Changing historic documents (Was: Re: Debian WWW CVS commit by bertol: webwml/english/vote/2005 Log-debian-dpl-debate.wml)
Hi,
Florian Ernst <florian@uni-hd.de> schrieb am 16.10.05 23:46:21:
> I just want to make this clear, so replying to d-www and to Nicolas,
> as it was his check-in that made me wonder...
>
> On Sun, Oct 16, 2005 at 09:25:32AM -0600, Debian WWW CVS wrote:
> > Modified files:
> > english/vote/2005: Log-debian-dpl-debate.wml
> >
> > Log message:
> > typo
>
> Do we fix typos and the like in those "historical documents", i.e. in
> transcripts and individual mails?
Yes we do. See Matt's mail
http://lists.debian.org/debian-www/2004/03/msg00208.html,
where he notes, that the Chicago Manual of Style supports this for
obvious typos.
Also: http://lists.debian.org/debian-www/2004/08/msg00281.html
(Now I know that the proposed fix s/can not/cannot/ is wrong,
or at least not necessary.)
Nevertheless I agree that it's not useful to change IRC logs. It's often
very hard to find a single line in such documents which doesn't contain
at least five typos :-)
Correcting an important string such as a name is maybe worth to be fixed.
> I mean, there are plenty of mistakes in <News/weekly/*/*/mail.wml> and
mail.wml are often important and in a good quality so I always fixed typos
there. I also fixed from time to time ugly mail encodings such as =20=
strings (or similar). All these changes may invalidate a signed mail, but
since WML needs escaping of special characters nobody assumes that
the GPG sign matchs.
I remember that I was many years ago incommunicative because of
my bad English. I really hope that other persons fix my broken English as
well in current documents/archives/... when possible.
> in some logs / transcripts below <vote>, but I always considered
> correcting them to be an act of correcting history, thus possibly
> creating a false image of the past...
If a mail refers to project leader XZY whereas his name is XYZ many
persons will notice that this is a typo. But readers will maybe not notice
this in 10 years, so I support fixing it ...
Jens
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