I wasn’t standing on the edge of my toilet hanging a clock, nor was the porcelain wet, and neither did I slip, but the other day I had the idea of an Error Message Wiki. I think it would be fabulously useful.

Error codes are often cryptic and overloaded, sometimes famous, and frequently bizarre (”000 Error: No Errors Found“). There is much art to giving a good error. If you want to know what an error means, Google will help, but only in the way that Google always helped find info before Wikipedia was around: disjointedly. Wikipedia proved that Google’s mission is not yet accomplished; aggregating knowledge is valuable.

It looks like somebody already had the idea of using a wiki as a knowledge base on error messages, but they seem to have given up before writing a single article. I for one would like a thorough, encyclopedic article on “Connection reset by peer”. Anyone who’s used IRC must be familiar with this phrase, but it foiled me recently in a web context, and when Google’s results when searching for it list this Everything2 article second, it’s not so easy to discover the full meaning of the message. I gather it arises from deep within the bowels of the TCP stack. It would be a moment’s effort to register errorwiki.org, set up MediaWiki, and write a seed article on the aforementioned message, but… it seems I can’t be bothered. And looking at that Wikia stubsite, it seems nobody else can either. Oh well. Let’s monitor the Church of Scientology instead!

Yup, still there!