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DP
Distributed Proofing site goes through the roof
By David Moynihan
A WEBSERVER ENDURES Slashdotting and the publishing industry trembles. Two years after launching his Distributed Proofreaders site, Charles Franks, a programmer from Las Vegas, hit the traffic jackpot, shattering records for pages done, increasing his sites' users five-fold, and editing nearly 100 books, all in a wild weekend.
So what is DP? It's a website whose sole purpose is to generate cleanly edited public domain ASCII texts for Project Gutenberg. Franks and a few other experienced volunteers scan in the books via a $3,500 sheet-fed gadget, enter raw OCR'd text into a database along with images of each page. Visitors to Charles' site then edit the text to correspond exactly with the page image, saving the corrections before moving on to additional files. In a second round of proofing, the original edits are double-checked by another person for misses.
At DP, you don't commit to proofing an entire book, just editing one page at a time, though there's a ranking system for who's done the most. When all pages are complete, the experienced volunteer combines them into one large file, sending the completed work to Gutenberg's main internet server; shortly thereafter, the book files are replicated to literally hundreds of mirror sites across the globe.

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