Are Bloggers Forced To Revise History?

There’s a school of thought in the blogosphere that suggests once a Weblog article is written and published for the world to see, it’s done, cast in stone, and never to be touched or modified again. You can produce more recent updates or corrections, but there’s a sense that the “historical archive” is more important than being accurate or correct or contemporary.

Sometimes that just doesn’t work, though, and I experienced just this situation with a recent article I wrote on my Weblog about the JonBenet Ramsey murder, an article that was reprinted in the local newspaper this morning, just hours before new revelations in the case were unveiled that made the entire article irrelevant and wrong.

What to do? Indeed, what should bloggers do when their material later becomes incorrect? Do you post a newer article that links back and explains how it’s wrong, even though you know that people who use a search engine are more likely to find the old article than the new? Or do you surreptitiously edit the old article to make it accurate? Or do you just ignore it and mark it up to the inevitable result of the march of time?

It’s a complex and interesting question, one I ponder in much greater depth on my own Weblog if you’re interested in the details of this case: Why bloggers must be historical revisionists.

The real question isn’t whether you agree with me, but whether there’s any way out of this Long Tail-inspired dilemma, and if there isn’t, what its implications are for the long-term credibility of online information sources.

[tags]blogging,mainstream media,business blogging,accuracy in media,accuracy in blogging,historical revisionism[/tags]