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

[Mats Wichmann]

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?