Project Imperialism?
Jul. 25th, 2003 04:31 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tcpipReaders will know that I'm a big fan of Project Gutenberg. I completely agree with the sentiment of founder Michael Hart that "it would be a really good idea if lots of famous and important texts were freely available to everyone in the world".
But in the course of my research (in particular Internet and language content). I'm seriously beginning to have second thoughts about the Project.
Here's the current distribution of books according to language:
Bulgarian 6 Chinese 64 (whatever that's supposed to mean) Dutch 8 Flemish 5 French 102 German 183 Greek 1 Italian 13 Japanese 2 Latin 15(!) Portuguese 3 Spanish 15 Swedish 1 Welsh 4
and ...
English about 9500
To make matters less impressive they have this rule of ASCII first (not a universal standard) and then no standards at all. For example, the Epicheski pesni (Epical Songs), Slaveikov, Pencho, uses the Cyrillic Windows 1251 character set. Legge's Confucian Analects requires the Big 5 character set. The 1 Greek text (a translation of Sangharakshita, Vision and by Spiros Doikas) doesn't even mention what character encoding it uses!
Have these people heard of unicode?
But in the course of my research (in particular Internet and language content). I'm seriously beginning to have second thoughts about the Project.
Here's the current distribution of books according to language:
Bulgarian 6 Chinese 64 (whatever that's supposed to mean) Dutch 8 Flemish 5 French 102 German 183 Greek 1 Italian 13 Japanese 2 Latin 15(!) Portuguese 3 Spanish 15 Swedish 1 Welsh 4
and ...
English about 9500
To make matters less impressive they have this rule of ASCII first (not a universal standard) and then no standards at all. For example, the Epicheski pesni (Epical Songs), Slaveikov, Pencho, uses the Cyrillic Windows 1251 character set. Legge's Confucian Analects requires the Big 5 character set. The 1 Greek text (a translation of Sangharakshita, Vision and by Spiros Doikas) doesn't even mention what character encoding it uses!
Have these people heard of unicode?
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2003-07-31 02:26 am (UTC)You know, I hadn't responded to this comment because I agreed with everything it said ;-)
I (temporarily) joined the PG volunteers list to flag this with them. A couple of the volunteers reacted a bit tetchily - you know "we're volunteers, how dare you criticise us!", and Michael Hart himself made a couple of comments - mainly along the lines of "we don't have any standards anymore because I don't like to force people to do anything".
Whilst I agree with him on an individual perspective, PG is an organization. And for the sake of efficiency and effectiveness, organizations can set standards.
never ascribe to malice what can be adequately explained by ignorance.
I do this as often as possible. But there are those who simply choose to remain ignorant and therefore malicious...