What, When and How? - the Art of Updating an Online Dictionary

Online dictionaries are not published in numbered editions and impressions which makes it difficult for users to know how old a particular entry is. As e-dictionaries grow older, the question of updating steadily becomes more pressing. Is everything up-to-date? If not, when was a particular entry composed, and when was it last revised? These are questions the users might ask themselves, and in this paper we deal with some of the aspects involved: what is most likely to change, when should revisions take place, and how can the staff keep track of entries in need of updating. The paper is based on experience from an online monolingual dictionary of Danish, but it is assumed that the problems and their solutions are independent of the particular project and language.