Versioning

Versioning is the process of assigning versions to distinct states of a document. For instance, versioning can be numerical (“version 1”, “version 2”, etc.), date-based (“last updated 2017-07-02”), or hash-based (assigning a cryptographic hash to the content).

Contents

Analogy with software

There has been a lot of thought put into versioning of software:

Software has obviously backwards-incompatible changes that can be made to it. This makes it useful to have some sort of convention of quickly telling users when this happens.

Examples of versioning prose

The following are some examples of ways to version content:

Tricky issues

Some problems that might occur:

See also