I am proposing that we establish a menu on Viper, where we report errors that we found in inorganic texts, so that others do not have to go through the same waste of time as we did when we were trying to understand something that eventually turned out to be incorrect.

I have just found one error recently, which took me a while to finally recognize it as an error, and then I thought about this proposal.

What do others think?

My example is from the second edition of Organometallic Chemistry by Spesssard and Miessler, where there is a product structure on page 470 (11.12), which was supposedly prepared from the reactant shown next to it, by Pi bond metahesis of two double bonds using Schrock catalyst (structure 17 on same page). The error is easily visible when one counts the number of atoms between two oxygen atoms in both compounds. There are two in the reactant, but three in the product, while no bond was broken between these two O atoms during the reaction.

To confirm 100% that the structure was indeed incorrect, I checked the original paper, when that structure was first reported by Schrock, and indeed there were two atoms in both R and P.

Well, what do you think?

Wouldn't it be useful to know of these errors before you encounter them?

P.S. It is posible that the error was corrected in the third edition. Could someone who has it, check?