Brion Vibber wrote:
Doesn't the Gutenberg Distributed Proofreaders project already do this sort of thing?
Yup, and we're actively working on EB11. At the moment, the following are posted (finished):
http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/200 -- Vol. 1 [*] http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/13600 -- Vol. 2, Part 1, Slice 1
Various other parts of many volumes are in progress. If you'd like to help, visit http://www.pgdp.net/ and register a new account. You should probably start with some beginners projects to familiarise yourself with our Proofreading Guidelines, and then you're welcome to work on whatever you like, including the current EB volume being proofed: Vol 6 #3 (Chiton to Cincinnati). While you're there, you can join Team Wikipedia ;).
Mark Williamson wrote:
Alternatively, we could store it as images online. That would take a lot of bandwidth, but... it would preserve the original much much better.
When we're working on a particular section, the images are necessarily stored online. After a project is posted to Project Gutenberg, the scans are archived to a different server so that they can still be referred to for corrections. It's planned that One Day the archived images will be publicly accessible.
Michael
[*] Note: Volume 1 was posted as the Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia due to potential trademark issues with the use of the EB name that are now resolved.