If you do this, then every single change in a word or a phrase will have some article about it. Some people will compulsively track every small change - and what this means is that the government will have to be extra careful before changing even a word. This will lead to bureaucracy, and even more secrecy, because working documents would never get published, only final documents.
Putting change.gov under source control is not a good idea. You want Obama personally having to field questions all the time, because some secretary chose a particular order of words?
Some of the changes are extremely important. For instance, Obama originally had this to say about forced labor:
Obama will call on citizens of all ages to serve America, by developing a plan to require 50 hours of community service in middle school and high school and 100 hours of community service in college every year.
Now all he says is this:
They'll [Obama and Biden] set a goal that all middle school and high school students engage in 50 hours of community service a year, and develop a plan for all college students who engage in 100 hours of community service to receive a fully-refundable tax credit of $4,000 for their education.
There are major, substantial changes being made here. There is also obfuscation going on, as you see above. Knowledge of what he previously wrote clarifies what "set a goal" means. I think it's important for the American people to see this.
I would think the _latter_ serves more to clarify the former than the other way around. Generally that's the way it works. Surely, in a lifetime of communication you have at one point or another misspoken or been misunderstood and had to clarify your meaning. Would it be fair for listeners to disregard your later statements entirely simply because they came later?
Your casting a volunteer program as "forced labor" strongly indicates that you have a political opinion on what the interpretation _ought_ to be. It would be _convenient_ for you if that interpretation would be correct, but it would not be _accurate_.
Not only is the latter in line with the plan (to require service in exchange for the tax credit) outlined well before the election, but it also has the advantage of actually making sense in context. Why would a page describing expansion of established volunteer services suddenly shift to mean mandatory service? And for students only? And then go right back to talking about voluntary services? It would make little sense to have the meaning of an entire page hinge on a single word in a middle paragraph, and even if it were an accurate representation of intent, the sentence itself is utterly bungled. Calling it obfuscation is senseless, too, given how freely the site expresses other plans that many find disagreeable.
You want people to believe that the President-Elect is only willing to express major, substantial changes in policy via one word on one page of one site at one time, now past? Please.
The latter version only tells you the goal. The former version told you the mechanism by which Obama will achieve this goal, namely force. That's information which has been removed. The new information in the latter version is that college students will be paid for their work.
We will find out soon enough whether Obama really does support forced labor. I don't think it's an outlandish idea, however. Forced labor has quite a few supporters on the left (Rangel, Clark and McDermott, for instance http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/z?d110:H.R.393:).
Anyway, this isn't really the place to discuss the merits of Obama's possible policy proposals. My point is this: at one time, change.gov advocated forced labor. The American people deserve to be able to easily look this up for themselves, and see what other changes were made.
There are some who don't think it's outlandish that Obama might be a lizard person in disguise, and that where change.gov states that the new administration "will encourage retiring Americans to serve by improving programs available for individuals over age 55", that it is really advocating euthanasia and reprocessing into Soylent Green as a solution to both overpopulation and world hunger. Try as I might to propose alternative interpretations more in line with Obama's prior statements, they only see what they want to see.
Whether you think it's an outlandish idea or not does not have any impact on whether it is actually true or whether the case you've made is actually reasonable. You're still insinuating that Obama advocates forced labor based on a redacted description of a program (the American Opportunity Tax Credit, by name) which was never before or ever since been described as mandatory, forced, or required. Implying that it bears resemblance to H.R.393 is an enormous stretch beyond the facts, as well, and the attempt at guilt-by-association is transparent. Rangel, Clark and McDermott are not Obama, representatives of Obama, or the authors of change.gov. Nor for that matter are any supporters of draft reinstatement who happen to not be Democrats.
You say "this isn't really the place to discuss the merits of Obama's possible policy proposals", and yet that's exactly what you are doing and I am not. As I noted before, your political bias is obvious. You are clearly more concerned with associating Obama with the concept of forced labor than either ascertaining the correct interpretation of his stated plans or in encouraging others to draw their own conclusions based on the supposed "evidence". Though you feign doubt saying "We will find out soon enough whether Obama really does support forced labor.", that is little different from saying "We will find out soon enough whether Obama really has stopped beating his wife." You don't appear to be concerned with the answer so much calling it into question. In other fields this is known as "FUD".
It does little good to advocate transparency for the sake of the American people when you do so by attempting to obscure matters even further.
I was originally responding to this: Some people will compulsively track every small change - and what this means is that the government will have to be extra careful before changing even a word.
My point: there are important changes being made which deserve to be tracked. I provided an example of such a change. I also explained in another post (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=380300) why I picked this example: by some ad-hoc means, I was able to dig up the original language.
Also, your analogy is ridiculous. If early versions advocated euthanasia, and then it was changed to say "setting a goal to reduce the burden of old people on the social security system", I would be concerned.
Unlike your euthanasia example, early versions of the website did unambiguously advocate forced labor. Here is a pdf copy:
By the way, your one man downmod squad is cute. Too bad this isn't reddit; plenty of people here like Obama (I used to myself), but we have few (if any) fanatical pro-Obama downmodders.
I daily thank sweet merciful Christ that this isn't reddit, but the more people like yourself I find here, the less I'm able to believe that. Being accused of being a "one man downmod squad" as if I even remotely gave a shit about moderation is a big red flag. I care fuckall for a popularity contest, and I find it personally offensive that your argument has fallen to suggesting that I do.
Additionally, you have no idea what my political affiliations are, and I'm not about to explain them, because I am not interested in having an argument over politics, just as you formerly claimed to be. To be clear: I may or may not have voted for Obama, I may or may not be of voting age, and I may or may not be a U.S. citizen.
Personal attacks aside, you're still wrong.
Of course my analogy is ridiculous. I thought the "lizard person" bit gave that away. The point was that your unorthodox interpretation of the original text is itself nearly as ridiculous in that it completely discards every other statement prior or subsequent in favor of a reading that while literally unambiguous in isolation, is very unlikely to be accurate.
Consider this sentence: "All Jews will die." On the one hand, it's factually accurate. On the other, it can be read as a threat. Context is vital, and is not to be ignored. It is in fact most important when potential interpretations are most disagreeable.
At no point did I deny that that the text formerly read as it did. What I deny is that your interpretation of that text accurately reflects the intent of the message. I've given reasons above and in my prior posts, none of which you have contradicted. That changes have been made is not in question, but as your point rests in the idea that "major, substantial" changes are being made, and your evidence for that substance is demonstrably flimsy, I don't see where you have done anything more than confirm the statement you were responding to in the first place. That, and insult me.
(Incidentally, how do you know the site did not once unambiguously advocate euthanasia and consumption of the elderly? Isn't it central to your case that this is currently unknowable? Aren't you just making an assumption based on the improbability that Obama would suddenly make such a significant change to his agenda only to shortly thereafter remove it?)
No need to be a fanatical Obama downmodder to see your use of the term "forced labor" as trolling. If you're unfamiliar with how the term is used-- though I don't think you are-- take a look at the first page of Google results for an idea.
Mandatory community service may be a terrible idea, but it's "forced labor" in the same way mandatory K-12 education is.
So what? The use of the term makes it appear that you are equating getting a kid to do homework with the Gulag's arrests, interrogations, transport in unheated cattle cars, forced labor, destruction of families, years spent in exile, and the early and unnecessary deaths.
As the parent comment illustrates, change.gov is already under version control. It's just being maintained by an army of semi-independent volunteers using ad hoc tools.
If you build a website with a substantial audience, every change of every word is being tracked, by Google and the Wayback Machine if nothing else. That's just the facts of life in the 21st century.
So far, the wayback machine has nothing on change.gov.
My ad-hoc mechanism of tracking changes was the following: I remembered a conversation on the internet, during which the website was modified (1). I then managed to google this conversation, and find quotes on the original language.
I managed to track precisely one change, but I'm reasonably web savvy (read: I've written webapps, probably putting me in the top 1% of web users). Do you think the average citizen could manage to do even that?
(1) In fact, after it was modified, several Obamatons accused the conservative posters of lying about the contents of the website. This is another hazard of unmarked modifications.
Oh, I understand and agree. I'm not trying to say that the current system of ad hoc "version control" is very good, let alone good enough.
I'm just pushing back against this the argument that using a real version control system will create a P.R. problem. If the P.R. problem is going to happen, it's going to happen. The changes are public. People like you are reading them, copying and pasting them, emailing them to each other. I wouldn't be at all surprised if various political professionals are taking snapshots of the site on a weekly basis. There isn't even a security-through-obscurity argument to be made here, because the edits aren't all that obscure!
Well, government documents aren't eligible for copyright, so anyone could hack together a crawler and republish the entire history of change.gov (or any other .gov, for that matter). Right?
In fact, this would be even better, since there would be no way for the government to retroactively tamper with the record.
<tinfoilhat>well, except by cracking my servers via those NSA backdoors in AES</tinfoilhat>
The Internet Archive is almost certainly capturing all these changes for posterity. That admittedly doesn't really address O'Reilly's main goal, to legitimate version tracking as a device for political transparency.
But there's another problem, too. The Internet Archive has a 6-month lag between collecting and publishing. That cripples it for oversight purposes, which is a pity. I only found this out because http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://change.gov doesn't have anything yet. Maybe they could be persuaded to fast-track pages with a .gov suffix or something.
What would be really interesting about having policy documents up on github or something, would be not just the changes, but the change notes. "Took this bit out, can't afford it, diverting funds to health instead", etc.
Putting change.gov under source control is not a good idea. You want Obama personally having to field questions all the time, because some secretary chose a particular order of words?