Apparently, Brewster Kahle wrote (via Federico Leva - Nemo):
http://blog.archive.org/2020/08/21/can-you-help-us-make-the-19th-century-searchable/
Take for example, this newspaper from 1847. The images https://archive.org/details/sim_frederick-douglass-paper_1847-12-03_1_1 are not that great, but a person can read them:
The problem is our computers’ optical character recognition tech gets it wrong https://archive.org/stream/sim_frederick-douglass-paper_1847-12-03_1_1/sim_frederick-douglass-paper_1847-12-03_1_1_djvu.txt, and the columns get confused.
In my experience, working with ABBYY Finereader Professional, you always need to manually check columns / zoning. For just a few years of one newspaper, this might be a reasonable manual work. But the problem is the same for centuries of thousands of newspapers.
When I scanned encyclopedias (printed in 2 columns in 20 volumes x 800 pages), I manually checked columns in the OCR program.
For Wikisource, we would need a way for the OCR program to indicate how the zones (columns) are identified in the image, and let the wiki user modify these zones before sending each zone to the OCR program. It would be reasonable for the WMF to fund a developer (or team of developers) to create such a solution. There is already some solution for marking parts of a picture, right? This needs to work within pages of a PDF or Djvu file.