Stealth edit

A stealth edit occurs when an online resource is changed without any record of the change being preserved. The term has a negative connotation, as it is a technique which allows authors to attempt to retroactively change what is written.

A common scenario would be a reporter posting a diatribe against something, followed by a blogger posting that the reporter is too extreme, followed by the reporter stealth editing the original post to be less extreme. The result is that the blogger looks like the one who is too extreme, since the public can't tell that the original post has been changed.

The existence of stealth edits may often be detected by comparing the current contents of a web page against an archived or cached version.

Editors and journalists have argued that making undeclared edits to articles is a routine part of digital journalism, believing that it allows them to give the most complete version of a story. Readers, however, often feel that it is unethical or suspicious for a news publication to make undeclared changes to a story, especially when the edits significantly change the context of the story.

Non-stealthy edit

A variety of non-stealthy techniques exist when making corrections or updates:

• The title of the page can have an update notification prepended or appended to it, along with a brief description of what has changed.
• Deletions may remain but be crossed out, while additions are made in a different colour.
• Publicly accessible change logs may be kept for every edit.

The common feature is that all these methods explicitly let the reader know that an edit has been made. A grey area exists when the edit is trivial (such as a typographic error). Some organizations flag all updates; others make a judgment call about what is considered a substantive update.

See also

• NewsDiffs – Archive website tracking changes to news articles
• Web archiving – Preserving history of web pages
• The Ministry of Truth – Fictional governmental organizations in the novel Nineteen Eighty-FourPages displaying short descriptions of redirect targets

External links

• stealthedits.com