Editing Distributed Proofreaders (section)

== Proofreading process ==

[[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, many errors often 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.<ref>{{cite conference
 |author1=Gentry, Craig |author2=Ramzan, Zulfikar |author3=Stuart Stubblebine | title=Secure Distributed ''Human'' Computation
 | book-title=Financial cryptography and data security: 9th International Conference
 | page=329 | date=February 28 – March 3, 2005
 | volume=3570 | series=Lecture Notes in Computer Science
 |editor=Andrew S. Patrick |editor2=Moti Yung |editor2-link=Moti Yung | location=Roseau, The Commonwealth of Dominica
 | publisher=Springer | isbn=3-540-26656-9
 | url=https://books.google.com/books?id=JegO2ly7IccC&pg=PA329
 | doi=10.1145/1064009.1064026 }}</ref> This process thereby distributes the time-consuming error-correction process, akin to [[distributed computing]].

Each page is proofread and formatted several times, and then a post-processor combines the pages and prepares the text for uploading to Project Gutenberg.

Besides custom software created to support the project, DP also runs a forum and a wiki for project coordinators and participants.