This week's book giveaway is in the Agile and other Processes forum. We're giving away four copies of The Mikado Method and have Ola Ellnestam and Daniel Brolund on-line! See this thread for details.
Why don't publishers provide a wikipage for erratas of their books ? I'm fed up posting loads of erratas which I'm not sure will ever be added in their list. For some publishers, it even requires submitting the same form for each error. Why isn't there any decent way to keep errata lists up to date ? (yes I'm a bit tired right now )
I've just started doing this for "Jess in Action", and within a week two previously unreported errors were added to the list, which I think is great.
The downside of any Wiki, of course, it that it's not authoritative. Unless there's a sufficiently large community looking at the thing constantly, vandals will ensure that there's at least some crap up there at least half the time (and I'm speaking from experience here.) There is automated wiki spamming as well as old-fashioned trolls, and I've seen plenty of both on my small public Wiki. A static web page doesn't have these problems.
Perhaps there's a workable compromise? Maybe confirmed errata could be on a static portion of the page and unconfirmed errata could be in a wiki - then occasionally some of the stablized wiki entries could be transferred to the static area...
Eliminate fossil fuel subsidies. (If you're not on the edge, you're taking up too much room.)
Yes, as Bert said, the wiki part would be for unconfirmed erratas only. Then the author could pick them up, and update the confirmed errata list.
At some publisher's homepage, there are forums where we can post erratas. I find it very time consuming to go through the whole forum to find out all errors reported by others. Putting them in one wiki would really help.
A page like Ernest's Jess In Action wiki is great
Jeroen T Wenting
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The volume of "errors" which are really caused by the reader's lack of understanding of the topic under discussion might rapidly make such a wiki useless.
And that's if the trolls and spammers don't get a hold of it first (which is one reason I pulled my own little experimental wiki I'd put up as a toy, hosted on a machine that didn't even have a domain name).
I think O'Reilly have a good system, having an automated submission tool which forwards the reports to the book author (and I guess others) for screening before they're put up as either confirmed or unconfirmed in the errata lists.
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Cameron Wallace McKenzie
author and cow tipper
Saloon Keeper
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