Off Topic: Eliding Raganwald

My editing “policy”:

(Please imagine me making those oh-so-last-century quote marks with my fingers as I say the word policy.)

I deliberately post as soon as I think an idea is finished enough to communicate the gist. Then, as time and inclination allow, I polish my posts. Sometimes readers provide some excellent feedback, and that gets worked in as well. To me, this reworking is a benefit of the medium. If you read and re-read my posts, especially in the first seventy-two hours, you’ll see the changes.

So far, this is probably not contentious. However, there is a prevailing style amongst bloggers to mark their edits, perhaps by striking out words they have elided.

update: Or by noting that new words are, well, new.

There are good reasons for that style. The primary place where people insist on it is when there’s some emotionally charged conversation, and someone retracts something they’ve said. The idea seems to be that if you just delete wrong words, you’re pretending you never said them, which is somehow hypocritical and reprehensible.

I do not subscribe to this view, and I do not hold others to it. My intent with my writing is to present as coherent a view as possible. Vast tracts of strikeout and insertions can degrade a post.

That being said, you will find stricken words and updates scattered throughout the site. I use this style when I am trying to portray a thought process. For example, I recently described an unexpected behaviour and admitted I didn’t know what was going on, although I speculated as to what might be causing the behaviour. A reader managed to explain the behaviour in a comment. I struck out my original words and added an explanation. That particular post was about unexpected behaviours, so showing the process of going from not knowing what was going on to having someone else explain it added value to the post.

Nevertheless, there is no overarching consistent policy around edits. If recording my words exactly as I originally said them is important, someone ought to donate more funding to the wayback machine so that it can achieve a finer granularity of archiving.

Is this a disclaimer?

Of a sorts. I fully expect that sooner or later someone is going to write an angry comment saying that I changed my words and didn’t keep the originals around as a scarlet letter of shame. Knowing my (bad) habit of writing emotional posts before I’ve had my third coffee, it’s inevitable that I’ll write something I’ll regret enough to retract.

I don’t expect that writing this will get me off the hook when that happens. I’m not saying to you, “no fair criticizing me for doing this, it’s in the fine print.” I’m writing this to explain, not to mitigate.

Ok, thanks for your patience with this wildly off-topic post. Time for my second coffee and to return to working with a team of programmers a cut above JavaSchools idiots mediocrity certification-happy and buzzword-driven programmers the rest.

;-)  ¶ 9:51 AM