I decided that I should formally articulate an editing policy for my blog. I wasn't worried about this at the beginning because I wanted to see how things would develop (and I reserve the right to modify and/or abandon any policy set forth today - my blog, my rules!) but since part of the reason I'm blogging is to set a historical record documenting the Great Change (and you know how I feel about documenting...), I don't want to corrupt that record with retroactive modifications.
There are some reasonable exceptions though:
- Typos are always fair game for fixing.
- After making a post, I may come back later to rephrase parts of it. It's important for me to articulate myself clearly, and sometimes I find myself lacking the correct words to do it at the time I post. Sometimes it's only on re-reading posts that I finally find the phrasing I was searching for. Depending on the time that has passed since the original post and the scale of the changes I may leave a notation describing the edits. I won't generally do this if I make changes on the same day, but I will be more likely to do this if it's possible that readers might get confused ("Didn't it say something different the last time I was here???").
- Inline URLs can be adjusted at any point, but I will try to leave an editing notation to indicate if there has been a significant change.
- If I really change my mind on something, I will try to follow the protocol of not mutilating or destroying the original post. Rather, I will follow it up with another subsequent post and/or a comment. An example where I did (something similar to) this was for the June 13 and June 15 posts.
- Comments, part I: I'm really enthused that there's been some interesting discussions in the comments already. I would like to leave the comments section alone and not edit them at all, but I'll have to see how things shape up. I reserve the right to delete comments that I am not comfortable with hosting on my site for any reason, but I would prefer not to interfere. I've been debating the merits of deleting off-topic comments, but the volume on the site isn't such where I think that's necessary at this point.
- Comments, part II: I have on occasion gone back and removed typos from my own posts, but I am looking to resist editing them for content because the other people leaving comments do not have the same ability.