Added to Compendium under:

Colors, Tweaks, Customizations, and Guides:
Good Work

Well since this a mod of the Improvements.xml unless the author has been doing compares and updating his mod regularly then it should work but will break many of the fixes the dev's have done on the game esp as Improvements.xml has been changed several times since.

Not actually true at all, a mod like this that overwrites the existing file may not outright break something but if it is an old version it will not include any of the new changes.  Additionally if the devs fix something like spaces in the internal name of a tech then the improvement that tech enables wont even be available if you are using an old ImprovementDefs.xml like this one.  Mods often break games when they aren't updated regularly thats why append mods are best and even better would be the <replace> code TheCW has proposed.  As I said it should work but it may break any number of things.

Just compared the code, and the file will break Xeno_irrigation and a few of the other stuff that's been altered with the more recent patches. For the rest surprisingly little actually.

OK how do you check and compare XML files sound like it would save me some headaches if I knew how??

I use two tools, the Compare plugin for Notepad++ works very well, but more recently I have started using a program called winmerge.

You feed it two directories and it compares the files in each side by side and tells you a host of things like when each file was last updated, which files match, which files exist only on one side or the other.  Then you can select a file and in the case of xml's I select "compare as xml" this displays the two files side by side intelligently and displays the differences between the two, the key thing is it does so very intelligently not just a simple line by line but compares them by content.  It displays where content has changed and even where lines have been removed or added on each side.

And here is the awesome part, you can right click on a differing element on one side and tell it to "copy to other side" and it automatically duplicates that line or set of lines on the other document.  This allows me to very quickly check my files against the game files, see which have been changed by the devs and then easily parse through them copying just the updates to my files so my mods remain intact with the newest patch changes merged in.

Would highly recommend this to any modder.

P.S. using the "compare as xml" preserves the files formatting when saved rather than collapsing empty lines which it is otherwise inclined to do.