OED editing, antedating peril ephemera, was Re: [ADS-L] The competitive sport of antedating

[Jesse Sheidlower]

On Fri, Oct 19, 2007 at 07:21:54AM -0700, Dave Wilton wrote:
> Going beyond simply correcting known errors faster, a neat feature would be
> inclusion of "unedited" citations in the online edition. A button, similar
> to the one that displays the 2nd Edition entry, could display
> unedited/unverified citations when the reader requests. You could even have
> a comment feature where readers could send in or comment on citations by
> clicking through. (Probably not public comments, given the nature of the
> OED, but ones that go directly to a database for consideration by the
> editors when they get to that word in the revision cycle. Make submitting
> citations and corrections easier.)
>
> This would be a fair amount of work to implement and maintain (and I imagine
> that it's probably not practical to put every citation in the Oxford
> database online--some I understand are still on paper slips), but it could
> end up generating more material and saving effort in the long run by
> engaging a wider group in helping with the editing. And you'd still maintain
> quality control by having the "official" edited entry. And it would make the
> dictionary more valuable by pointing researchers to citations that they
> otherwise might miss--they'd have to verify them themselves, of course.

I think doing something like this would prove to be extremely
confusing and useless to almost everyone who looked at it,
unless an extremely large amount of editorial effort were
involved. (An example where such effort has been expended is
the OED's science fiction project, at
http://www.jessesword.com/sf, which does in fact link to the
OED's citation databases for the relevant words, but even here
there are significant problems with the list.)

As someone who gets to see the kind of comments the OED gets
from the general public, trust me when I say that encouraging
more of this would involve an exceptional amount of editorial
time and energy with very little positive result.

Jesse Sheidlower
OED

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