MISTAKE? WHAT MISTAKE? or THE QUESTION OF AUTHENTICITY ON THE EVER-CHANGING NET
American Journalism Review's Newslink is posting an interesting story (http://ajr.newslink.org/ajrbarbmay01.html) about the ethics of making corrections on our web pages without ever mentioning it. For online journalists, the story goes on, online journalism is "a fluid environment where all work is 'in progress' and initial inaccuracies are overwritten as stories are polished."
In the physical newspaper, errors are there forever, locked in the solidity of print. Writers and publishers can't change them; all they can do is admit error while posting a correction. But online, well, "Why volunteer that you were wrong if maybe no one noticed?"
Now, if you're talking about minor errors like misspellings, that seems harmless enough. Catch it soon enough and it's as if you never made the mistake at all.
The problem is that this places journalism, and all other online publishing, on a continuum that ends in 1984, where history itself is fluid, constantly rewritten to meet the needs of current policy. In 1984, of course, the fact of unyielding print made it difficult to rewrite history; the government had to recall the textbooks and rewrite them. Given the net, though, how easy it would be for government, with the click of a mouse, to transform a former ally, into a historic enemy.
Even more problematical, if an error remains online long enough, it takes on a life of its own as it is read, believed, printed out, and used by other reporters in their own stories, as was demonstrated with a number of the more salacious but unverified news items about Clinton and Monica Lewinsky. Wiping those stories from your archive does not relieve you of responsibility for publishing them in the first place. To be accountable, the publisher has to make the correction publicly, with a statement of the truth and an apology -- "we regret the error" or "we have since learned..." Since even a published correction doesn't always catch up with the original story, a conscientious web publisher should attach the correction statement to that original story.
It's also true that error itself is a key part of the historical record -- you can read the history of science itself by observing the changes in science textbooks over the past 100 years. People act as they do because they have been told certain things are true. To wipe out the record of what they have been told is to leave people's actions and beliefs inexplicable.
For the web publisher, this means there is an obligation to make a public admission of corrections, and to link these in every related story in our archives. Even if all we are doing is deleting content from an archived issue, we should state for the record that it has been removed. (For this reason, I am informing you of something I have removed from my own ExLibris archive, the review I wrote of The Internet Blue Pages in a previous issue of this magazine. I was under the impression that the editor of ALA TechSource had rejected that review, so I published it myself, and was startled to find it being used by ALA after all (https://www.techsource.ala.org/). Since my contract calls for them to have exclusive rights to what I wrote for them, I had to remove the review from my own site.)
For the user of information, the ease of changing content creates an obligation to be skeptical. What we have read one day may not be what is there the next day. At the very least, we need to print out what we expect to use, as proof that we didn't make up those facts and statements -- they WERE there at one time. Even more to the point, we should revisit those web sites, look for admitted and unadmitted revisions and updates. Because more than ever, truth has become a moving target.
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COOL QUOTE
[Douglas Adams died, far too young, this week. My cool quote is a reminder of why so many of us loved him.]
Er ... Good morning, O Deep Thought," said Loonquawl nervously, "do you have ... er, that is..."
"An answer for you?" interrupted Deep Thought majestically. "Yes. I have."
. . .
"To Everything? To the great Question of Life, the Universe and Everything?"
. . .
"Though I don't think," added Deep Thought, "that you're going to like it."
. . .
"Tell us!"
"Alright," said Deep Thought. "The Answer to the Great Question..."
"Of Life, the Universe and Everything..." said Deep Thought.
"Is." said Deep Thought, and paused.
"Yes...!"
. . .
"Forty-two," said Deep Thought, with infinite majesty and calm.
. . .
"Forty-two!" yelled Loonquawl. "Is that all you've got to show for seven and a half million years' work?"
"I checked it very thoroughly," said the computer, "and that quite definitely is the answer. I think the problem, to be quite honest with you, is that you've never actually known what the question is."
"But it was the Great Question! The Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe and Everything!" howled Loonquawl.
"Yes," said Deep Thought with the air of one, who suffers fools gladly, "but what actually is it?"
A slow stupefied silence crept over the men as they stared at the computer and then at each other.
"Well, you know, it's just Everything ... Everything..." offered Phouchg weakly.
"Exactly!" said Deep Thought. "So once you do know what the question actually is, you'll know what the answer means."
Douglas Adams. Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
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Ex Libris: an E-Zine for Librarians and Other Information Junkies.
http://marylaine.com/exlibris/
Copyright, Marylaine Block, 2000.
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