[WikiEN-l] Britannica attempts to become Wikipedia

[Delirium]

Oldak Quill wrote:
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> 2008/6/3 David Goodman :
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>> 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relevant to the article, looking for things that are obviously out of 
date now, rewriting old and now-crufty prose or reorganizing the 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