# A Revision Is Legitimate in Proportion to Its Auditability ## Claim Revising an authoritative text is normal and unavoidable, so what separates legitimate revision from misrepresentation is whether the change can be seen — dated, attributed, and published beside what it replaces. <!-- atomicity: 1 idea ✓ --> ## Evidence **Source**: [[3. Resources/Readwise/Articles/Statement of Faith of the United Church of Christ – La Declaración De Fe De La Iglesia Unida De Cristo]] The UCC publishes four versions of its Statement of Faith on one page: the 1959 General Synod text, an adaptation attributed to Robert V. Moss, a doxological version authorized by Executive Council in 1981, and a Spanish translation. The 1981 revision changes person throughout — "He calls the worlds into being" becomes "You call the worlds into being" — and substitutes *God* for *Father*, *persons* for *man*, *Savior* for *Lord*, *realm* for *kingdom*. None of that is concealed. Each authorization carries a body and a year, the original stays in print, and every version sits beside the others, so any reader can diff them without special access. The contrast is what makes the claim general. The same day's reading includes McClellan on the Legacy Standard Bible altering Genesis 2:19 — taking a rendering the NASB had right and introducing a pluperfect that dissolves a contradiction between Genesis 1 and 2. That change is also a revision. It ships as the accurate reading, with no marker, inside a text presented as a faithful translation. Both bodies revised. One published the seam and one hid it, and that difference is the entire distance between an editorial act and a misrepresentation. The UCC page also shows the standard is exacting rather than flattering: its own Spanish version carries no translator, date, or identified source version — the one text on the page a reader cannot audit. ## Scope & conditions - **Holds** for texts a community treats as authoritative and revisits over time — confessions, translations, standards, constitutions, specifications, licenses. - **Requires** the prior version to remain accessible. Dating a change without preserving what it replaced records that something happened, not what. - **Breaks** for working drafts before adoption, where visible iteration is the process rather than a disclosure obligation. - **Weakens** where publishing variants creates real harm — where the exact wording carries legal consequence and ambiguity is itself the risk. - **Does not require** revisions to be announced loudly. Auditable means discoverable by someone who looks, not promoted. - **Note the asymmetry**: auditability is a property of the publication, not of the revisers' motives. A well-intentioned silent change fails the test; a contested but documented one passes. ## Links - [[3. Resources/Permanent Notes/An Audit Trail Is Trustworthy Only When It Is a By-Product of the Work]] — because extends: that concerns records of activity, this concerns the artifact itself. Publishing versions side by side is how a text becomes its own trail. - [[3. Resources/Permanent Notes/Divine-Revelation Translation Claims Immunize a Work From Scholarly Critique]] — because contrasts: the failure case in its strongest form. A revelation claim removes the possibility of auditing the change, which is precisely what this note requires. - [[3. Resources/Permanent Notes/What a Recommendation Omits Identifies Its Real Selection Criterion]] — because extends: both make an invisible editorial decision visible. One reads the gap in a list, the other reads the gap between versions. - [[3. Resources/Permanent Notes/Update Signatures Prove Provenance Not Freshness]] — because extends: the software cognate. A dated authorization is exactly as narrow, and exactly as useful, as a signature — it tells you who changed what and when, and nothing about whether the change was right. - [[3. Resources/Permanent Notes/Target Audience Determines Translation Methodology More Than Equivalence Theory Does]] — because applies-in: the UCC's versions serve different audiences, which is legible only because all of them are published. - [[3. Resources/Permanent Notes/A Genre Label Sets a Text's Truth-Conditions]] — because evidence-for: four simultaneous versions are coherent because the text is framed as testimony rather than as a test. Genre is what makes visible plurality affordable. - [[3. Resources/Permanent Notes/Intent Written on the Outside Compounds While Re-Derived Intent Is Debt]] — because extends: a dated authorization is externalized intent about a change, which stops future readers reconstructing why the wording moved. - [[Faith & Theology MOC]] — because applies-in. - [[Open Source Governance MOC]] — because applies-in. - [[3. Resources/MOCs/MOC · United Church of Christ]] — applies-in: the MOC lists this note under Founding-era primary source. ## Implications - The test is cheap and mostly mechanical: can a reader see what changed, when, and on whose authority? A "yes" survives disagreement about whether the change was wise. - Keeping the superseded version in print is the move that does most of the work, and it has a second effect — it removes the incentive to smuggle changes, because there is nothing to smuggle them past. - Applied to translations: the question separating an interpretive rendering from a misrepresentation is not whether interpretation occurred (it always does) but whether the reader can tell where. - Applied to specifications, licenses, and standards: unversioned normative text is the same defect. If the current text is the only text, every past reader's understanding has been silently overwritten. - The auditability standard is enforceable by outsiders, which is what makes it useful. Motive is not checkable; publication is. ## Open Questions - What is the minimum sufficient disclosure — a date and a body, or is a rationale required for the standard to mean anything? - Does side-by-side publication reduce adoption of the revision, and is that cost worth the legibility? - How should a tradition handle revisions made before the standard existed, where the seam is real and now unrecoverable? ## Source - [[3. Resources/Readwise/Articles/Statement of Faith of the United Church of Christ – La Declaración De Fe De La Iglesia Unida De Cristo]] — four authorized versions published together with dated authorizations, and an undocumented Spanish translation as the counter-instance