Debate still continues about Mark Pilgrim’s Winer Watch. I don’t mean to be snarky, but I honestly don’t understand this sort of comment posted to Mark’s site by Watts Martin (emphasis added),
The “revision history” concept is worthwhile, but the flap about the “Winer Watcher” wasnÂ’t about the technical merits of revision tracking. Looking at it from the standpoint of enforcing accountability is only one side of the coin; the other side is that it prevents someone who has that accountability forced upon them from ever reconsidering their words. Sometimes an addition isnÂ’t enough: if youÂ’ve posted something in the heat of anger, perhaps, and youÂ’ve said things you regret, you canÂ’t take them down.
If weÂ’re to leave Mark PilgrimÂ’s personality out of this and abstract it, that means we have to leave Dave WinerÂ’s personality out as well–as well as his record in revision without notation. The tool itself and the concept for tracking revisions on weblogs is fine, but the tool doesnÂ’t address the ethical issue of whether one person should track someone elseÂ’s website, without their consent, to highlight all changes made. I donÂ’t recall ever deleting a post on my own weblog nor making any substantive edits, but if I learned someone–particularly someone I might have had public spats with in the recent past–was tracking my words that closely, I would be pretty uncomfortable.
Don’t these people get it? This is the Internet — when you post something online you are potentially broadcasting it to an immense audience.
Suppose I decide to post something insulting on my weblog because I’m angry in the morning but by 9 p.m. I’ve cooled off and I want to take back what I posted in the heat of the moment.
It’s too late. On a typical day, thousands of people have already read my original comment. You can’t take it back — it’s already been published.
You fundamentally cannot take back things on the Internet. It’s already out there. It will show up in an RSS feed or somebody will have quoted it on another blog or somebody’s e-mailed it to their buddy halfway across the world. But for some reason people have a difficult time grasping this.
If you need to remove things in this way, it has to be acknowledged in some way. To have an insult or derogatory paragraph just sit out there for a few hours and then disappear without explanation or acknowledgement repeatedly simply stretches the social boundaries too far (i.e. people are going to get pissed after awhile).