Distributed Proofreaders

A long-running volunteer crowdsourcing initiative, founded in 2000, that proofreads OCR output for Project Gutenberg using a side-by-side web interface showing the scanned page image and the extracted text. Distributed Proofreaders has been credited with accelerating Project Gutenberg beyond what manual entry could have achieved, and has added more than 40,000 books to the archive. It is frequently cited as a prototype for social-purpose crowdsourcing in accessibility work: large volunteer community, multi-stage quality control, and gradual refinement of output texts. Many later systems for accessible-book production (Bookshare, EBIS, Japanese NDL tooling) are modelled on the Distributed Proofreaders workflow.