[WikiEN-l] Blog Entries (Bauer fork)

[Gwern Branwen]

On 3/28/07, jayjg <jayjg99 at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 3/28/07, William Pietri <william at scissor.com> wrote:
> > jayjg wrote:
> > >> There are two questions that matter here.
> > >>
> > >> 1) Is Teresa Nielsen Hayden a source worthy of citing in matters
> > >> related to publishing?
> > >> 2) Does Making Light definitely contain material by her?
> > >>
> > >> The answer to both is unquestionably yes. Here endeth the discussion.
> > >>
> > >
> > > Not really. Blogs have no editorial oversight, and their contents are
> > > ephemeral - that is, they can change without notice, leaving evidence
> > > of that change.
> > >
> >
> > What sort of editorial oversight do you believe is in place for an
> > interview in a normal publication?
>
> The fact checker checks that you said it; the editor decides whether
> or not the magazine or newspaper will fact a lawsuit if they print it.
> The latter, in my view, is fairly criticial.
>
> > As to the latter, there's no technical barrier for web publishers of any
> > sort, blogs or magazines. The main protection is convention; in both
> > realms it is customary to note changes on the page, and you risk
> > ridicule if you don't do that. But the original text is not sacrosanct.
>
> It's better than nothing, though.
>
> > To overcome this would it be sufficient in your eyes to cite from the
> > Internet Archive or WebCite?
>
> The odds of either of them actually catching some change on an
> individual blog are very, very low.
>
> Jay.

Why would that be? The Internet Archive might not store all revisions,
but once on their servers, the archived copy doesn't change. WebCite
could store all revisions as it works on-demand - all you would have
to do is request it to archive each version as it changes, and as
before, the copies don't change once archived. That's the entire
point.

--
gwern