When TV ratings go down, the shows are changed, sometimes so drastically you wouldn't recognize them, and are often cancelled altogether, sometimes only two weeks into a new season. I once saw a show featured on one of the morning talk shows to promote that evening's performance, but the show was cancelled during the intervening hours. When school ratings go down, the ratings are changed; the show remains essentially the same, and it is often a best teacher award winner who gets cancelled while more boring teachers go on year after year to bore the children of an assortment of former students. The Preservation of Errors With the advent of electronic text there is no longer any reason but the Seven Deadly Sins [enumerated above] for a person not to share information. . .except. . .some value added work to make the texts better than what passed into their hands from previous editions. However, with a kind of infinitely reverse logic, most of the scholars dipping their toes into cyberspace, have the espoused idea that no Etexts should vary by one character from some exact paper predecessor, and that these Etexts, new that they are, should be absolutely identified with a particular paper edition which cannot be improved upon. Somehow this reminds me of the Dark Ages, that 1500 years during which no weighty tome of the past could be updated because that would be the same thing as challenging those revered authorities of the Golden Age of Greece, which we all know can never be improved upon. Their tomes were copied, over, and over, and over again-- with the inevitable degradation that comes with telephone games [in which you whisper a secret message through ears after ears in a circle, until completely distorted babble returns from the other side]. Even xeroxing has this bad result if you do it over and over. Therefore scholars developed a habit of searching for any differences between editions, and referring back to older editions to resolve differences, because the more copying the more chances for the addition of errors, comments and other possibly spurious information. This was probably ok for the environment they lived in... but a serious failing caused the Dark Ages which lasted a VERY LONG TIME by anyone's standards, and served to warn, in a manner we should NOT ignore, that this should not be the way things should be done in the future.