[Foundation-l] Friendliness (was: Missing Wikipedians: An Essay)

[John Vandenberg]

On Tue, Feb 22, 2011 at 3:47 PM, Renata St <renatawiki at gmail.com> wrote:
>...
> Then one day I stumbled upon Distributed Proofreaders (
> http://www.pgdp.net/c/) and proofread a few pages. I couple days later I
> received *three* *personalized* welcoming messages & evaluations "this is
> what you got right, this is what you should improve". I was shocked. These
> people are overworked, they have huge backlogs, they are stricter about
> quality than the pickiest FAC reviewer, yet three of them found time,
> energy, and good will to write lengthy personalized messages for a newbie
> who reviewed 30 book pages...

There are other aspects that need to be considered when comparing
Distributed Proofreaders and Wikipedia.

Distributed Proofreaders (DP) does not publish until their work has
been completed, checked and rechecked.  As a result, there is no
urgency to 'get it right'.  On Wikipedia, BLP violations and hoaxes
are published and appear in Google results on an hourly basis, and
would stay there if it wasn't for our existing processes and
patrollers who fight the good fight.  In addition to this, the task of
proofreading all writings of mankind is so large, and the likely pool
of contributors so small, that they can easily summise that the
backlogs arn't fixable.  DP have projects which are moribund for
*years*.

Another difference is that the task of proofreading texts is one that
has very little personal opinion involved.  Their contributor base
doesn't have a wide variation of opinions on how the task should be
done.  They are constrained by the software and Project Gutenberg
rules, eliminating most of the fierce battles which could be wages
over important issues like ... typography, orthography, etc.

Finally, the Distributed Proofreaders project only consists of already
published & public domain material.  It is all already dusty, and
there can be no dispute about what the text was.  This also reduces
the opportunity for conflict, and it also results in less personal
involvement in the work.  Proofreading doesn't even require any
knowledge of the text, or even the language of the text - contributors
merely need to know how to find the glyphs to match the type on the
page.  And a contributors choice of texts to work on doesn't say much
about their beliefs, personality or mission in life.

--
John Vandenberg