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)