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It is true that later on, in order to support the idea of charging money for the thing, Encarta did hire competent editors (one or two from Britannica, as I recall) and actually created an editorial process. Low quality is always a weak argument against “free.” The marketing strategy was obvious: Sell someone a computer with a “free” encyclopedia already installed, and they will be far less likely to purchase any other encyclopedia. What is perhaps not so fondly remembered about Encarta is that originally it was given away. As a matter of fact, Britannica’s text was very well structured and, in addition, it contained more than a million internal indexing links that had been created, not by an algorithm that could not distinguish homographs or different senses of a word, but by indexers who knew to distinguish the relevant from the superficial. It’s mainly an engineer’s case – the core Funk & Wagnalls text, he claims, was superior for the purpose to Britannica’s because it was “more nearly ‘structured data’.” The whiff of sour grapes may or may not be in my imagination, but the memory of Dick Martin pronouncing “Funk & Wagnalls” is certainly not. In the comments a fellow named Tom Corddry, who says he ran the Encarta project at the beginning, makes a case for the respectability of his product. This assumes that Wikipedia had anything to do with it, an assumption that many observers and futurepundits are very, very eager to make.
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In the wake of the news that Encarta, Microsoft’s electronic encyclopedia, is to be euthanized, the question of the day seems to be, Is Wikipedia to be blamed or thanked?