Distributed Proofreaders
Web-based proofreading project
Distributed Proofreaders (commonly abbreviated as DP or PGDP) is a web-based project that supports the development of e-texts for Project Gutenberg by allowing many people to work together in proofreading drafts of e-texts for errors. As of December 2025, the site had digitized 50,000 titles.
01History
Distributed Proofreaders was founded by Charles Franks in 2000 as an independent site to assist Project Gutenberg. Distributed Proofreaders became an official Project Gutenberg site in 2002.
On 8 November 2002, Distributed Proofreaders was slashdotted, and more than 4,000 new members joined in one day, causing an influx of new proofreaders and software developers, which helped to increase the quantity and quality of e-text production.
In 2006, the Distributed Proofreaders Foundation was formed to provide Distributed Proofreaders with its own legal entity and not-for-profit status, separate from Project Gutenberg. The founding trustees were Charles Franks, Juliet Sutherland, and Gregory B. Newby.
In July 2015, the 30,000th Distributed Proofreaders produced e-text was posted to Project Gutenberg. DP-contributed e-texts comprised more than half of works in Project Gutenberg by 2009.
02Proofreading process
DP servers are located in the United States, and therefore works must be cleared by Project Gutenberg as being in the public domain according to United States copyright law before they can be proofread and eventually published.
Public domain works, typically books with expired copyright, are scanned by volunteers or sourced from digitization projects, and the images are run through optical character recognition (OCR) software. Since OCR software is far from perfect, the resulting text always includes errors. To correct them, pages are made available to volunteers via the Internet; the original page image and the recognized text appear side by side. Each set is presented to multiple volunteers to enter corrections, which results in a combined dataset that minimizes errors. This process distributes the time-consuming error-correction process with a method akin to distributed computing.
A post-processor combines the pages and prepares the text for uploading to Project Gutenberg.
Besides custom software created to support the project, DP also runs a forum and a wiki for project coordinators and participants.
04Milestones
The source for many of these entries is the DP Timeline.
| Milestone | Date | E-text |
|---|---|---|
| First | 1 Oct 2000 | The Odyssey, Homer, Lang tr. (first pages for proofreading) |
| 1,000th | 19 Feb 2003 | Tales of St. Austin's, P. G. Wodehouse |
| 2,000th | 3 Sep 2003 | Hamlet, the 'Bad Quarto', William Shakespeare |
| 3,000th | 14 Jan 2004 | The Anatomy of Melancholy, Robert Burton |
| 4,000th | 6 Apr 2004 | Aventures du Capitaine Hatteras, Jules Verne |
| 5,000th | 24 Aug 2004 | A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature, John William Cousin |
| 10,000th | 9 Mar 2007 | (See 10,000th e-book below.) |
| 15,000th | 12 May 2009 | Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society - Vol 1 - 1666, various, Henry Oldenburg (editor) |
| 20,000th | 10 April 2011 | (See 20,000th e-book below.) |
| 25,000th | 10 April 2013 | The Art and Practice of Silver Printing, H. P. Robinson and Capt. Abney |
| 30,000th | 7 July 2015 | Graded Literature Readers: Fourth Book |
| 35,000th | 26 Jan 2018 | Shores of the Polar Sea, a Narrative of the Arctic Expedition of 1875-1876 |
| 40,000th | 10 October 2020 | All four volumes of London Labour and the London Poor |
| 45,000th | 18 January 2023 | Down the Mackenzie and Up the Yukon in 1906, Elihu Stewart |
| 50,000th | 7 December 2025 | A Dictionary of the Art of Printing |
10,000th e-book
On 9 March 2007, Distributed Proofreaders announced the completion of more than 10,000 titles. In celebration, a collection of fifteen titles was published:
- Slave Narratives, Oklahoma (A Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves), U.S. Work Projects Administration (English)
- Eighth annual report of the Bureau of ethnology (1891 N 08 / 1886-1887), edited by John Wesley Powell (English)
- R. Caldecott's First Collection of Pictures and Songs, Randolph Caldecott [illustrator] (English)
- Como atravessei Àfrica (Volume II), Serpa Pinto (Portuguese)
- Triplanetary, E. E. "Doc" Smith (English)
- Heidi, Johanna Spyri (English)
- Heimatlos, Johanna Spyri (German)
- October 27, 1920 issue of Punch (English)
- Sylva, or, A Discourse of Forest-Trees, John Evelyn (English)
- Encyclopedia of Needlework, Therese de Dillmont (English)
- The annals of the Cakchiquels, Francisco Ernantez Arana (fl. 1582), translated and edited by Daniel G. Brinton (1837-1899) (English with Central American Indian)
- The Shanty Book, Part I, Sailor Shanties (1921), Richard Runciman Terry (1864-1938) (English)
- Le marchand de Venise, William Shakespeare, translated by François Guizot (French)
- Agriculture for beginners, Rev. ed., Charles William Burkett (English)
- Species Plantarum (Part 1), Carl Linnaeus (Carl von Linné) (Latin)
20,000th e-book
On April 10, 2011, the 20,000th book milestone was celebrated as a group release of bilingual books:
- The Renaissance in Italy-Italian Literature, Vol 1, John Addington Symonds (English with Italian)
- Märchen und Erzählungen für Anfänger; erster Teil, H. A. Guerber (German with English)
- Gedichte und Sprüche, Walther von der Vogelweide (Middle High German (c. 1050, 1500) with German)
- Studien und Plaudereien im Vaterland, Sigmon Martin Stern (German with English)
- Caos del Triperuno, Teofilo Folengo (Italian with Latin)
- Niederländische Volkslieder, Hoffmann von Fallersleben (German with Dutch)
- A "San Francisco", Salvatore Di Giacomo (Italian with Neapolitan)
- O' voto, Salvatore Di Giacomo (Italian with Neapolitan)
- De Latino sine Flexione & Principio de Permanentia, Giuseppe Peano (1858-1932) (Latin with Latino sine Flexione)
- Cappiddazzu paga tuttu, Nino Martoglio, Luigi Pirandello (Italian with Sicilian)
- The International Auxiliary Language Esperanto, George Cox (English with Esperanto)
- Lusitania: canti popolari portoghesi, Ettore Toci (Italian with French)
30,000th e-book
On 7 July 2015, the 30,000th book milestone was celebrated with a group of thirty texts. One was numbered 30,000:
- Graded literature readers - Fourth book, editors: Harry Pratt Judson and Ida C. Bender, 1900
40,000th e-book
On 10 October 2020, the 40,000th book milestone was celebrated with the completion of a four-volume work, London Labour and the London Poor, by Henry Mayhew.
50,000th e-book
On 7 December 2025, the 50,000th book milestone was celebrated with the posting of A Dictionary of the Art of Printing by William Savage.
Sources and credits
This article is adapted from the Wikipedia article “Distributed Proofreaders”, written by its contributors and licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. Fathomly has changed the layout, removed citation markers, navigation and maintenance notices, and adjusted punctuation. This adapted version is shared under the same license. For references, see the original article.
Images, from Wikimedia Commons:
- Distributed Proofreaders.png by Palosirkka, Public domain
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