How collaborative is the OED?

[Jesse Sheidlower]

On Sun, Dec 27, 2009 at 11:17:43PM -0500, Joel S. Berson wrote:
> Thanks, Jesse.  Despite the reliance on databases, I won't be
> completely discouraged.  EAN (and ECCO, for books) still don't turn
> up everything I come across.  :-)
>
> I was hoping the OED databases could trace accepted quotations back
> to the submitter, and distinguish in-house from volunteer.  But alas,
> I suppose the necessary data base fields are not present.

They are, in fact, but it's not the sort of thing we'd
normally need to consider, so it would need to be manually
examined in order to come up with precise numbers.

Jesse Sheidlower
OED

> At 12/27/2009 09:34 PM, Jesse Sheidlower wrote:
>> On Sun, Dec 27, 2009 at 10:30:02AM -0500, Joel S. Berson wrote:
>> > On another list, someone remarked:
>> >> The OED was and to a lesser extent is a highly collaborative, highly
>> >> edited venture.
>> >
>> > How collaborative is it these days?  In numbers of volunteers vs.
>> > staff?  In numbers of quotations submitted by volunteers that are
>> > "admitted" vs. numbers from staff?  How does that compare to the old days?
>>
>> As Fred notes, the majority of OED quotations now come from
>> databases (typically found by in-house researchers or editors)
>> rather than from reading-program volunteers. And the nature of
>> the reading programs has changed, since they're no longer the
>> primary way we gather citations.
>>
>> However, there are still a very large number of people
>> involved in the project as volunteers, and we get quotations
>> (both hand-found and database-found), suggestions,
>> corrections, etc. all the time. I don't think there's any way
>> to quantify this, but it's certainly the case that
>> collaboration remains an important part of OED editorial
>> efforts.
>>
>> Jesse Sheidlower
>> OED
>>
>> ------------------------------------------------------------
>> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org

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The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org