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Just found this thread, which I think raises a very good question.
But actually it seems to me there is already a fairly good answer in the traditional practice of the publishing industry.
Virtually every paper book I possess, and most of the commercially published ebooks, contain a page or two, usually at the front behind the cover and title page, usually labelled something like 'edition notice', or 'printing' or 'publishing history' which makes some attempt to give the provenance of the book in terms of author, editions, reprints, copyright information, etc. Sometimes with classics you also get something called 'note on the text' which is even more specific.
Why not give a reasonably strong, but not mandatory, guideline to uploaders to include such a section in their contributions.
As an occasional uploader I've (mostly) done that, and it wasn't particularly onerous.
As a downloader I'd love to also have some such information in the metadata to be searched when looking for books to read. I think I would probably download more if I had a faster way to assess the transcription quality of what's available.
(NB As an aside, this is also true for commercially published books too. I'd love to be able to consult an MR database of reviews of the transcription quality of (say) Amazon titles. So many titles, even by well-known publishers, have many irritating, and sometimes even major flaws. This sort of thing rarely gets commented on in Amazon reviews. As an example the copy of the Penguin ebook of Sir Walter Scott's 'Rob Roy' that I bought has over 200 basic and glaring spelling errors, a large proportion of which were mistranscribing 'the' as 'die'. In this case I would have probably been better to download the Gutenberg version if only had I known before spending my money.)
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