On Tue, Feb 22, 2011 at 3:47 PM, Renata St <renataw...@gmail.com> wrote: >... > Then one day I stumbled upon Distributed Proofreaders ( > http://www.pgdp.net/c/) and proofread a few pages. I couple days later I > received *three* *personalized* welcoming messages & evaluations "this is > what you got right, this is what you should improve". I was shocked. These > people are overworked, they have huge backlogs, they are stricter about > quality than the pickiest FAC reviewer, yet three of them found time, > energy, and good will to write lengthy personalized messages for a newbie > who reviewed 30 book pages...
There are other aspects that need to be considered when comparing Distributed Proofreaders and Wikipedia. Distributed Proofreaders (DP) does not publish until their work has been completed, checked and rechecked. As a result, there is no urgency to 'get it right'. On Wikipedia, BLP violations and hoaxes are published and appear in Google results on an hourly basis, and would stay there if it wasn't for our existing processes and patrollers who fight the good fight. In addition to this, the task of proofreading all writings of mankind is so large, and the likely pool of contributors so small, that they can easily summise that the backlogs arn't fixable. DP have projects which are moribund for *years*. Another difference is that the task of proofreading texts is one that has very little personal opinion involved. Their contributor base doesn't have a wide variation of opinions on how the task should be done. They are constrained by the software and Project Gutenberg rules, eliminating most of the fierce battles which could be wages over important issues like ... typography, orthography, etc. Finally, the Distributed Proofreaders project only consists of already published & public domain material. It is all already dusty, and there can be no dispute about what the text was. This also reduces the opportunity for conflict, and it also results in less personal involvement in the work. Proofreading doesn't even require any knowledge of the text, or even the language of the text - contributors merely need to know how to find the glyphs to match the type on the page. And a contributors choice of texts to work on doesn't say much about their beliefs, personality or mission in life. -- John Vandenberg _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l