Well before newspapers hit a decade of exclusive Web-only coverage, they may want to take a look at how they archive articles.

Rarely are instances of breaking news done as one official report. Instead there could be a first version that is a few paragraphs explaining the situation, perhaps a quote. Later in a second version this news “snippet” might be updated with whatever was available at the end of the daily news cycle. Then, the following day a more complete third version is published and — lets say there is an error so corrections need to be made. You’re now up to four versions of the report.

My guess is that some multi-version reports are archived separately and others are updated and archived without any acknowledgment of draft history. Logic would dictate that a final version (with corrections) should be the only one necessary to archive for the sake of clarity. On the other hand publishing everything could provide an absolute record of information as it happened. But are either actions really the best policy?

I highly doubt most publications on the web have given much thought their digital archiving policy.

While there aren’t many news organizations old enough to anticipate what the future will hold for past sins of sloppy archiving, an examination of Wikipedia may give us some clues. The user generated encyclopedia is hardly sloppy in its archiving, but issues of filtering out inadequate content are on the rise. Those that have discrepancies with Wikipedia’s policies are creating alternatives to fill in the gaps.

A good example of this is deletionpedia, a site comprised of 60,000 deleted entries from the English Wikipedia. The site’s rational for its actions states: “Who knows what might be lost to the world if we lose anything? And besides, storage is cheap!”

Ars Technica Senior Editor Nate Anderson wrote a great post in which he states:

“…such sites are part of a new, “never lose it“ approach to information collection. Certainly this has tremendous benefits, but in terms of sheer information overload, does it also have costs?”

It’s a question newspaper publishers should be asking their staffs now rather than later.