If I controlled a paper, I’d force a git control system with publicly viewable edits made after publication.
Imagine the goodwill and trust that would instill in the public toward your paper.
Edit: I’ve thought the same thing about proposed legislation for a long time.
I think many have also been wondering about version control of legislation/law documents for some time as well. But I never understand why it’s not realized yet.
Because the people who would implement that system would be the same people it would hold to account.
Probably because companies don't want to be held accountable.
Le-git-slation for the win!
I'm genuinely impressed by this being upvoted here. Big tech and powerful corporate/government interests are destroying our societies. This information needs to be checked and tracked.
I assumed the piracy sub would be a safe space for this sort of thing
Piracy is data preservation after all. How many books, series, TV shows, and video games would be inaccessible if not for pirated copies?
Definitely can't rely on companies to archive their own stuff effectively.
Well how do you do fellow Jacob Geller fan.
Maybe it is out there, but the Internet Archive should be wildly redundant on the internet, it's just too valuable to lose.
Lose*
Thank you.
This article sent my down a Brewster Kahle rabbit hole, so...
Who remembers when Alexa was simply a web traffic rating site? I forgot that Amazon named it's assistant after that property.
holy shit
How have I never connected those dots?
Do you support war, state propaganda and policing of speech or do you support things like freedom of information, speech and the internet archive? You can't do both, fake progressives.
When I tried to open this article about the importance of allowing bots to archive content, I got this "Robot Challenge Screen":
I'm all for taking molotovs and whatever else we can manage to scrounge up to bring the heat to any company who opposes the Internet Archive. I'm willing to perform terroristic acts to show these people that we care about our digital freedom.
Maybe a little soon bro.
This is useful for pointing out if a news site is manipulating a narrative, but for other things, I think news site should get the privacy they need to make stealth edits.
Like:
More recently, the Times stealth-edited an article that originally listed “death” as one of six ways “you can still cancel your federal student loan debt.” Following the edit, the “death” section title was changed to a more opaque heading of “debt won’t carry on.”
This was just poor wording. No reason sites shouldn't have the peace of mind to change poor wording without being called out.
...... What? No, if you need to edit poor wording you add a note establishing that the editor missed a section of poor wording, and that section has been revised.
You want to do stealth edits? We call those first drafts, and they arent published. Want to hide your edit history? Edit before you post.
People can make mistakes and miss things you know.
And there is nothing wrong with that, nor is there anything wrong in admitting your mistakes
Its the New York Times not someones personal blog. If they are publishing sloppy work that is their fault.
And if you do, you make the edit and add your edit note.
You should ad an edit to this comment:
Like this:
Edit:
~~People can make mistakes and miss things you know.~~
This is an example where I am objectively wrong and I apologize.
They wouldn't be called out if they had left editorial notes, that is what the article is about.
Horseshit. If your editor doesn't catch the article that says "have the peasants considered suicide as a way out of debt bondage?" then you as a news outlet should absolutely have to live with what you published.
But how do you determine what's just 'fixing poor wording' and what's actively hiding major bias or retcons of history?
Radio NZ got caught a year or so ago with a staffer who was editing articles syndicated from Reuters to be more pro-Russian. Should they be able to sweep that under the rug and claim it was only ever the one article they got caught on?
Likewise, bin Laden was originally hailed as an anti-Soviet freedom fighter. The articles relating to that are part of the historical record and kinda important.
Allowing the historical record to be retconned with impunity was probably the defining trait of 1984. It's really not a path you want to go down.
While I agree in theory, it's hard practically to give the ability to make private wording and typo edits without giving the ability to make more insidious changes - like pushing a certain narrative and then quietly changing words here and there to erase evidence of that after most people have read it, etc.
If news websites kept their own visible audit trail, much like Wikipedia, I could see the argument that Internet Archive doesn't need to capture these articles immediately, maybe it should be time bound to a year after publication or somesuch, and therefore recent news could retain its paywall by the NYT without being sidestepped by Internet Archive. (While it's annoying that articles are paywalled, news sites do need to make money and pay for actual news reporters.)
When a news provider publishes something they should be able to be held to what they’ve said. That’s the nature of both publication and the responsibility that the press should be held to
Editing news should require by law an editors note at the bottom what was changed to what like a github commit.
If you cite that shit literally somewhere you could get in trouble for citing wrongly.
At the top.
A note at the top, that there were changes made and an auto scroll link to the foot note of changes.
This is actually a perfect example of why we need to archive these things. Don't let corporations try to rewrite history wtf
I don't care how many times you edit your comment, but I also don't trust you at all. Now, I don't have to trust you because clearly I am not going to learn anything of value from you.
If you don't care whether I trust you or not, this shouldn't bother you.
Most Newspapers trade on their credibility. They should want to be trusted that they aren't making material changes to their articles. Are you suggesting we leave it to them to decide for themselves what constitutes a material change?
this article is 7 years old lol
It came out yesterday. You are probably looking at the date on the screenshot of an article that it starts with rather than the date of this article at the top.
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