Archiving Corrected Versions Without Erasing the Original
Launch library · evergreen read
Simply overwriting a flawed version of a piece with a corrected one, without any visible trace of the change, erases part of the historical record and can look, to a suspicious reader, uncomfortably close to quietly rewriting history after the fact without any visible acknowledgement at all.
Good practice keeps a visible note of what changed and when, sometimes alongside an archived copy of the original version, so anyone questioning the correction later can see exactly what was altered and why the change was actually made in the first place, in plain and specific terms.
This transparency protects a publication as much as it serves the reader, since a documented trail of what changed is a far stronger defence against accusations of impropriety than an unexplained edit ever could be. It also makes future research considerably easier, since anyone studying how a story evolved can trace the change precisely rather than working from an incomplete, silently altered record of events.