Professor Yochai Benkler rightly celebrates Distributed Proofreaders as a paradigmatic crowdsourcing success story,[1] and others have emphasized the site’s potential value as a tool for crowdsourced library-building.[2] The numbers are difficult to quarrel with. In the decade since its founding, volunteers coordinating their efforts through Distributed Proofreaders have proofread and released in electronic form (through Project Gutenberg) over 17,000 texts.[3] DP’s strengths include a large and supportive user community (with over 3,000 contributors active in the last 30 days at the time of this writing)[4] and a rapid proofreading process, with completion times even for lengthy works measured in weeks (at least in the early rounds).
Nevertheless, a number of structural weaknesses may limit DP’s utility as a tool for improving access to primary legal source materials. Unlike many of the most vibrant peer-produced informational projects, DP maintains a bureaucratic, hierarchical structure, with site administrators adjudicating users’ compliance with the site’s daunting criteria for promotion to higher levels of access, and all but the most senior users are disabled entirely from contributing new works.[5] Furthermore, DP’s selection of texts is driven by the philosophy underlying its senior partner, Project Gutenberg, which expressly aims to maximize the inclusion of texts popular with a mass audience.[6] In consequence, Distributed Proofreaders and Project Gutenberg include comparatively few texts of interest to the legal community. Project Gutenberg’s mission discourages the addition of such texts, and the DP architecture makes it difficult even for interested users inclined to do so. This hinders efforts to broaden the scope of the project’s coverage.
- ↑ See, e.g., Benkler, supra note 4, at 81; Benkler, supra note 72, at 398–99.
- ↑ See Travis, supra note 44, at 784 (“[c]ommons-based peer production has created what is arguably the largest and most successful digital library, and in a remarkably speedy, efficient, and user-friendly way.”).
- ↑ See supra note 86.
- ↑ See supra notes 93–100 and accompanying text.
- ↑ See supra notes 93–100 and accompanying text.
- ↑ As Project Gutenberg’s founder explained:
Hart, supra note 83.Project Gutenberg selects etexts targeted a bit on the “bang for the buck” philosophy … we choose etexts we hope extremely large portions of the audience will want and use frequently. We are constantly asked to prepare etext from out of print editions of esoteric materials, but this does not provide for usage by the audience we have targeted, 99% of the general public.
