Sometimes I wish the whole web was a wiki

Tuesday, November 20, 2007

The first book I've edited was published recently: The PHP Anthology: 101 Essential Tips, Tricks & Hacks 2nd Edition, and It felt like a worthy accomplishment. I'd never have ever thought of becoming an editor but working as a Techical Editor for SitePoint has been very enjoyable so far. As a job it has that perfect mix of being both challenging and satisfying. The aim of technical books is ambitious because unambigous, technically-accurate, educational writing for beginners is very hard!

More recently I've been working on a new SitePoint project: The Ultimate CSS Reference. It's very exciting because, seriously, there's currently nothing like it on the web. It'll be the most complete, up-to-date CSS reference around. I'm talking hard core! As the content rolls in, I get more and more excited. I think it's going to be one of those indspensible companion resources you always keep close at hand.

While working on the reference I've had to do a lot of research on the web, mainly for fact checking and so on. And I noticed that there's a lot of out-dated and misleading stuff on CSS out there. I wrote as much on the SitePoint blog recently in "The Great Specificity Swindle!"

It raises the issue of responsibility. If you make information available on the web how responsible are you for its upkeep?

A lot of tutorials and artices that came up in searches had attached advertising, like Google ads and such. The cynic in me thinks the owners of these pages don't care how accurate the information is, as long as the search engine traffic keeps their ad earnings maintained. One of the commenters on the SitePoint post asked "where's the swindle?" I think the swindle is the fact that someone is making money off hawking tutorials that will do you no good if you choose to believe them.

A less cynical viewpoint might be that a lot of information is wrong now simply because it's out-dated, based on older specifications, or based on an older, mistaken interpretation of the standards. So returning to what I said before about unambiguous writing being hard, one reason why it is hard is you have to be extremely careful with your wording to avoid potential misinterpretation.

Anyway, it's the kind of thing that makes me sometimes wish the whole web was a wiki.

Random outings from a chaotic mind