On Tue, 2003-09-30 at 14:10, Daniel Ehrenberg wrote:
Well, an encyclopedia typically has the goal of a
static end product too, don't they? And they need to
meet some sort of deadline.
On the contrary, the paper encyclopedias I've seen publish regular
supplements and churn out a whole new edition after some number of
years. It's clearly their goal to stay as up to date as possible.
Deadlines and batched updates are an artifact of the paper publishing
process, which requires a long lead time and relatively large print runs
to be remotely profitable. With online publishing, effectively a new
edition of the encyclopedia is published every 15 seconds (whenever an
article is updated), and visitors to the main web site see this latest
edition unless they decide to look up older editions through the page
history.
-- brion vibber (brion @
pobox.com)