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

[Platonides]

Anthony wrote:
> On Sun, Jun 21, 2009 at 7:54 AM, John Vandenberg <jayvdb at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
>> Whether Google is good or evil is off-topic, and irrelevant to boot.
>>
> 
> Whether or not they have a right to exclude bots isn't.
> 
> Also worth noting, Project Gutenberg has digitised less than 30,000
>> books since 1971.  Distributed Proofreaders has done 15,000 of those
>> since 2000, so throughput is picking up.  But, there are more than
>> enough too keep everyone busy for a very long time.
> 
> 
> The interesting thing is, even if you don't use a bot, it's still faster to
> copy/paste from Google manually than it is to get the book and scan it in
> yourself (assuming you don't want to destroy the original, anyway).
> 
> If you're going to make a project out OCRing books that Google has already
> OCRed, I don't see any point in reinventing the scanning or first pass
> OCRing part.

IMHO the interesting bit would be to make a google books browser
prefiling the wiki editor.