Letter to the Editor: A Concerned Reader on Meta-Content Risks

Dear Editor,

I read with great interest the recent guest column titled "The Digital Headline Crisis: When Technology Forgets Human Limits." While I appreciate the author's thoughtful analysis of the runaway headline problem, I must express a concern that kept me up last night.

Aren't we now putting "articles inside our articles?" It's like what the programmers call "code in your code" - and from my understanding of these matters, that's exactly how you get corruption in your data.

Think about it: The original problem was that someone put an entire article into a headline field. Now we've written an article ABOUT that article. What happens when someone writes an article about THIS article? And then another about that one? It's turtles all the way down, as they say.

I've been a member of this community for 23 years, and I've seen what happens when things reference themselves too much. My nephew's computer once crashed because a spreadsheet formula referenced itself. The whole thing just spun around until it gave up. Is that what we want for our newspaper?

I'm not saying we shouldn't discuss technical problems. I'm just suggesting we be careful about creating infinite loops of meta-content. Perhaps we need some kind of validation on our articles too - maybe a rule that says "no article shall be primarily about another article in the same publication."

Just something to consider before our entire archive collapses in on itself.

Respectfully concerned, Margaret Holloway Phoenix, AZ