More on Wikipedia versus Britannica
Bill Ives, who admits earlier “I used the wikipedia a lot and now have renewed confidence in it,” points to posts on Many2Many and Freedom to Tinker concerning the debate about whether Wikipedia is better than Encyclopedia Britannica.
Freedom to Tinker’s evaluation often mentions which source is more current. It’s too bad no one talks about when the encyclopedias update. Since Wikipedia is a wiki, anyone can edit it at any time. It makes sense that its information is quite up-to-date. I don’t know anything about Encyclopedia Britannica’s publication/update schedule. If it isn’t something that can be easily edited, perhaps it isn’t updated as often, which could account for some of the differences. I tried to find information about Britannica’s update schedule on their Web sites, but didn’t find anything within a few minutes of looking in the most likely places for the information.
I wonder if there’s some kind of relationship between these blog posts and the September 9 Washington Post article on the same topic or if it’s a coincidence that they appeared so close together.
September 15th, 2004 at 6:56 am
My comparison on Freedom to Tinker used the online version of Britannica, so there was no logistical barrier to rapid updating. And I only complained about information that was several years out of date.
The Governor’s Residence of New Jersey moved more than twenty years ago, but Britannica Online hasn’t been updated to reflect this. The Microsoft case was settled three years ago, and Britannica Online doesn’t reflect this either.
September 15th, 2004 at 3:12 pm
On the update frequency matter, here’s how many of the 352,151 English language Wikipedia articles at the time I checked on 14 September 2004 had been updated within the time given:
1 month: 49%
2 months: 72%
6 months: 92%
12 months: 98.7%
18 months: 99.67%
There’s a report, Special:Ancientpages, which lists pages by aascending date of last edit.