[pydotorg-www] Resource book lists are mostly one publishing house

[Steve Holden]

Escalate this to Board? There are clearly sponsorship issues to be
considered, and I know Packt generates a portion of revenues to the
Foundation so this needs to be considered where all the information is
available. Copying PSF staffers in.

As a member of the sponsorship committee I believe it's time for the
Foundation to plant a clear stake in the ground, delete many or even all of
the references to Packt publications and publish a blog post stating why
the action was taken.

I believe Packt have taken advantage of a liberal regime, but I think
rather than being punitive we should simply "reset" them: our fault for not
being clearer about the rules, now EVERYBODY knows what they are let's
start again. Or maybe we just need wiki editors to start giving their
publications some honest reviews. I withdrew as an editorial consultant
from one proposed work that still went ahead despite
serious quality issues, and I have heard enough similar stories from other
authors/reviewers that I believe Packt's actions may be against the
membership's interests in promoting works of dubious value. The ultimate
decision, however, is well above my now happily lowly pay grade.

Given that I start my Christmas vacation tomorrow evening, let me take this
opportunity to wish all readers the very best of everything over their
festive season, and a prosperous new year.

Kind regards,
Steve Holden


On Mon, Dec 16, 2019 at 8:58 AM M.-A. Lemburg <mal at python.org> wrote:

> Agreed. We had this discussion before, but no action was taken AFAIK.
>
> On 15.12.2019 13:48, Steve Holden wrote:
> > They've already been warned once.
> >
> > Personal opinion: they should be stopped from spamming our Wiki, in
> > which they currently have undue prominence.
> >
> > Kind regards,
> > Steve Holden
> >
> >
> > On Sun, Dec 15, 2019 at 5:20 AM Mats Wichmann <mats at wichmann.us
> > <mailto:mats at wichmann.us>> wrote:
> >
> >     On 12/14/19 9:55 PM, Frances Hocutt wrote:
> >     > Hello all,
> >     >
> >     > While going through the wiki working on Python 3 updates, I noticed
> >     > that these two pages now stretch to hundreds of books from a single
> >     > publisher:
> >     >
> >     >   https://wiki.python.org/moin/IntroductoryBooks
> >     >   https://wiki.python.org/moin/AdvancedBooks
> >     >
> >     > This seems like it runs into spamming/broad self-promotion more
> than a
> >     > usefully curated list of resources, but I'm not familiar with how
> this
> >     > wiki usually handles that kind of thing. Could someone more
> familiar
> >     > with this wiki take a look?
> >
> >     We do have one publisher - Packt - that keeps updating all the time.
> >     They produce books at an astounding rate.  I've looked at a fair
> number
> >     and they're not useless, although they're of fairly low quality in my
> >     personal opinion - it's a kind of "book mill".
> >
> >     I haven't a clue what we think we should do about them.  I think we
> >     warned them a few times about changing the sorting to put their
> >     books at
> >     the top, and believe they stopped that and kept to the "alphabetical
> >     order" we suggest. Beyond that... don't think we can say they're
> doing
> >     something wrong. Without someone curating the list for quality,
> >     which we
> >     don't have, it's not clear there's any actual complaint we can make.
> >
> >     Thanks for asking - it's a good question.
> >
> >     Anybody else?
> >
> >
> >
> >
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> >     https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/pydotorg-www
> >
> >
> >
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>
> --
> Marc-Andre Lemburg
> Python Software Foundation
> http://www.python.org/psf/
> http://www.malemburg.com/
>
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