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Oh wow. I tend to ignore these threads that run on and on forever, thinking that it's just the same old arguments going round and round, but I thought I'd have a look at this one and see what people were still managing to talk about, and I'm almost wishing I hadn't.
Luckily I am now here to solve everything in easy numbered bullet points.
1. Being free and voluntary does not give you a free pass. Things can always be better. Isn't that why MR has its own library at all? To make nicer editions than the other free and voluntary sources? Personally, I appreciate the effort, and tend to come to MR first when I'm looking for a PD item, because the books here are likely to be better-formatted than at gutenberg or the automated conversions at amazon or whatever.
2. AlexBell's edition was identified as having modernised spelling. It seems that many of us feel that changing "gay" to "light-hearted" is more than just a modernisation, and should have been (at least) noted more clearly. "Gay" does not mean now what it meant then, but "light-hearted" changes the rhythm of the sentence. It is Wilkie Collins, though, of the verbose overwriting school of 19th-century literature, and ultimately I don't think it bothers me. It is the kind of edit you might make to put out a new edition, which is essentially what AlexBell has done.
3. The problem, really, is that there is no way of knowing it was done, unless you are already an expert on the text. And it's true. There isn't. We still wouldn't know it was done, if AlexBell hadn't told us. Any given book could be edited. It could be an abridgement. It could be a completely different book. Ultimately, you just have to trust the uploader and hope anything too egregious will eventually come to light. Or just not read it.
I had/have this problem to some extent with a commercial anthology. One table of contents I saw on the publisher's website suggested that some of the included works might be abridged. There's nothing in the actual book to say either way. The only way I can be sure is to read another version and compare, in which case why not just read the other version anyway?
4. I would hope that any substantive edits would be noted, and I don't really see why there shouldn't be guidelines to say that. I would guess there already are some guidelines for what can be uploaded to MR and how to do it? I haven't been able to contribute yet, so I wouldn't know.
Things would still be missed - AlexBell seems to be fairly conscientious, but obviously didn't think that change was sufficiently major to warrant a separate mention - but I don't see that there would be any harm in a statement of what the library is aiming for, if anyone can agree what that is.
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