I was talking to a friend at dinner last night and he asked me what the Reign of Terror was that I referred to in one of my other posts. I explained it and realized it was possible that not everybody is as familiar with the French Revolution as I am. So I decided to put a link to the wikipedia article that explains it [NB: This is something I'm constantly missing when I post & I'm hoping to get better at]. Which made me wonder if I should write a post saying that I had edited the previous post. Which led me to wonder about corrections on blogs in general & how to best handle them.

I like to think I’m pretty good at searching the web so imagine my surprise when I could find no web pages that talk about the accepted way to correct an earlier statement or error in a post. It occurs to me that if there isn’t any discussion of how to do that correctly there’s a pretty good chance that people are just editing in place and not mentioning it at all. I know newspaper sites do this because I’ve seen them edit out of existence some factual error on a breaking story with no mention that it was going on.

You may have noticed that I tend to prefer technology to old school and regard people who get their news off dead trees as little better than Amish but it seems to me that having things magically correct themselves without explanation is a little dishonest.

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