Finished, or Correct?

There comes a time in the life of every endeavor where it seems complete. I used to enjoy that aspect of life—the finishedness of a good essay—a thought laid on paper with some clarity that felt good.

I don’t feel that way now; I’d rather be right than finished. Furthermore, I’ve never ‘finished’ an endeavor—say, a short essay, a poem, or painting a wall—and not come back at some later point to notice that there’s a section off. For tangible things, the painting, a planter box - these imperfections are mostly charming facts-of-life, and hard to fix. We try better next time, and can move on.

What does that mean here? Nothing you see on this site will ever be finished. It will, to the best of my often meager abilities, be right. Perhaps not in the platonic sense, but in the ‘this is as good as it can be at this moment’ sense. If I reread something that I wrote with great conviction (at the time) and find it lacking, I’ll probably rewrite it or rebut it.

This approach lacks a certain regard for historicity… to which I say, what tiny fraction of our productive capacity as humans is worth remembering? How many Renaissance paintings were found to be overpaintings of a previous work?

I would rather amble towards the things unseen than preserve my ill-thought-out history.

Okay so Maybe Historicity is Sort Of Important.

If we want to regain historicity (A government website or reputable news source or person who desires these sorts of things…), either for ourselves or out of some sense of posterity, the ‘writing with source control’ approach gives back anything we’ve lost. Gitkraken has an excellent (albeit biased to their product) explanatory page on the practice of writing text using a source control system such as git. Matthew McCullough has a nice GitHub Gist of resources if you want to tread along this path. This is the style I’d like to see sites use when there is some need for it, the aforementioned governments and newspapers included. For me, I don’t think it would be worth the burden, and I actually like that I can condemn earlier revisions to exist only insofar as somebody kept a scraped copy.