User blog:Cerne/Editing blog entries (and why I don't do it)

Hello, here I am typing another blog entry. This one is about editing, and in the spirit of editing, I would like to start off with things I could edit in my last entry but - for reasons I will name later - I can't. For those of you who did read it, you would no doubt have noticed that I misspelled "Nitrogen" once as "Notrogen." This might be considered rather trivial at first but it can be more significant depending on the word and the typo. There are cases where you can change one word into another word just by making a single typo, and when using technical or specialized terms like the name of a chemical element, it definately helps to know what you are doing. I have no doubt that those who read the word did interpret "Notrogen" correctly, but in case you didn't, this is not a fictitious or newly discovered element.

I would also like to add here that I forgot to put water vapour in the list of elements and compounds found in our atmosphere. Technically I didn't really make a mistake here - dry air obviously wouldn't contain water vapour, and the article I brought up assumes as much - but a typical cubic litre of air would contain at least some water vapour in it. Especially if there was liquid and/or frozen water present in the area. So yes, if you are curious, water vapour can make up as much as 0.40% of the air we breathe on Earth according to Wikipedia's Atmosphere of Earth article.

There are a number of other blog entries I would like to edit as well, but I am not going to. Primarily because the text formatting for these blog entries is horrible. It ignores paragraph spacing a lot of the time, or over-spaces paragraphs, and on many occasions it screws around with line spacing when you don't even press the Enter key in between lines. The only sure way I can think of around this problem is if you manually type everything right into the entry text box without using the Copy & Paste technique, as I am doing right now. Using the list tools will help too, if you don't mind the indentation and the line headers. A lot of my earlier entries involved cutting and pasting from elsewhere and I believe this wiki's software may have misinterpreted the format style I had been using with the external text application I was using. If I try to edit these entries, I may run into further problems that may warrant further editing, and I don't want to waste my time doing that.

The good thing about avoiding the Edit button for myself and my readers (if I have any) is that it creates an air (no pun intended - see above paragraphs) of authenticity in my blog. Just knowing that something has remained unchanged since the time of its creation gives me a sense that what I am reading is much more real than something that has been edited constantly. Yes, I am aware that the Wiki software creates logs of earlier entries. Thing is, no one would really care to check an earlier version of a page until and/or unless it came to their mind that the page had an earlier version. I doubt perusing earlier page entries counts itself as a pastime for the average Wikipedia reader. I even forget that feature from time to time when I visit a Wiki site. The only thing that really matters to me is the current page as it is, so to know that the current page you are seeing has remained unchanged tends to restore or instill in someone a sense of confidence toward the page, that what they are seeing is authentic and original. And this is a lot more important if the page is something like a journal or blog entry because the reader wants to know what was going through the writer or typer's mind at the very second they are writing or typing the page in question. Knowing that the page was or could have been edited later on removes a lot of the trust and confidence that readers may have in the author of the journal or blog they are reading. In addition, the No Editing rule helps me because it shows me what kinds of mistakes I made in the entry without having to delve into earlier versions of the entry I want to re-read. It is right there, easily accessable to me whenever I want to read it. A moment captured in time and preserved for eternity (not really, but I liked the phrase).

With that said, there is one entry in my blog that has been edited at least once. It would be my third entry, and I believe I was trying to fix the formatting errors that appeared the first time I posted the entry. I may have done so more than once, I am not sure. You may see formatting errors and typos in all of my entries at some point. I probably know about them, too, and am probably going to keep them that way. My thoughts and the way I convey them - errors and all - is what is being preserved here, not the actual information itself. As such, new entries will not be edited either. Sometimes I am not able to preview them beforehand, so they may have more mistakes in them, but I am not really concerned with that. If it bothers me especially, then I will point it out in my next entry.

That is all I really have to say right now. My ideas have been emptied and my mind is now blank, so I will end the entry here. Thanks for reading.