They are the unsung heroes of cyberspace; an army of Australian fighters against mistakes.
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Every day, a battalion of sticklers for accuracy go online and correct the newspaper and documents archive of the National Library in Canberra known as Trove.
Trove is an immense and amazing Australian achievement, recognized worldwide as the online archive to match. In it are (at the latest count) 221,070,605 newspaper articles from 22 million newspaper pages going back to the Sydney Gazette of 1803.
They are nearly all Australian papers with a handful from neighbouring countries and the National Library gathers them in collaboration with other libraries in Australia.
The original papers have been scanned and put through a computer programme so the pictures of the pages get turned into words which can be searched - pictures of newspaper pages can't be.
But the programme gets it wrong sometimes. It makes mistakes with words.
And that's where the army of 53,462 (at the last count) checkers comes in.
They pore over copies of old editions to see if the online transcript is accurate.
They do it unpaid as a public service and out of sheer curiosity.
John Warren, for example, was intrigued about the murder of his great-grandfather, one Ernest Henry Martyr, in western Queensland in 1895. Martyr was killed by a striking shearer who feared being dobbed in for setting a shearing shed ablaze in the industrial dispute.
All of this intrigued the great-grandson who found himself drawn into the detail and then correcting mistakes in the transcription of the original in the National Library archive.
He hasn't stopped since. He now spends a full day from as early as five in the morning going over the old newspapers to correct them. It is an obsessive and useful routine, over a full (unpaid) working week.
John Warren, by the way, learned that his great-grandfather wasn't just murdered but was chopped up with a tomahawk. It's the kind of thing you learn when you spend all day reading old newspapers.
Another Trove text corrector, Neil Hamilton, was drawn into the endless task when he moved to Canberra.
A curious man, he wanted to find out about the history of his new home city so he started reading back copies of The Canberra Times and found that one article led to another. Each answer raised a new question.
Trove's online site for newspapers also contains pictures and documents and is continually expanding. It makes items from the National Library and the state libraries available online for free to users everywhere.
There's a monitor screen in its administration offices on an upper floor of the library which shows where people are using it around the world; a dot in Iceland, for example, a cluster in the United States, a big crowd in different parts of Australia, particularly the cities of the east.
But the organisers feel it needs a higher profile and easier access. They want to broaden the range of users so, for example, school children go to it easily and naturally. Wikipedia is prominent but Trove is not. The organisers feel the profile of the Australian archive should be higher.
Two years ago, the National Library was given $16 million to upgrade Trove and that work is now underway. Dr Hilary Berthon, the library's assistant director, said the aim was to make it much more accessible, making searching easier, for example. The documents available - maps, pictures, newspapers - were expanding all the time and the aim was to update and improve.
She's very proud of it. "It's a great collaboration", she said.
She hopes more people will realise just what an amazing resource it is just the click of a mouse away.
