Talk:Bahá’í News
Roadmap for this series:
- Proofread the text of all issues (completed)
- Crop, upload and categorize all images at bahai.media (in progress)
- Wikilink all images, embedding them in the pages of issues (Not started: example here)
- Embed all "corrections" at the place where the error was made (Not started: example here)
Other tasks
- As inserts become available they need to be scanned, ocr'd and added to the site/proofread.
- Re-do proofreading of issues 287-370, unfortunately the first pass was poorly done
A note on the completion of proofreading Bahá’í News issues[edit]
The page Bahá’í News was created in March 2010, and it looks like by January 2015 every issue had been added to the site, and this included a text layer to the PDF's we uploaded. This text layer was necessary for people to be able to search through the periodical, but since it was added by using OCR it contained many errors. Dates might contain an o instead of a zero, 195o. Any word with diacritics was almost guaranteed to be wrong, and lots of others. I had a notice at the top of every page advising people about this, and requesting help with proofreading these text copies but unfortunately no one ever volunteered to do this work. Going on 11 years since adding the first issues, it seemed unlikely the work of proofreading this series would ever be completed. In early October 2021 I decided to hire people to complete this task. I hired several people initially, but eventually it became clear that the quality of work being done varied a lot, and I let everyone go except for one individual who consistently proofread issues several hours faster than the others and with a better result.
Taken all together, the proofreaders did 3,918 hours of work. The shortest amount of time an individual worked was 12 hours and the longest was 2,578. The effort ran from October 2, 2021 through June 27, 2024 which is 999 days.
As you can see from the roadmap above, there is still a lot of outstanding work to be done, namely around working with the images in the series and incorporating correction notices, but the purpose of the proofreading effort was to make searching through the periodical reliable for researchers, and that goal is accomplished now. The individual who performed the majority of the proofreading has agreed to continue his work at The American Bahá’í.
