[Foundation-l] Info/Law blog: Using Wikisource as an Alternative Open Access Repository for Legal Scholarship

[Ray Saintonge]

Anthony wrote:
> On Sun, Jun 21, 2009 at 10:55 AM, Anthony wrote:
>   
>> Okay, http://www.archive.org/details/catholicencyclo16herbgoog happened to
>> be the first book I randomly picked from Google Book Search.  There's no
>> text version.
>>
>> And the text version I find of other editions seems to be much much worse
>> than the google OCR results.
>>     
> http://books.google.com/books?id=TZ0UAAAAYAAJ strike two, not even there.
> http://books.google.com/books?id=PYAaAAAAYAAJ strike three
> http://www.archive.org/details/happinessessays00hiltgoog finally...let's
> compare the OCR:
>
> "Great numbers of thoughtful people are just now much perplexed to know what
> to make of the faffs of life, and are looking about them for some reasonable
> interpretation of the modern world. They cannot abandon the work of the
> world, but they are conscious that they have not learned the art of work."
>
> "Greaf numbers of thoughtful people are just now much perplexed to know what
> to make of thefaSls of life^ and are looking about them for some reasonable
> interpretation of the modem world. They cannot abandon the work of the
> worlds but they are conscious that they have not learned the art of work."
> ---
> "Few people, however, really know how to work, and even in an age when
> oftener perhaps than ever before we hear of "work" and "workers" one cannot
> observe that the art of work makes much positive progress. On the contrary,
> the general inclination seems to be to work as little as possible, or to
> work for a short time in order to pass the remainder of one's life in rest."
>
> "Few people, however,  really know how to work, and even in an age when
> oftener perhaps than ever before we hear of" work " and " workers " one
> cannotobserve that the art of work makes much positive progress. On the
> contrary, the general inclination seems to be to work as little as possible,
> or to work for a short time in order to pass the remainder of one's life in
> rest. "
> ---
> I guess that's acceptable.  The Catholic encyclopedia results were much
> worse, though.  Maybe it was a font thing, but I'm not quite interested
> enough to bother doing a more in depth study right now.
.
Who is expecting OCR to be perfect anywhere?  In the absence of real 
human proofreading I assume any OCR material to be fraught with errors. 
Wikisource aims to accurately reproduce what was published, including 
original errors.  Scans alone provide the needed accuracy, but they are 
not suitable for the added value of wikification.

Ec