Quote:
Originally Posted by rhadin
I wonder, however, about the quality of the community work on average. (Please -- as with everything else, there will always be some excellent, high-quality work as well as exceedingly poor, very-low-quality work. But these tend to be the extremes to which most work does not go.)
I wonder because I daily see the difference between good-quality editing and poor-mediocre editing and when I talk to some of the editors of the poor-mediocre work, I discover that the following characteristics describe the editors: (a) low paid to volunteer, (b) American English is not their native language, (c) became editors because they found some errors in a book they bought and thus figured they could do the job, and (d) received little or no editorial training/education.
Many great author's books became memorable because they were well edited by highly skilled, well-qualified editors.
Community skills may matter less in fiction but are of great concern in nonfiction.
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I would say both fiction and non-fiction can equally benefit from crowdsourcing, as software does from the open-source initiative. The problem is that we're so married to the old-world ideas of the 'editor' and the 'proofreader' as some kind of elevated and knowledgeable position, when in a lot of cases those positions weren't gained by merit but by nepotism and friendship (along with being published), especially within the UK publishing industry, which has always been incestuous. We've elevated these positions, along with the writer, to something beyond and otherworldly. If Kovid, the author of Calibre, has a 'bug' in his software there are hundreds of people who'll immediately tell him what that 'bug' is and a handful more who'll either help fix that bug, or program a patch. Still others will contribute new recipes and code the underlying technologies that help in conversion. Those reporting might not be programmers, yes, but those that help fix the problems, in most instances are.
You take the open-source model and apply it to writing, both fiction and non-fiction, and I think it would work just as well. We've seen how well WIKI works (putting aside the academic whining about authenticity), so why not publishing? What makes a good editor or a proofreader? There's no real yardstick, especially if you look at what is being published at the moment, and if what is being published at he moment is a yardstick then there is no editing or proofreading happening out there. Non-fiction would benefit even more from a crowdsourced environment, because you can bet there'd be a lot of interested parties there to point out factual errors within the speciality of what's being written.