"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?

 09:16 Nov 12, 2002 (UTC)"