On 6/2/08, Oldak Quill oldakquill@gmail.com wrote:
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?
The best I know of is 18 months out of date: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Carnildo/The_100
Based on that, we've got close to a 100% rate of updates to articles. Significant updates are a different matter: in the nine months covered by the survey, only about 25% of the articles had non-trivial changes made.