Talk:Error

A note

kioujio

I removed most of this entry. It was largely a combination of a less than fruitful attempt at a general-purpose definition of "error" and random trivia from a number of disciplines. Some particular comments:

An industry, insurance, has grown up to protect both victims and perpetrators from the baleful effects of error.

Removed this silly claim. Many kinds of insurance are designed not to protect you from error, but from "acts of God", such as fires and floods. Unless you mean to call God and/or "the Universe" a source of "error". Insurance protects you from many things that are not error, including chance and intentional malice.

Errors occur naturally, for example, an error in the replication of genetic material will result in a mutation, probably an unfavorable one.

Removed. Not NPOV. Whether errors occur "naturally" is entirely a matter of philosophical perspective. There is certainly a perspective from which anything natural is, by definition, free of error. In the case of genetics, you can only regard mutation as an "error" if you take as given that nature "wants" its replication processes to be exact replication processes.

Irrespectively of their inevitability, at law the fiction is maintained that an error is a wrong, negligence, a tort, for which anyone who suffers damage as the result thereof must be compensated by the perpetrator.

That's nice. Why can't this be in an article about law?

--Ryguasu 09:16 Nov 12, 2002 (UTC)

How about a section for Human Error? I would base it on the book of the same name written by James Reason. I may try it soon, but I don't currently have a copy of the book (an article on the book and its author would also be nice), but if anyone else wants to take a crack, give it a go. Spalding 16:01, Oct 10, 2004 (UTC)

Accidents

Accidents are often caused when a chain of errors occur that bypass safety countermeasures.

This applies most particularly in the fieds of transportation.

Syd1435 06:04, 2004 Nov 11 (UTC)

Software Engineering

I've never edited the wikipedia before and so don't know the protocols ... so when in doubt communicate (and be gentle with me if I have done wrong :-) The prior discussion described the term "fault" to be a bug. This is (a) wrong and (b) and ignores the critical distinction (widely recognized in availability engineering) between design elements that predispose a system to error (defects) and the conditions or events that exercise the defects (faults). The distinction is important, not merely for precision of communication, but has very practical value in that some things (that are technically referred to as defects) are nearly impossible to eliminate, and it is more practical to deal with the risk of failure by preventing the faults (which while less robust can be equally effective). For example, it is (in reliability parlance) a "defect" that human beings are so easily killed by bullets, so we attempt to reduce the likelihood of error (people being damaged by bullets) and failure (death or disability) by reducing the likelihood of fault-events (regulating fire-arms and wearing body armor).

There is another discussion that I only started ... but chose not to take deeper for fear of doing more harm than good. In hierarchical systems, we often use the term "error" to describe behavior that is entirely within specifications. When a degraded signal makes it impossible to recover data from a disk, the software in the controller detects this failure (through error detecting data encoding) and includes, in the request completion information, a description of the data read error. The disk controller is functioning exactly as specified ... which means that this does not (technically) qualify as an error. I mentioned that in hierarchical systems an error or failure at level N can turn into a fault at the next level up. I did not (for fear of muddying the waters) say that such faults are also usually referred to as errors.

MarkKampe 17:50, 5 November 2006 (UTC)

Headings should not be links

Don't all these headings violate this guideline? Shouldn't we move the links into the sections? Spalding 03:28, 24 February 2006 (UTC)

gaffe

I suggest merging gaffe into this article. --Dangherous 09:16, 14 April 2006 (UTC)

• Whoever put the picture of the train wreck, I think that is a great illustration! Oops!
  • I nearly soiled myself! Dorfl 17:55, 20 October 2006 (UTC)

I hate to bring up things not related to improving articles...

but the first impression when this article loads, with that picture of the train wreck at Montparnasse is priceless. —Dylan Lake (t·c·ε) 00:55, 16 November 2006 (UTC)

Agreed. Nothing quite says "Gosh, it appears we have an error here!" like that picture :) —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 199.43.48.129 (talk) 02:51, 9 January 2007 (UTC).

Oluwasegunjeg 18:03, 7 February 2007 (UTC)segun

@Dylan Lake what are you talking about? UnsungHistory (Questions?) (Did I mess up?) 20:35, 19 November 2024 (UTC)

That picture

I just had to laugh when I saw that train picture at the top of the page! It was funny, and it also made me think of Uncyclopedia. Good job, whoever did that! (But in all seriousness, it clearly tells the reader what and error is.) - dogman15 01:57, 14 February 2007 (UTC)

I loved the picture but it led to the neglect of error in the sense "the error of your ways", human moral error or departure from social norms. The article had stated that error was predominantly about a gap between intended and actual result. That didn't even fit statistical and experimental error or some of the other technical, scientific, and engineering uses, e.g., in control theory. DCDuring 17:57, 12 September 2007 (UTC)

Pronunciation

The pronunciation "'erə" was cited for the word. A pronunciation guide for such a basic word doesn't really need to be there at all, and it is only one of a couple of very common pronunciations of the word. The one given is also one pronunciation of "era" and is used by r-droppers.--Jeffro77 22:30, 29 April 2007 (UTC)

Other Senses of Error

Error does not just derive from a gap between intended and actual consequence. (experimental error and gaffe didn't fit.) It can also be a gap between actual behavior and the norm or expectation for that behavior. Expectation needed for something like experimental error; norm needed for social gaffes. Also, I don't want to make this article into a discussion of moral error, but there was a problem IMHO because we had excluded a class of errors in human behavior. (Not just human, in principle: It could be any morally responsible entity, but I can't think of others outside of fiction.) Departures from socially given or religious norms are errors, too. I don't see how we can sensible have gaffes included and "moral" error excluded. I would want to continue the practice of referring to other articles for fuller explanations. I'm not sure that I would know how to get citations if parts of this article were challenged. Is this article even encyclopedic? DCDuring 18:10, 12 September 2007 (UTC)

Cardinal Error

not jet described ? --213.23.168.170 (talk) 12:55, 7 February 2008 (UTC)

I believe it to be a mistake to label this page as the error page, as I believe the word mistake to be a better choice; however, it is no mistake to think differently about this. Wise Raven) 3:43 31 August 2013 —Preceding undated comment added 02:43, 1 September 2013 (UTC)

Error in the article (?)

The article first describes "error" as being opposed to mistakes (disambig link BTW), and then start to speak of gaffes as mistakes. I'm not actually sure that mistakes aren't errors (more citations needed), so the article confuses (is a confusion an error, or is it a concept that causes errors?) errors and mistakes by providing two taxonomies, first by explicit definition:

• something:
  • error,
  • mistake,

and then by implication the incompatible:

• error:
  • mistake
    • gaffe

... More sources needed! Said: Rursus ☻ 10:03, 6 May 2008 (UTC)

I think the problem could be solved thus: since error per psychology might reside in a different position in a different taxotree in f.ex. psychology, in comparison to in f.ex. linguistics, in logics and philosophy, it might be possible to find what X-ology uses it how. Said: Rursus ☻ 10:18, 6 May 2008 (UTC)

Here's what the first paragraph now says:

An error is any difference between actual behavior or measurement and the norms or expectations for the behavior or measurement. The concrete meaning of the Latin word error means "ramble" or "misconception", although the metaphorical meaning "mistake, misapprehension" is more common.

I think this is nonsense. That may be the meaning of the word "error" in some fairly specific contexts, but it is wrong to say that all other senses or the word or instances of errors are merely metaphorically errors. Michael Hardy (talk) 23:28, 25 July 2008 (UTC)

I thought of replacing the current nonsensical first paragraph with the latest older version that was different. That's from all the way back last October, and it's so completely philosophically one-sided POV bullshit that that would be unconscionable. Michael Hardy (talk) 20:00, 26 July 2008 (UTC)

File:Calendar error.jpg Nominated for speedy Deletion

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Error & Failure Wikipedia articles

Anyone notice these two articles have the same image in the same place?--78.156.109.166 (talk) 20:11, 26 January 2014 (UTC)

Is that related to improving the article? UnsungHistory (Questions?) (Did I mess up?) 22:16, 19 November 2024 (UTC)

Move discussion in progress

There is a move discussion in progress on Talk:Error (disambiguation) which affects this page. Please participate on that page and not in this talk page section. Thank you. —RMCD bot 20:16, 19 May 2018 (UTC)

sign error

It seems that nowhere in WP is sign-error. Maybe it could be a section here, and not need a page of its own. I wanted to link to it, but there is nothing to link to! Gah4 (talk) 21:09, 13 July 2021 (UTC)

@Gah4, Can you be more specific? UnsungHistory (Questions?) (Did I mess up?) 20:32, 19 November 2024 (UTC)

There was a specific need three years ago, but it is well indicated by this cartoon. Often in physics and engineering, one gets the sign wrong, plus or minus when it should be minus or plus. When I was in high school, there was the story that our district had bought a series of physics movies, though we didn't get to watch them. It seems that in one, they get to the end of the story, with equations on the blackboard, and the answer comes out wrong. But they made the movie anyway, and sold it to all the schools that would buy it. Three years ago, I needed a link for "sign error", but couldn't find where to link it. Gah4 (talk) 22:11, 19 November 2024 (UTC)

@Gah4, I still don't get how this is related to the article though....can you clarify on that? UnsungHistory (Questions?) (Did I mess up?) 22:15, 19 November 2024 (UTC)

OK, it seems that this is the edit that I was doing at the time. Maybe sign error should have its own page, but it might be that it could be a section here. It is common enough to need a place to explain it. Gah4 (talk) 22:20, 19 November 2024 (UTC)