Understanding Depublishing
by Stuart Robertson on June 15th, 2005 | Uncategorized
In my last entry on Celebrity and Authority in Digital Comics I linked to an article published by Scott McCloud which he has since chosen to depublish:
On the advice of people whose opinions I respect, I’ve decided to remove this essay. If I ever respond again, it will be on points alone, not the motivation behind those points.
Sorry for that 24 hour lapse in judgement. Like a lot of people, I get angry when friends are attacked.
—Scott
Depublishing is the practice of posting something to the web, often an inflammatory post to a weblog, then removing the inflammatory parts or deleting the content altogether. The term was first used during 2003, when the topic of accountability and weblogs was being hotly debated. Dave Winer, who’s long running blog features posts about blogging software, RSS, XML and other technical topics, would often publish inflammatory remarks about other bloggers on his site and then depublish them after reconsidering what he had said. People would frequently discover entries they linked to or commented on had suddenly disappeared, or been substantially edited, making their own blog entries nonsensical.
Rebecca Blood’s The Weblog Handbook includes a section on Weblog Ethics and an excellent entry explaining the trouble with depublishing: “Write each entry as if it could not be changed; add to, but do not rewrite or delete, any entry.”
The network of shared knowledge we are building will never be more than a novelty unless we protect its integrity by creating permanent records of our publications. The network benefits when even entries that are rendered irrelevant by changing circumstance are left as a historical record. As an example: A weblogger complains about inaccuracies in an online article; the writer corrects those inaccuracies (and notes them!); the weblogger’s entry is therefore meaningless—or is it? Deleting the entry somehow asserts that the whole incident simply didn’t happen—but it did. The record is more accurate and history is better served if the weblogger notes beneath the original entry that the writer has made the corrections and the article is now, to the weblogger’s knowledge, accurate.
History can be rewritten, but it cannot be undone. Changing or deleting words is possible on the Web, but possibility does not always make good policy. Think before you publish and stand behind what you write. If you later decide you were wrong about something, make a note of it and move on.
I make a point never to post anything I am not willing to stand behind even if I later disagree. I work to be thoughtful and accurate, no matter how angry or excited I am about a particular topic. If I change my opinion in a day or two, I just note the change. If I need to apologize for something I’ve said, I do so.
In addition to the ethical reasons to avoid depublishing, it’s often a pointless activity. Once you publish something online, it soon moves beyond your website to be stored on other people’s computers and on various servers around the world. During the depublishing debate with Dave Winer, Mark Pilgrim wrote a script called “Winer Watch” that would monitor Dave’s website and make note of changes to blog entries where posts were edited or removed. While Mark has since taken his script offline, there are other less specific systems archiving content. The Internet Archive lets you search for content you may have thought deleted years ago, and many Search Engines maintain a cached copy of website content.
If you frequently find yourself wanting to depublish content, you should spend more time reflecting on what you’ve written before putting it online. If in doubt, ask someone to review your content before publishing it. If you later change your mind about something you’ve written, write a new article. Keep moving forward.
Stuart Robertson
