Dear Krishnaprasad,

You raise an important methodological point about accuracy.  In the pre-digital age, scholars worked hard to make their published books as accurate as possible.  Sometimes a book would contain a list of errata, or a second edition would fix some of the flaws of a first edition.  A harsh book review was a terrible thing to receive, especially if justified.  Occasionally, people lost their jobs because of such bad reviews from colleagues.  It could be serious and the stakes were high.  Not to mention, of course, the core importance of having accurate information on which to base further scholarship.

But things are different today.  In the last few decades there has been an explosion of digital texts available online.  In many cases, scholars prepare these e-texts for their private use and then release them publicly as a gesture of generosity to colleagues.  All of us who do this feel that we could perhaps have done more to make the texts more accurate, and we fear public criticism.

I think that we should think differently about open-sourced digital texts.  Of course, nobody likes to be responsible for errors.  But structurally, the situation is very different  from the old model of physical publishing.  An open-sourced e-text can easily be updated or corrected.  All that we need is an appropriate technical infrastructure for retaining bibliographical control over this process, so that all scholars know which version of the e-text they are using and can refer to it unambiguously and share their corrections in a rational manner.

In short, the quality of an open-sourced e-text is a matter of shared responsibility across the whole community of scholars.  If someone makes an e-text freely available to the scholarly community, we should all feel only gratitude for whatever help it gives us.  Beyond that, if we see errors, it is our own communal responsibility to correct them.  By sharing an e-text freely, the responsibility for the correctness of that text is also implicitly shared with every scholar who downloads and uses the text.  In this scheme, I see no place for criticism of the original provider.  That is an obsolete mechanism dating from the days of print publication.

Best,

Dominik