Page:Crowdsourcing and Open Access.djvu/28

618 corresponding link from the volume’s index will automatically be updated to reflect the changed status of that page.

As with Distributed Proofreaders, when the scanned pages of a work have been proofread to a satisfactory quality level, the proofread text of all (or some) of the pages within the work can be joined together to form a single electronic file of the complete proofread text. Unlike Distributed Proofreaders, however, this process resides entirely within the control of the users of the site and requires no additional software. Subject only to certain technical constraints imposed by the underlying architecture, the corrected text from dozens or hundreds of scanned original pages may be automatically joined together to form a single Web page with the complete text of the entire original work. The common practice on Wikisource is to keep the scanned page images available even after proofreading is complete in order to ease authentication ; for most works recently added to the site, users may verify for themselves (by clicking a small page number link that typically appears in the margin of the displayed text) that the text displayed at the site matches the content of the scanned page image.

Wikisource, unlike Distributed Proofreaders, is a wiki: with the exception of a small number of "locked" pages, any user of the site may add or edit any work in the library. Thus, Wikisource removes some of the obstacles that make Distributed Proofreaders and Project Gutenberg unpromising candidates for hosting source materials of interest to the legal community. Indeed, the barriers to adding a new work to Wikisource are exceptionally low: so long as a user can locate (or create) an electronic file containing scanned images of the source work as originally published—and there are many scanned legal texts already available online at sites such as Google Books or the Internet Archive—the only indispensable step consists of uploading a set of suitable scans to Wikimedia Commons where it will be accessible by Wikisource. Every other step of the process—creating an index page, extracting (or creating) uncorrected OCR text from the scanned file, proofreading and correcting the text, and