Starting PGERT, a forum solution

Edit: No sooner had I made this post an email hit my inbox, letting me know that the PGERT was not only already underway, but that there were only 1100 errors, not the 10000 as claimed before. All interested parties should make their way over to the ErrorCorrection page over at Gutenberg.org for more information, and completely ignore everything else I’ve just said.

After talking with Mike Cook and Michael Hart, clearly the easiest way to get the ball rolling on PGERT (and more importantly, keep it rolling) would be to use a simple forum system to manage and fix the errors reported.

Mike posted the idea^I of using the already populated Distributed Proofreaders forums, instead of duplicating efforts by starting a separate forum on DP-News or Gutenberg.org. That way nobody would have to wait for a specially coded solution to be made, and we could start on it almost straight away.

Broken down, here’s the simplest solution I came up with:

Open a new forum at DP for PGERT, and have four sub-forums:

• General – A regular discussion area for PGERT volunteers to co-ordinate their efforts, ask questions etc.
• Report an error – Where anybody can post an error they’ve found, in a simple template dictated by a sticky post so volunteers have a consistent layout to work with.
• Fixed errors – Where errors are moved to once they’ve been fixed. Naturally this would be a locked forum (so people can’t continue discussing them, but can still view the errors).
• Rejected errors – This might not seem important, but having the false-positives saved will stop repeated reports of the same event (people will be asked to search for the error before posting it). Again, this should be locked.

The 10,000+ current errors would have to be entered into “Report an error” by volunteers (of which I’d be more than happy to help with) rather than the current plan of handing a few errors out to people interested in helping out. For these we could save time by not using the planned template, just a simple copy/paste so that we don’t spend too much time migrating the old errors over.

This would hinge on the following prerequisits:

• The effort must be promoted on Gutenberg.org for the public to see, otherwise the only people aware of it are DP members who would be diverted from their normal efforts.
• PG would have to be happy with hosting PGERT on the DP forums
• DP would also have to be happy with the increase in traffic and bandwidth on their forums, as well as handling the initial user rights.^II

The singular problem I can see is the reporting of new errors. At the moment they all go to the errata@ mailbox, which is how we got into the problem in the first place. The only problem with reporting errors on the forum is that people would have to join first. Sure it’d be great to inadvertantly get people to join DP, but the extra steps involved might discourage reporting the error. Ideally we’d just have a form on Gutenberg.org with say, recaptcha to prevent spam, and have some magical script format it and post it on the forum. Or have the “Report an error” sub-forum open to the public for posting.^III

It’ll be simple as pie to implement, providing it can be promoted well enough and that future errors can be handled better than being dropped in a mailbox. Perhaps it might be worth nominating for the “magical script” I mentioned to be developed by somebody in next year’s Google Summer of Code.