed Proofreaders [1] and reCAPTCHA [2].
[1] http://www.pgdp.net/c/
[2] http://recaptcha.net/learnmore.html
I have tremendous respect for the genius behind these projects, but the
Victorian four page village newspapers have enough text for a your
average government report. Put four together and you get a three-decker
novel. The folks in the Distributed Proofreaders rarely sign up for the
labours of Hercules (and, according to my sources, he only hung in there
for twelve tasks).
Then you have to deal with the fact that OCRing some of the microfilm
I've seen is probably not statistically different from invoking a random
token generator ...
Walter
