On 17/08/2011 12:11, Harry Burt wrote:
On Wed, Aug 17, 2011 at 12:01 PM, Charles Matthews <charles.r.matthews@ntlworld.com mailto:charles.r.matthews@ntlworld.com> wrote:
<snip> Further, experience at Wikisource suggests that proofreading is the bottleneck, rather than scanning. </snip>Other items in this interesting discussion notwithstanding, does anyone know the WikiSource position on paying for proofreading? en.wp is against paid editing, but almost entirely on bias grounds, and there's no room for bias here: either a proofreading is right or it's wrong.
Well, if WS is paying for proofing ... I do about 35 hours a week currently, so I'd be interested. Seriously, WS doesn't have the sort of profile (point 1) that is likely to attract this sort of support. But also (point 2) WS is in a more crowded market than WP, given that there are other and indeed larger text repositories and ways to get proofreading done.
In other words WS needs a USP when it comes to a proofreading project. I can explain what that is (i.e. strong tech support and the ProofReadPage extension of MediaWiki, allowing the proofing itself to be checked by anyone online); but in that light it starts to make more sense to talk about why a given work needs to be on WS, to be proofread to a particularly high and _verifiable_ standard, and what tech support or other expertise is actually needed. Again there is some sort of preliminary discussion about priorities for having certain content freely available online; but typically once a work has been scanned to a reasonable standard as djvu and posted to archive.org, that already meets many people's needs.
For those interested, I recommend what [[User:Dominic]] who is the Wikipedian in Residence at NARA has been saying about WS and GLAM.
Charles