The enforce behavior idea is not my argument, but another's reasoning for why we shouldn't have edit. The idea being it will make people more careful. I think the lived experience of the board, sans edit, has shown that not having edit has not removed the need or desire for it.No one has suggested forcing people to edit their posts, so volition is really not an issue here. No-edit doesn't actively "enforce behavior" as you're cleverly trying to suggest, it just prohibits one behavior, namely editing.
I have never made that argument, and several well-spoken posters who use the preview feature have come out and said they *still* wish they had edit as preview doesn't get the job done completely. I agree that we need sound reasoning to back up our philosophies, but I have yet to read much of this from the anti-edit side. You have provided reasons, but I disagree with them as I have outlined below.No, but we do have to provide sound reasoning or other justification for those philosophies if we care about anyone else taking them seriously. "I don't wanna use Preview because it's boring and sometimes I forget" is, to put it mildly, less than persuasive.
By that definition, so do boogeymen exist because kidnappers and other human monsters exist. The point wasn't that revisionism hasn't or won't occur, -it is that the impact of it has been overstated and overreacted to."Boogeymen" are perceived threats that do not actually exist; historical revisionism, since it does exist (I've seen it myself) is not a boogeyman.
Why in the world wouldn't I edit my post to say, "This fuckwit edited his original post in an effort to make me look like the homophobic racist he is..."? If they can edit their posts, then so can I edit my responses.Poster1: I'm sick of all the fags and niggers at the event.
this post has been edited
Don Muerto: I agree...
His "diseased invective" should not be cause to limit the experience of everybody in ways that are unpopular. You'll note his diseased invective was placed here in a no-edit environment, so I am not sure how not being able to edit is saving us from such.If you're thinking that only an insignificant number of people would be so hateful, you need look no further than Captain Fuckwit's diseased invective just upthread. And relatively benign pranksters are probably in far greater abundance around here.
I disagree. There is a collective memory at work here even in an unlimited edit environment. Even if I don't catch it, others will unless it is buried deep in the history of the thread.Having no edit lays the minor burden of clicking Preview on each poster, and only at the time the post is actually being made. Allowing edit places on everyone the burden of having to re-read the entire thread...I'd call that burden considerable -- suffocating, even.
So, the worst case is that somebody goes way back in thread time to put isolated cases of your statements out of context. This is pretty difficult to do without the malefactor putting his/her own out of context except in a-historical examples concocted in policy discussion threads and without before and after conversational context. I am willing to take that risk, as the weight of all my posts make up who I am online, -not one thing in far history.
It seems to me that people don't read the back pages anyway as the number is overwhelming. Old posters know you from your accumulated cotemporal context, and new posters get to know you similarly on a going-forward basis, -not by rereading the tens of thousands of historical posts laying around here.
Limited edit is better than no edit, but I still contend that the arguments marshalled against unlimited edit amount to little in terms of community impact. Your worst case scenarios aren't nearly as bad as the cruft added to the board by people bitching about not having edit or editing in subsequent posts. This is my opinion, but I think that it is shared by quite a few.Granted, a 15 minute time limit on edits would significantly alleviate the Poster1 scenario, but once that's available people will bitch that fifteen minutes isn't nearly long enough to reformulate their thoughts, or to go back and remove their drunken ramblings from Saturday at 3AM. And they'll be right; fifteen minutes is about long enough to spot typos and make minor corrections and not much more. So if the purpose of Edit is simply to fix typos before committing one's words to posterity, what's Preview for??
To answer your question: "Preview" is a shoddy half-measure replacement for Edit.
More importantly, edit allows posters to do much more than "simply fix typos." The quoted examples on page 3 of this discussion show how edit has been used to: remove personal information about 3rd parties that should not have been put there in the first place, remove graphic information that might upset friends and relatives of somebody killed on the road home from BM, to clarify posts, to add useful and pertinent information to posts, and to satisfy the poster with what they have posted in the spirit of "you own your own words".
Could you please clarify this statement? I don't understand what you mean.Unlimited edit is a total mess, and we already have the equivalent functionality of a 15-minute edit window.
