Apparently the lore for the Burning Crusade WoW expansion ran into a little bit of internal consistency problems with the lore established in the Warcraft III manual.  Here's the WoW forum link where the main lore writer for the Warcraft universe provides a mea culpa for the problem.

I find that response interesting for a bunch of reasons.  First, it has a very humanizing and casual tone.  Personally I like this but when coupled with an "I screwed up" message I wonder whether it is putting too personal and fallible face on what should be a completely behind the scenes process.  Second, the fact that they are admitting a problem at all as opposed to ignoring it, handwaving past it, or introducing some additional fiction to explain the discrepancy (the latter option is how Marvel and DC solve this sort of problem all the time).  Third, I'm surprised that there was no safety net or separate continuity editor involved in the process before.  With such any huge and complex backstory the opportunity for an error of this sort is huge -- the fact that it was all just in one guy's head before seems like an awfully precarious position for Blizzard to be in.

I'm in general all for more open communication between developers and players, especially in regards to online persistent games like World of Warcraft.  But I kind of wonder in this case whether revealing the human fallibility so directly isn't a bit disconcerting and undermines some of the conceptual infallibility that a faceless process has.  That is, this error shines light on the fact that ultimately the World of Warcraft "universe" is just a story in somebody's head.  This fact is obvious on the face of it, but the day-to-day presentation of the game is all about building up the world as something that has a kind of life of it's own.  The fourth wall is broken.

I'm not bugged when authors talk to their fans about their characters and worlds, or the process behind the writing, so why does it bug me when the "author" of the WoW fiction does the same?  Nor am I bothered by the game designers discussing mechanics or class balance.  I'm not entirely sure why I have this reaction.  Perhaps it has to do with the fact that so much of what goes into a game is this illusion of a fully realized world.  Game mechanics are already outside the world, but the story in many ways is the defining essence of what makes the game a world rather than just an arena.