Hot Off the Press

Wikipedia is also known for its incredibly quick updates. Since anyone can edit it, it often gets news before anywhere else does and fellow Wikipedians can then log on to the site and get the information hot off the press. For example, the 7 July 2005 London bombings apparently had a Wikipedia article just fourteen minutes after they were perpetrated. Soon, with editors using a special Wikipedia feature that gives a list of new articles buzzing around the article, it became more comprehensive than media coverage of the event: a powerful testimony to the power of Wikipedia.
Being a wiki, something that flies in the face of traditional encyclopedia wisdom and that has even led some to criticise it as not being an encyclopedia at all, gives Wikipedia an edge given to no other traditional encyclopedias: it is incredibly dynamic. Anything on the Internet can be dynamic if the editor edits the site now and then, but that would move incredibly slowly since there is a limit to what one person can do, and if that person is not at the scene when something relevant to the site happens, the site will fall behind. With Wikipedia, however, the update speed and fluidity is unprecedented. It does not have manpower constraints: with nearly eight million editors in 253 languages, Wikipedia can be updated by anybody who happens to be nearby when something happens, leading to such phenomena as the bombings article. Such things will never happen with more traditional encyclopedias, online or offline, and even when they are next updated the incident may be declared non-notable and left out of the encyclopedia. Notability criteria on Wikipedia tend to be extremely different from those of other encyclopedias, since Wikipedia, though decidedly not an indiscriminate collection of information (see this article) does not face the same size constraints as paper encyclopedias and can therefore include much more information. It's the definitive example (or at least one of the definitive examples) of a Web 2.0 site.