On Thu, Jan 22, 2009 at 2:04 PM, Charles Matthews <charles.r.matth...@ntlworld.com> wrote: > the wub wrote >> Also from the article:
Re-quoting link to article (more comments below): http://www.smh.com.au/news/technology/biztech/battle-to-outgun-wikipedia-and-google/2009/01/22/1232471469973.html?page=fullpage#contentSwap1 >> "He said the encyclopedia had set a benchmark of a 20-minute >> turnaround to update the site with user-submitted edits to existing >> articles" >> >> That'll probably be faster than us once flagged revisions is switched >> on (compare with the German expeiment, where backlogs are up to 3 >> weeks) which should make for an interesting role reversal. >> (I don't want to derail this thread into arguing about flaggedrevs, >> just thought it was amusing) >> > Certainly that benchmark is impressive. I have a personal figure of > about ten minutes, for "how long it takes to add a new researched fact > to enWP". Assuming only this is a fact-checking exercise based on > Google, it would be quite something for EB to sustain this 24/7. Of > course it may be deduced some other way, for example telling employees > that they are supposed to vet two dozen submissions in a working day, > and rather assuming a good match of employees to time zones. But in any > case there would be a question-mark over how things scale. Presumably > they are not intending a big expansion of coverage on current affairs? There may also be a big presumption of rejecting most updates. Their standards may be (almost certainly are) different to ours. Rather than verifiability and "sounds OK and has sources" (I know, I know...), they may intend to only accept the best updates and the ones that really do improve the articles. They may also be looking for major improvements and additions, rather than incremental improvements. Though doing that in 20 minutes does sound optimistic. A 20-minute turnaround does sound more like a "can you copyedit and proofread our articles for us?" approach. I guess the only way to find out is to go and suggest different sorts of changes and see what gets accepted. And a "fact checking exercise based on Google" can be excellent in some areas and useless in others, as we all know already. I really hope EB aren't doing that. Hopefully their fact-checking would involve access to various paid-for databases and a library of books as well. If the book needed can be found quickly (in the same room), 20 minutes is just about doable. If the update is large and books needed are in a remote location, then you would be talking hours and days to update. "Would-be editors on the Britannica site will have to register using their real names and addresses before they are allowed to modify or write their own articles." That sounds like an attempt to merge Wikipedia, Knol and Britannica. On something else completely, the comparison isn't direct: "Founded in 1994, the Britannica.com's database contains articles comprising more than 46 million words [...] Founded in 2001, Wikipedia is now available in more than 250 languages and attracts about 700 million visitors annually. The English editon alone contains nearly 2.7 million articles." Britannica is 46 million words. Do we know how many *words* Wikipedia is? How many *articles* Britannica is? Carcharoth PS. That's an *awful* picture of Jimmy! :-) _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
