I am looking through the Sefaria Exports and finding it is extremely messy, non-uniform, and full of modern "Latin script" symbols, see this literature question for a small amount of context.
Meanwhile, when you go into an Orthodox or other synagogue, you find really nice hardcover books written in the original Hebrew/Aramaic/etc. language.
Several of the Sefaria texts come from Wikipedia like WikiSource, which are probably not as diligently transcribed as the hardcover editions of the texts, and so are probably full of errors, small and large.
My question is 3 parts.
- Status of online texts in Judaism? What is the status of Sefaria (or other online Hebrew/Aramaic "original" texts online) in the Jewish community? Where does it stand? How is it perceived?
- Status of Synagogue Hardcover texts in Judaism? What is the status of "original Hebrew/Aramaic" texts in general? How do they compare to the original original texts (manuscripts)? I.e., are even the hardcover editions found in synagogues "full of errors"? If not full, aren't there pretty much guaranteed to be mistakes in transcriptions along the way? If so, how are these "mistakes" conceptualized of in Judaism? If the texts are known to have transcription mistakes/inconsistencies, wouldn't that mean that the Word is evolving or not quite the original Word? How is that conceptualized / rationalized or otherwise handled in Judaism?
- How do you arrive at a "canonical" text in Judaism? Given that there are many versions of texts, such as found in this list on GitHub or in the Sefaria exports like this
Seder Kodashim - Bekhorot
which has 2 versions, but some books have 3 or 4+ versions.
The reason I ask is, it seems that the Sefaria collection of texts, beyond being extremely messy, is guaranteed to be full of errors in one way or another. Either because it uses non-original syntax like periods and commas and parentheses, or because it has mixed in HTML markup which doesn't quite retain its original meaning/intent, or because things aren't labelled properly or according to tradition, or maybe because it was typed in incorrectly here or there. I would like to obtain a high quality Unicode (i.e. standard digital text-based) copy of all the books in Sefaria, but they don't look to have a high quality bar (yet?), so I'm not sure how they are perceived in the Jewish community in general. Though I can see them being useful as a "rough draft / introduction" to the texts for free, I don't know if they would live up to the standard of quality which I imagine is required in Judaism in some way or another. Then if I go and try and "clean up" the Sefaria texts (as per that literature question), I am modifying them further, so wondering what the end result would be.
Basically, wondering how to obtain high quality digital text-based (i.e. non-image, non-PDF) versions of all the Hebrew texts.