On Tue, Mar 31, 2009 at 12:27 AM, David Goodman <dgoodma...@gmail.com> wrote: > Britannica in its various incarnations and Encarta were excellent and > useful reference works. Britannica remains useful. Encarta I think > could have remained useful also. I really regret that we had a role in > killing it. Why should we be pleased? > The commercial organizations need to compete. We do not. The more > encyclopedias the better. >
One reason we might be pleased is if we take the explanation from the FAQ (which seems to have been taken down) at face value: "Encarta has been a popular product around the world for many years. However, the category of traditional encyclopedias and reference material has changed. People today seek and consume information in considerably different ways than in years past. As part of Microsoft’s goal to deliver the most effective and engaging resources for today’s consumer, it has made the decision to exit the Encarta business. Microsoft’s vision is that everyone around the world needs to have access to quality education, and we believe that we can use what we’ve learned and assets we’ve accrued with offerings like Encarta to develop future technology solutions. In doing so, we feel strongly that we are making the right investments that will help make our vision a reality." If the people at Microsoft are going to put resources behind serious innovation in the educational reference space, then the loss of an encyclopedia could be offset with the gain of something better. It's not hard to see that the writing is on the wall for Britannica as well. The recent subscriber-submitted edits thing is just a gimmick to drum up a few more subscribers, and evidence of how bad their situation is. But this is part of a bigger story... the market for newspapers is crumbling as well (a situation I think Clay Shirky explains very well in a recent essay: http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2009/03/newspapers-and-thinking-the-unthinkable/ ), and if anything, Wikipedia has had a small hand in slowing their decline. We don't run ads (and so don't further dilute the ad-space marketplace) and we intentionally privilege newspaper content over the blogs and other new media that usually get blamed for the newspapers' decline...which both reifies their authority and drives traffic to their archival content. (The decline in newspaper journalism is going to spell trouble for Wikipedia as more and more often there will be no simple rubric for identifying reliable sources. What happens when Huffington Post, with its new endowment for investigative journalism, starts breaking stories and newspapers are the ones simply doing analysis after the fact?) If Wikipedia hadn't killed Encarta, would it be dying anyway by now? I think probably so. (Remember, Britannica's present difficulties started in the 1990s, in part because of Encarta and in part because of the Internet in general.) -Sage (User:Ragesoss) _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
