The Distributed Proofreading Project

Distributed Proofreading Project ^ | 11.23.2002 | self

[zeugma]

Some of you may be aware of Project Gutenberg, a project dedicated to making public domain books available for free to anyone on the internet. Since these books have no copyright, anyone can scan them into a computer and make them available on the internet if they so choose. Project Gutenberg is attempting to do this in a methodical and high-quality manner.

I've recently come across an associated project that is attempting to harness the power of the millions of folks on the net to speed up the process of getting the scanned pages of the books that have been run through OCR software proofread in a quick and convienient way.

Here's a blurb about it on the project's homepage:

This site provides a web-based method of easing the proofreading work associated with the creation of Project Gutenberg E-Texts. By breaking the work into individual pages many proofreaders can be working on the same book at the same time. This significantly speeds up the proofreading/E-Text creation process.

When a proofer elects to proofread a page for a particular project, the text and image file are displayed on a single webpage. This allows the text file to be easily reviewed and compared to the image file, thus assisting the proofreading of the text file. The edited text file is then submitted back to the site via the same webpage that it was edited on.

Once all pages for a particular book have been processed the Project Manager joins the pieces, properly formats them into a PG E-Text and submits it to the PG archive.

Right now Project Gutenberg has several thousand books available. With the production rate of this Distributed Proofing Project, the rate that new books are added to the archive should accelerate quite dramatically.

To give you an idea of how the project is doing, check out the following stats that are current as of 12:30 Central time today (11.23.2002)...

Site Stats:
Pages completed today: 889 as of 10:01 Pacific Time today
Pages completed this month: 125835

(the following are my personal stats)
Your Stats:
Your Total Pages: 74
Your Current Rank: Proofer
Total users who completed at least 1 page: 4336

Check it out! http://texts01.archive.org/dp/default.php

[zeugma]

I'm posting this on FreeRepublic as I think many would be interested in this project. Note: This is a not-for-profit organization, though they do take donations (much like FR itself). I really would advise you to check out the massive selection of literature available from the folks at Gutenberg.

[pops88]

Great project. I've read several books they've done after not being able to find them in book stores.