---
title: Versioning prose
author: Issa Rice
date: 2016-12-05
created: 2016-12-05
---

**This page has moved to <http://contentcreation.issarice.com/versioning/>.**

There has been a lot of thought put into versioning of software:

  * [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_versioning)
  * [Semantic Versioning 2.0.0](http://semver.org/)
  * [Why Semantic Versioning Isn't](https://gist.github.com/jashkenas/cbd2b088e20279ae2c8e)

Software has obviously backwards-incompatible changes that can be made to it.
This makes it useful to have some sort of convention of quickly telling users
when this happens.

However, I've seen less discussion of how to version prose better.
Off the top of my head:

  * Textbooks and in general books have different "editions", and for each
    edition, the authors usually note the major differences in a foreword for
    that edition.
  * Wikipedia has no concept of versions aside from its raw edit history.
    This means the full history is given, but it's also hard to tell when some
    major change was introduced.
    Note that editors can still include an "edit summary" accompanying their
    edits, but this isn't required.
  * Some web pages have a "last modification date" or "last major revision
    date" or "last substantive revision date" or something similar.
    But it's not clear whether these mean the same things across different web
    page authors.
  * Some web pages have a "History" section.
  * Some sites, such as this one, track all changes in a revision-control
    system (e.g. Git).
    This makes the "feeling" of tracking prose somewhat similar to that of
    tracking software -- because the same tools are used for both!
  * On blog posts, people tend to add updated information at the bottom of the
    post (even when they logically belong to the parts of the post where that
    thing is being talked about) or injected into the post with something like
    "ETA:" or "EDIT:" (even when newer readers -- who are probably the majority
    -- wouldn't care whether that information was part of the original post or
    not).

Some problems that might occur:

  * Giving a "substantive revision date" might trick readers into thinking that
    *all* the information on a page is updated to match the given date, even if
    an update can be "substantive" only by changing some significant part of
    the page.
  * The overhead of having a "History" section on every page might not be
    justified.
  * In general, it is time-consuming to convey the "freshness" of each sentence
    or paragraph in a document.
    (There are parallels here with trying to convey the credence of each
    sentence or paragraph in a document.)

Other examples:

* The CDC website has "Page last reviewed" and "Page last updated" dates;
  presumably the former guarantees that all the information on the page is
  accurate as far as the CDC is concerned, while the latter just says that
  information from as recent as the given date is included.
  However I would appreciate if there was a linked explanation of what they
  actually mean.
* Eliezer Yudkowsky often shares his old Facebook posts using the Facebook
  "memories" feature.
  I appreciate these posts because it shows whether he has changed his mind on
  a topic or not.

# See also

  * [[Dating style]]

# External links

  * ["Beware technological wonderland, or, why text will dominate the future of communication and the Internet"](http://lesswrong.com/lw/k25/beware_technological_wonderland_or_why_text_will/) by Vipul Naik