A Past With No Changelog

WHO'S HOLDING THE PEN — Part 4 of 7. From the desk of Kiler Davenport.

 Ever go back to an article you read last week and feel like it said something different?

Sometimes you were right.

News stories get revised after publication, and many are updated with no note about what changed. E-books can be updated without telling the people who bought them. Search results reorder themselves daily. And Wikipedia, the closest thing we have to a shared memory palace, can be edited by almost anyone. Documented cases over the years have shown organized editing from corporations, political operatives, and government-linked accounts.

You're not imagining that the ground moves. It does. Most of it is harmless: typo fixes, corrections, updates. Honest edits are part of honest publishing.

Here's the hard truth, though. The system can't tell you which edits were honest, because for a lot of it there is no changelog. Each change is small. Each is defensible. And the record is the sum of all of them, with no one required to show you the before.

A printed page is a witness that can't be revised. A digital page is a witness that can be replaced.

 If you can't see the before, how do you know there was a before? Part 5 next.

 #Wikipedia #MediaLiteracy #DigitalRecords #InformationIntegrity #Journalism #WhosHoldingThePen #LoneWolf