Implicit Versioning

The documentation system tenet of implicit versioning states that the documentation system should maintain document version control automatically, and the capability of selecting versioned documents in a consistent manner. This tenet supports the principle of truth proximity by discouraging the proliferation of stale files.

Most open source and commercial document systems adhere to this tenet. As per Nelson’s (1987) observation, “When a document is updated, a reader will ordinarily want to see the new version- but the reader may be following a link made to an older version.”. Implicit versioning is also key “to ensure that assumptions about the past and present are correctly based and so avoid embarking on irrelevant or misguided courses of action” (Mooney, as cited in Choo, 2002).

Unfortunately, many enterprises still rely on legacy documentation systems and processes in which users normally create different document versions manually, for example:

• X:\Documents\2023\Sales\Sales_Strategy_v0.1.docx
• X:\Documents\2023\Sales\Sales_Strategy_v0.2.docx
• X:\Documents\2023\Sales\Sales_Strategy_v0.3.docx

This tenet refers to two different but complementary aspects when it comes to versioning. 

One is that every change that we produce results in a new document version so that we can compare changes, switch to a previous version, or roll back. Such is the nature of modern source code management systems and nearly all wiki engines. 

The other one is a bit more nuanced, and it is the ability to reference and select such resulting document versions consistently. Users may want to select specific versions when creating a composite document. In other words, implicit versioning is not only about ‘undo’ capabilities but it is essential to support evolutionary document composition. In this regard, Nelson said:

“A particular form of compound document is one which consists explicitly of an original and changes to it- which may be made by anyone. (We may call this a derivative document). The integrity of each document is maintained by keeping the two aspects separate: derivative documents are permanently defined (and stored) in terms of the originals and the changes.”

It is also important, from an authoring perspective, to visualize the changes in such a way that forks can be told: “Actually, we may best visualize these alternative versions as a tree in the ongoing braid, a forking arrangement whereby one document becomes two, each of these daughter documents may in turn become others”. 

Bush (1945) also noted the usefulness in being able to compare different versions side-by-side: “As he has several projection positions, he can leave one item in position while he calls up another”.