Note that the site isn't really about the creation (production) of content, but rather, about making that content accessible. But they are still an example of CBPP.

See:

Gutenberg school?

In conversations with Ray about the scholium system, the idea of building a school around the Gutenberg collection came up. I think it would be great to do something like this at some point! Imagine being able to discuss some of the world's most important literature of all time with many of the world's most important thinkers of the current day. That's what I'd like to shoot for at any rate.

--jcorneli

Discussion

PG is very CBPP, actually. It doesn't matter that the source of the content is extant works; what matters is that value (digitization) is added by the commons. This process even involves distributed spot-checking and correction of OCR results by human beings, if I understand correctly. Reminds me a lot of distributed checking for mathematical errors… --akrowne Mon Mar 7 07:01:33 UTC 2005

: I was thinking that its description as a border case was earned through it not being a producer of content. But then again, maybe they are a peer producer of free content because they start with "non-free" content (public domain, but not transparent) and convert it into free (transparent) content. Similarly, PM isn't (currently) about the production of new mathematics, but about the "freeing" of mathematical ideas. --jcorneli

This notion "adding values by digitization" has recently come back in spades to haunt us — exactly the reasons you gave for Project Gutenberg being a producer of content are exactly why digital libraries claim they have a"thin copyright" which allows them to restrict copying of public domain material. --rspuzio 26 June 2005

One interesting point, which may be relevant in light of some of the discussions of the last few days about free vs. non-free content is that not all of what Project Gutenberg has to offer is free. Quoting from their "Help and FAQ",

: Some Project Gutenberg e-texts have copyright restrictions. You can still download and read these, but you may not be allowed to reproduce, modify or distribute them.

--rspuzio 14 March 2005

Yes, that's true, but I'm quite sure that the vast majority of the PG content is free. I don't know what their official policy is on the non public domain stuff, i.e., why they have it, how much of it they want, etc. --jcorneli Mon Mar 14 23:28:47 2005 UTC

Another thing which would be nice is more effort in making public domain mathematical works available electronically. So far, all I am aware of is the following, which only contains two books:

: http://www.emis.de/classics/index.html

Hopefully, they will keep at it and produce more books. Also, it would be nice for more people to get in on this business. At the very least, anyone with a scanner could scan in hunderd-year-old math books. Later on, as the technology develops and becomes available, one could run OCR programs to convert them into TeX. Also, in the meanwhile, a few people might want to type the equations in TeX by hand. In the case of works with not too many equations (and older math books tend to have a higher proportion of text to equations) this would not be too big a deal. With a bit of a concerted effort, it would be possible to get all of mathematics before 1900 in electronic form. Remember, there was a lot less mathematics then so this is not too unreasonable a goal for the near future if enought people would consider it worth doing and put some time into making it happen. Among other reasons for doing it, let's not forget that books were printed on acid paper which will fall to dust soon and it would be a shameful scandal to lose old mathematical works simply because nobody bothered to scan them in! --rspuzio 14 march 2005

Project Gutenberg is asking for volunteers to help; I think the simplest non-monetary way to help is to zip over to

Project Gutenberg Distributed Proofreaders http://pgdp.net/

and proofread a couple of pages.

Perhaps the proofreading system they set up might be useful for a mathematics encylopedia.

That is a really fascinating point. We could set up such a system in a modular fashion. It would have its own database of PM entries and if and how many times they had been checked, and what the proofreader said the status was (in violation or not). We could feed new entries into the system via RSS, and perhaps do the same to get entries likely in violation as output. --akrowne Sat Mar 19 01:19:36 UTC 2005

A system like this could work… though I personally think that a PM proofreader would be likely to be someone who would generate a lot of useful data, not just "yes or no" data, but also suggestions, questions, and so on. --jcorneli Sat Mar 19 05:34:33 2005 UTC

: As a good example, one might remember that Chebyshev proved his celebrated result on the distribution of prime numbers while editing Euler's collected works. Even such an apparently dry and mundane task as editing and proofreading old math books can lead to new insights. --rspuzio 23 January 2006

Projects