When people rite rong, I can’t help correcting them, it’s the former tech writer/Edna Krabapple in me. If they have a Twitter account I’ll tweet a correction, but even if they notice and acknowledge the misteak they have to locate the original text, edit it, find the errors, and make my suggested corrections. For simple typos this is mindless busywork; I’ve done the work, just apply it to the original.
Meanwhile, in a distributed version control system like Git, I can “fork” someone’s code, fix a bug, and offer my fix (called a pull request or a merge request). So… if someone published their writing using git, they could accept corrections with a single click, as if their document was a program with bugs. Well, some people do, and it works very well!
Software developers are so adept at creating tools to automate and improve their work. Every other occupation and endeavor can learn a lot from them.
Here’s another low-friction fix I made:
