Editions

Text versus edition

A text is the manuscript. An edition is a reading of it.

The distinction is doing real work here, so it is worth being precise about which facts live on which side:

Belongs to the text	Belongs to the edition
The CKM designation and short reference	The title of the reading, and its editor
The manuscript photographs	Which akṣaras are outlined, and where
The physical description	What graphemes each akṣara is read as
	Clarity, obscuration, and text-critical marks
	The word division, lemmatisation, and lines
	The sequence structure, translation, and chāyā

Everything on the left is a fact about the object. Everything on the right is an argument about it, and someone else may argue differently.

Why a text carries several editions

Because disagreement is the normal state of the field, and the model treats it as such rather than as a problem to be resolved before publication.

Two editions of the same manuscript can differ on any of the right-hand column — where one editor sees ṣa another sees ṣpa; where one restores a lost akṣara another leaves the gap open; where one divides two words another reads a compound. Both editions point at the same photographs, so a reader can put them side by side against the same evidence.

Nothing merges them and nothing ranks them. There is no "current" or "accepted" edition of a text, and no notion of one edition superseding another.

Editorial responsibility

An edition has exactly one owner: the account that created it. Nobody else can alter it, and no administrator merges other people's readings into a house version.

That means an edition is attributable in the ordinary scholarly sense, and it is what a citation should name. The Viewer's report puts the editor in the masthead for this reason. Cite the edition and its editor; the Viewer is only the display. See Sharing and Citing.

::: No co-editing An edition cannot have shared write access. The ability to transfer an edition to another account has not yet been implemented :::

Versions and revisions

An edition is a living record, not a snapshot. It has no version numbers, no revision history, and no published-versus-draft copies:

• Editing a published edition changes what readers see, immediately.
• There is no way to recover a previous state of an edition after a change.
• A citation of an edition points at the edition as it is now, not as it was when cited.

The practical consequences are worth taking seriously. Unpublish before making substantial revisions if you do not want readers seeing the work half-done — the visibility switch is the only draft mechanism there is. And if you want a reading preserved as it stood at a date, take a report and keep it; that is the only fixed form of an edition the system produces.

If a revision is substantial enough that the old reading should remain available, the model's own answer is to make a new edition of the same text rather than overwrite the old one. Editions are cheap, and the text will happily carry both.

::: Cloning The ability to clone an Edition for another account has not yet been implemented :::

Related

• The Data Model — where editions sit in the chain.
• Editions — creating and managing them.
• Publishing an Edition — the two visibility flags.