My understanding is that the 1901 census was transcribed by persons detained at HM's Pleasure being paid £7 ph. As far as I know, this is not an urban myth. For the felon it beats sewing mail sacks. But may also account for the high number of transcription errors in the original release of TNA's 1901 census -- e.g. most heinously the surnames Ditto and Do (an abbreviation of ditto) and the unfortunate confusion of copperplate Fs and Ts, so that Tucker became...
As fas as transcription goes, wherever there is human agency there will be human error. In my own experience, i would say that the 1881 is better than Ancestry's 1871/1891/1901 and that the latter is better than TNA's original 1901 (though many of the errors are being progressively corrected).
