It is clear from this discussion that we have very different practices in the various language subdomains. My experience is that oftentimes on the English Wikisource you just have to mark paragraph breaks and remove line breaks and extra spaces around punctuation marks, and you can already save the page as "Proofread". More often than not the validator will have nothing to correct, since the OCR was already perfect, which is unsurprising given that OCR software (or any software, for that matter) is generally designed for the English language, with little regard to languages that use additional letters or diacritics (not to talk about writing systems other than the Latin alphabet).
On the Italian Wikisource the blue button means "Completely transcribed but not formatted" (not "Problematic"), while the yellow button means "Completely transcribed and formatted". So in theory an inexperienced user could choose to just transcribe a page and let it be formatted by someone else. In practice this rarely happens and the workflow for most pages is similar to the English Wikisource's usual practice, although Italian-language texts, especially medieval or Renaissance ones, tend to have more OCR errors.
It looks like on the Polish Wikisource they use the red (or blue?) button, not the yellow one, upon creation, while still proofreading the text of the page. So they end up doing three proofreadings overall, which has the obvious benefit of higher accuracy, especially since they seem to have bad OCR support, with the added difficulty that some of the words with typos happen to be real words and therefore not spotted by spellcheckers.
It would be nice to know if other Wikisources take even different approaches. And maybe we could make an attempt to unify them? Taking everyone's issues and concerns into account, that is.
Regarding the initial topic of this thread: Pressing the edit button, checking for errors, marking the page as validated, saving, and going on to the page was not a problem for me as a beginner (though since the font in text boxes is not very pleasant to the eye, I would begin checking for errors in view mode and enter the edit mode only upon spotting the first error). Rather, it allowed me to learn the markup little by little (like paragraph breaks, the use of <poem> for lines of verse, or the purpose of colons at the beginning of a line).
> Date: Wed, 12 Aug 2015 11:11:00 +0200
> From: Andrea Zanni <zanni.andrea84@gmail.com>
> To: "discussion list for Wikisource, the free library"
> <wikisource-l@lists.wikimedia.org>
> Subject: Re: [Wikisource-l] Better way to validate pages
> Message-ID:
> <CAC=VxyaZfHuxZNZFjYCKfA0+1D4EkCPyRKZf5cm1EbS_T+hmzw@mail.gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
>
> I read a lot of misunderstanding here,
> probably due to the fact that none of us are native speaker.
>
> @Wiera Lee: please, please, please, don't shout.
> This is a civil discussion. What Alex did is just a button that you double
> click and you go directly in the Edit mode. Nothing more, and only I have
> it. It's *definitely not a final decision of any kind*.
> So the message you sent earlier is simply not true. So we can restart a
> nice conversation :-D
>
> @Lugusto thanks for sharing your experience.
> I probably said the wrong "color", in this discussion: green.
>
> That is not necesseraly what I really want (of course I thought about
> validation at the beginning of the thread).
> What I really really want is
> * a simpler life for our readers
> * a way to harness/tap/exploit the simple fact that a lot of users DO read
> our books, but never correct anything.
>
> What I really want is a very very quick way, for a user, to correct a typo
> WHEN she sees it.
>
> Maybe we could do a BIG YELLOW BUTTON (meaning 75%), or maybe we can simply
> find *another* way for a user to signal the simple fact that we correct a
> typo or similar.
> My fear is that Wikisource is way to complicated, and a lot of people read
> our texts, and they could help us but we are too complicated to let them.
> Can we try to solve this?
>
> Aubrey
>
>
>
> On Wed, Aug 12, 2015 at 8:58 AM, Nicolas VIGNERON <
> vigneron.nicolas@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > 2015-08-12 7:00 GMT+02:00 Alex Brollo <alex.brollo@gmail.com>:
> >
> >> Please don't presume that such a controversial tool hase been implemented
> >> anywhere ..... "running" only means that che code can run; presently only
> >> *one* user (Aubrey) can click it, just to test it.
> >>
> >> Alex
> >>
> >
> > I asked on the frws scriptorium, if the community wants to test it on frws
> > (
> > https://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Wikisource:Scriptorium/Ao%C3%BBt_2015#Big_green_button
> > ). I'll ask on brws too (but I'll be away).
> >
> > *You* (dear reader on this mail) can ask *your* community if *you* want
> > this tool or not and how. Nothing has been decided and certainly not in
> > your place.
> >
> > @Luiz : there is some very good ideas in your mail. If the code works for
> > green, surely it could be adapt easily for yellow.
> > You have a contention on orthographyon ptws? Can you provide the links?
> > (I'd like to know more as the only convention on frws is to do as the text
> > does)
> >
> > Cdlt, ~nicolas
> >
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> >
> >