I mentioned Rich’s Rule of Content today on IRC, in the context of a patch that I’d applied to the Apache httpd documentation.

Rich’s Rule of Content is something that I started jokingly referring to back in the DataBeam days. It goes something like this:

Make up any old thing. If it’s wrong, someone will be quick to point it out.

The serious side of this is that people are much quicker to correct errors than they are to provide the content in the first place. So if you make your best effort at writing a document about something, someone will quickly step up to point out the errors that you have made. Sometimes they’ll be rude about it. Most of the time (at least in the httpd project) they will be gentle and polite.

And, as a result, the docs are better than they were yesterday. Thanks, Jeff and Daniel.