I have been clearing through some old books recently, and came across The Meaning of Everything by Simon Winchester which tells the story of the creation of the Oxford English Dictionary.
I read the book a number of years ago, but one thing that stuck with me was the way in which the OED built improvement into their approach.
The for the first edition of the OED, the editors began, logically, at the letter 'A', and then worked sequentially through the alphabet. For the second edition, they started at the letter 'M'. The reason behind that choice was that they figured that by mid-alphabet the original editors had probably got their act together.
For round two, starting revising (many decades later – edition one took 71 years to create) from a point where the quality would probably be fairly good, thus allowing the second edition team to get up to speed with their processes by the time that they got to the content that probably needed most work.
It still strikes me as how clever, in that it is so obvious, this approach was.
mmitII 