Back when Mark Pilgrim’s Winer Watch was up and running, Dave Winer posted in several places that most of the edits he makes are relatively minor. That may be true, but Pilgrim provides a good example of how drastically things can change at Winer’s sites in the course of just a few hours.
Here’s what Winer’s site says at the moment about Pilgrim complaining about a bug in Radio Userland’s implementation of Trackback,
Mark Pilgrim’s bug report. Just a bug, not a conspiracy.
Here’s what it apparently said earlier today (emphasis added),
Mark Pilgrim’s bug report has all the grace of a Rush Limbaugh rant. Shoot first and ask questions later. Someone should kick his ass, hard.
One of the things that Dave is really setting himself up for is for someone to simply making something up and start claiming that Winer actually said it but then deleted it.
Suppose, for example, I decided to make up a particuarly over-the-top statement and falsely attribute it to Winer. So I post it to my weblog and say that Winer posted this earlier and then almost a quickly deleted it.
How’s Dave going to convince people that he didn’t? He’s not going to be able to say he wouldn’t make that kind of inflammatory statement, because we have plenty of evidence that he does. He also can’t credibly claim that he wouldn’t post and then delete an inflammatory statement because there’s plenty of evidence he does it regularly.
Dave himself pointed out the problems attendant with having a reputation for that sort of thing when he linked to an Andrew Orloski story but noted that given Orloski’s track record the story only had about a 10 percent chance of being true. But Winer himself has a long-standing reputation, and his habit of constantly modifying what he writes is really setting himself up for the above scenario.
Which is a very good reason not to make the sort of wholesale changes Winer makes to his weblog posts. If you make a mistake or post something extremely inflammatory, it’s much better to simply leave it there and append it somehow (possibly with strikethrough text) rather than completely erase it. At least that way, visitors know they can rely on you standing by the things you write. Once you start editing to the point that you are regularly changing the entire context of weblog entries you open up a whole can of worms that gradually degrades the trust readers have in your weblog.