Oldak Quill wrote:
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1
2008/6/3 David Goodman :
Quote from it worth some attention
We update the database at the rate of about 30-35 percent per year. A
third of the database is completely revised on a yearly basis thanks
to the input of our contributors. That's something that is probably
much more speedy than Wikipedia. Obviously Wikipedia cannot do that
because they are several times as large as we are
What an odd thing to claim. Wikipedia must have many hundreds the
number of contributors that Britannica has. Most of the articles I
come across have been edited in the last 6 months. I'm not sure how
"update the database" is defined here, but if we take it to mean an
article being edited, the majority of Wikipedia's database must be
updated every year. I would guess that over 75% of Wikipedia articles
have been edited in the last year. Are there any statistics on this?
I read it as them claiming that they actually did a full revamp of the
articles in question---doing a search for new information that might be
relevant to the article, looking for things that are obviously out of
date now, rewriting old and now-crufty prose or reorganizing the
article, etc. Those might sometimes result in relatively minor changes,
but it at least requires a full re-read and re-consideration of the
article and a search of the relevant literature.
To figure out how often we do something like that, you can't just look
at percentage of articles edited in the last year, since many of those
edits are very minor and don't constitute a full "update" of the
article---there's lots of typo fixes, recategorization, template
substitution, etc., many even done by bots. I would be curious what the
number is, though, if we take even a pretty generous definition of
"update" to mean any non-trivial addition or modification.
Anecdotally, of the articles I created over 2 years ago, about half seem
to have had significant editing done on them since then, while half have
not. Over a hundred have never had a single non-trivial edit. But then I
tend to work mainly in the area of pre-20th-century biographies, and
fairly obscure ones at that. In that area 2+ years old isn't anywhere
near a worst case---we have tons of articles that literally haven't been
updated since 1849 (not to mention 1911).
-Mark