errors in magazines

[Phil Payne]

> Well, at least with the weekly magazine, you can make corrections quickly (i.e., the next
week) versus having it carved in stone for a month.... But I can imagine the difficulties,
just by watching the development of spy shots for the facelifted 2005.5 A4 on AudiWorld......
They seem to change weekly!

A long time ago the UK Audi quattro Owners Club published a newsletter stating the torque on
the harmonic damper bolt should be 132 lb ft.  The real figure is 332 lb ft - and I believe to
this day that we lost at least two engines as a result.

That was - ultimately - the reason I created my web site.
http://www.isham-research.com/quattro/torque.html was really the first page I wanted to get up
there.

The great thing about web sites for this kind of thing is that they represent a centrally
corrected archive - that's if managed properly.  They're NOT good on readability - magazines
are much more portable and have vastly better graphics - but they are good on currency of
information.

I don't think web sites should try to emulate magazines.  My own site is "stripped for
speed" - I'm always mindful of the poor guy using a mobile phone or a 4800 baud dial-up link.
I've gone as far as dropping optional end tags (such as </P> and </TD>) from most pages just
to save those few extra bytes.

Even among the conscientious, updating previous bad information is an issue.  Example - the
microfiche version of the ur-quattro's four-wheel alignment is garbage - there's a horrendous
mistake in it.  Audi published a correction - a "Technisches Merkblatt" - but at least one of
the CDs burnt by the alignment rigs manufacturers contains the old and very wrong information.

-- 
  Phil Payne
  http://www.isham-research.com
  +44 7785 302 803