2022-11-29
When to Censor and Revise Old Website Archives
While I've been managing contractors at the KTracy.com manor, the Ministry of Propaganda and the Ministry of Information Technology under Rachel and Carl's leadership and guidance have been hard at work piecing together the 2009 KTracy.com Archives. I've been periodically getting updates from Carl and Rachel about their progress and I'm quite pleased. It is my hope that the month of October 2009 will be fully restored before December. The 2009 and 2010 backup they're working from is taking longer than the 2001 archives for a variety of reasons. First, there is a ton more content. Second, there are comments that we've decided to selectively include in the archives. Third and finally, some of our own archives are being modified or censored for a couple of reasons. The first is pretty self explanatory, but the second and third touch on the topics of self-censoring and revisionism that may be a bit more controversial.
Reasons for flat out erasing some old content
Harm to the Former Staff: In the 2001 archives, many articles were erased because they mentioned by name fellow high school students (many of whom were also under 18 at the time) and some politically incorrect opinions or actions they did while we were all in school together. At the time, we thought it was funny. A lot of it, I still found funny. However, out of respect for who they are today, I decided to remove much of that content. That content hasn't been online in over 20 years and making it suddenly searchable in search engines by their friends and families and employers of today seemed like it would cause more harm than good to their reputations. The active staff members from back then have had their first or last names removed. The inactive staff members largely have their full names still present only if there's no harm besides association with me.
Harm to the World: In the 2009 archives, written when everyone is clearly an adult and (more or less) behaving as such, the need for this type of censorship is significantly reduced. The two articles we've decided to erase contained really bad information that could lead others into serious error. Really, these were censored for religious reasons and leaving the articles up for people to stumble upon could lead someone away from truth. That wasn't my intent when I wrote the content, but it is the case now.
This doesn't happen too often because we largely censored ourselves back then. For example, there was an article where one of the staff members laid out a very detailed religious and political argument for conservatives to support abortion. I felt horrible about censoring it because he spent so much energy writing it, but it needed to be censored because, though compelling, it was not compelling enough to risk someone looking for an excuse to destroy a child's life finding the article and taking that as justification for his or her next actions.
However, the KTracy.com staff was less concerned about comments. Our logic was that we would allow almost any kind of comment since we could refute it if morally or logically necessary.
The refuting didn't always happen, however. Some comments were posted months after the article was written. Others listed so many poor arguments that it was literally impossible to refute everything that could be refuted without creating a new blog post; which we sometimes did. However, this creates an interlinking set of pages that are really difficult to re-create and were never really well defined in the first place. In some cases, we have decided that the content being discussed simply isn't worth the effort and we scrap the original comment, the responses to it, and the follow up blog post.
Honestly, seeing the staff today struggle with comment moderation again makes me happy that I decided to eliminate comments from KTracy.com last year (see our thoughts on comments evolve on the About KTracy.com Page).
When We Revise Old Content
I've also instructed the KTracy.com staff to give the archives the "George Lucas Treatment." It's a reference to the Star Wars Special Edition Trilogy; which gave us #HanShotFirst.
The changes really aren't as big as the 1997 special edition changes to Star Wars. I've asked the staff to correct spelling errors and any obvious grammar errors that stand out to them. I think spell checking in 2009 may have been done through a Firefox add-on because we're noticing spelling errors a lot more frequently among our contributors than from me. The grammar errors I am equally guilty of; which is somewhat surprising.
Revising old content like this may bother some internet archive purists. I am definitely sympathetic to their cause. However, if a year after the blog post was made, someone told me about a spelling or grammar error in a year-old post, I would have gone back to fix it without ever thinking about archiving the nostalgia of the site's spelling and grammar errors. What's really important is the content, not the spelling or grammar of it.
Another time we'll revise old content is when the archived blog post foretells some future content. We'll go ahead and add a link to the future content in the past content when we see this. This has SEO benefits as well as adds value to the visitors to KTracy.com. That value added brings us to the next topic.
The Benefits of Self-Censorship
In general, if you've created content, I say put it online and make it all interlink as nicely as you can. However, not all content should be shared. If you were a Satanist and converted to Christianity, it would be foolish to leave old Satanic content online for people to find.
Your website should be a celebration of you and your story. Some old content helps to tell that story, but other content directly contradicts the good in it or the message you want to share. In those cases, you should self-censor.
While I don't think you should self-censor for SEO reasons, if you had really outrageous, hateful views expressed in the past, erasing those views from your site and starting again fresh may help rebuild your reputation with Google and your prospective readers.
When to Revise Archives
Always! If you find errors in your old content, FIX IT! Google loves to see pages being updated. Google will also do its own audit on your spelling and grammar while crawling your site. Misspelled words or poorly constructed sentences indicate that you have less-than-professional content and a less than optimal viewing experience. Google also likes to see web pages being updated, so revisiting and revising old content every so often is great for SEO. It's also a benefit for the user experience; which should be your true goal in the development of your entire website, including your archives.
