[WikiEN-l] NY Times considers BLP issues

[Stephen Bain]

On 8/26/07, charles.r.matthews at ntlworld.com
<charles.r.matthews at ntlworld.com> wrote:
>
> Yes, very interesting. Journalists are so charming. "We can't change the article because it is part of the historical record." Such confusion. Journalism is only ever 'the first draft of history'.

I disagree with you here. Already published articles are part of the
historical record - they represent what was thought at the time that
they were written.

Of course, it should be much much easier than it is to find
corrections (they should probably just be attached to the original
articles) but originals should not be altered. Keep in mind that we do
the same thing by publishing the current version but retaining all
prior versions of a page. We do better than many newspaper archives by
making the "corrected" version the default display, but we still leave
the originals intact.

-- 
Stephen Bain
stephen.bain at gmail.com