careless geeks
Apr. 28th, 2007 02:14 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
xelaO tempora! O mores!
Didn't geeks used to be precise and careful? Like, by definition?
The second sentence in the first Google hit on postgresql openldap is a run-on sentence it took me three tries to parse; this does not incline me to want to read further*. The second hit starts off with two php errors, leaving me no more confident in its author. The third hit? A page entitled "OpenLDAP / POSTGRESQL is working know".
This is hardly the first time I've run into this kind of thing recently. It seems to me that people are increasingly willing to publish material with little or no care about quality — and, as these pages Google rankings show, other people are willing to treat such careless work as authoritative. I swear, "which sloppy documentation am I going to rely on" isn't a question I used to have to ask. And not just because back in the day the question was too often "what documentation?"
* Yes, I noticed that the author of that page is (probably) French. The page is also over four years old; I find it hard to imagine nobody before me has pointed out the run-on sentence to him.
