When Associations Edit the Past

I'm a bit peeved, personally and professionally, about a disturbing turn of events I've now seen with two of my associations, AIIM and ARMA. It seems that both of them have taken to editing previously published content without disclosing that fact. It's their content, so it's their right to edit it, but it seems a bit...unseemly to do so without disclosing that they are doing so. 

I consider Nick Inglis to be a professional colleague and a friend. He's done some incredible stuff over the years to move the disciplines of information governance and information management forward, and while I don't agree with all of his actions, I know they are coming from a genuine desire to raise the visibility and efficacy of information professionals. 

On October 22, 2021, he noted that ARMA had removed all of his bylines from their assets. Where they used to have his name, now they simply show "ARMA International". You can see an example in this post: https://magazine.arma.org/2021/02/whats-next-in-information-governance-continuous-audit-and-analytics/. Note the byline, dated February 1, 2021. Now click the link to download the article, and you end up here: https://magazine.arma.org/article_-whats-next-in-ig_-continuous-audit-and-analytics/, which clearly shows Nick's byline. 

At the same time, here's an example Nick cites of an article written by Jeff Whited, who left ARMA several months earlier than Nick did: https://magazine.arma.org/2019/06/goals-of-new-canadian-digital-charter-include-assuring-privacy-eradicating-hate-online/. I did do some searching around for other departed staffers and it may be that ARMA has decided to remove individual staff bylines, and simply missed the article by Whited. But again it would not have appeared as petty had ARMA made some sort of announcement about it. 

For my part, I've seen a lot of edits to posts I wrote for AIIM in the past as well. For example, I wrote a post comparing AIIM and ARMA memberships in April 2020. I looked at it today in reference to another post, and noticed that many, but not all, of the training and membership references now refer to AIIM+ and AIIM+ Pro. Which is fine, though I think the post date should have been updated, or at least a note to that effect added to the post (e.g. "This post was updated in October 2021 to reflect AIIM's change to the AIIM+ and AIIM+ Pro model."). That's just the right thing to do when updating a post in my opinion. 

But what makes it worse is that some of the edits make the posts distinctly more sales-y. And at the same time, no edits were made to the current number of professional members, or the drop from 16 online chapters in the community to 7, including the closure of all non-US chapters except AIIM True North in Canada. If you're going to edit for accuracy, I think you need to be consistent and edit for accuracy all the way around. 

I no longer have any visibility into AIIM's finances, marketing efforts, etc. but I have to wonder at the time spent to update nearly every blog post I wrote in the last couple of years - mostly to change calls to action to AIIM+, but some to change training descriptions to AIIM+ from e.g. the Modern Records Management course - and whether that's really making an impact on AIIM's revenue. And it's probably not just my posts that were edited like this - so what's the ROI on doing that editing compared to all the other things the marketing team could have been doing? 

So, for anyone from AIIM or ARMA reading this, what's my recommendation? First, don't edit stuff you've already published unless you need to clean up specific errors or links that are now broken. Second, if you're going to edit, have the courage of your convictions to edit all the obvious errors or changes in the resource. Third, if you're going to edit, NOTE THAT FACT in the resource that's been edited. Or keep stealth editing, and lose more of your credibility. We notice.