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.

I assumed the piracy sub would be a safe space for this sort of thing

Lose*

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.

...... 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.

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.)

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.

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?

You'd be a great employee of the Ministry of Truth