Distributed Proofreaders
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Screenshot of the proofreading interface on Distributed Proofreaders.
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| Available in | Multiple |
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| Website | www |
| Commercial | No |
| Registration | Required |
| Launched | 2000 |
| Current status | Active |
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Content license
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Public Domain |
| Written in | PHP |
Distributed Proofreaders (commonly abbreviated as DP or PGDP) is a web-based project that supports the development of e-texts for Project Gutenberg by allowing many people to work together in proofreading drafts of e-texts for errors. By July 2015, over 30,000 texts had been digitized.
Distributed Proofreaders was founded by Charles Franks in 2000 as an independent site to assist Project Gutenberg. Distributed Proofreaders became an official Project Gutenberg site in 2002.
On 8 November 2002, Distributed Proofreaders was slashdotted, and more than 4,000 new members joined in one day, causing an influx of new proofreaders and software developers, which helped to greatly increase the quantity and quality of e-text production. Distributed Proofreaders posted their 5,000th text to Project Gutenberg in October 2004, in March 2007, the 10,000th DP-produced e-text was posted to Project Gutenberg, in May 2009, the 15,000th DP-produced e-text was posted to Project Gutenberg, in April 2011, the 20,000th DP-produced e-text was posted to Project Gutenberg, and in July 2015, the 30,000th DP-produced e-text was posted to Project Gutenberg. DP-contributed e-texts comprised more than half of works in Project Gutenberg, as of July 2015[update].
On 31 July 2006, the Distributed Proofreaders Foundation was formed to provide Distributed Proofreaders with its own legal entity and not-for-profit status. IRS approval of section 501(c)(3) status was granted retroactive to 7 April 2006.
Public domain works, typically books with expired copyright, are scanned by volunteers or sourced from digitization projects and the images are run through optical character recognition (OCR) software. Since OCR software is far from perfect, often a large number of errors appear in the resulting text. To correct them, pages are made available to volunteers via the Internet; the original page image and the recognized text appear side by side. This process thereby distributes the time-consuming error-correction process, akin to distributed computing.
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