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Microsoft Encarta Adopting Wikiesque Process
An anonymous reader writes "The MSN Encarta program manager announced that readers of Microsoft's encyclopedia articles can now edit articles in a Wikipedia-like fashion. Once submitted, edits are reviewed by Encarta staff members for accuracy, readability, and proofreading before being incorporated into the article." From the post: "To support this program, we've hired some new research editors. Their job will be to help you out with things like fact-checking, syntax, and editorial style. Every writer can use a good editor, and we see no reason that community contributors deserve any less." J adds: This won't be a big surprise, but "Your submissions to Encarta must be your own work" and "you grant Microsoft permission to use, copy, distribute, transmit, publicly display, publicly perform, reproduce, edit, modify, translate and reformat your Submission."
This mirrors some of my experiences. Basically, what Larry Sanger said was right, only the phrasing "anti-elitist" was unfortunate.
WP discourages spending much time on an article. After all, the next guy will just pop his 5-minutes thoughts right into it, or as you said add trivia upon trivia or - frequently - paste some weirdo stuff or conspiracy, thus diluting the real content. They just covered your work in a piece of BS.
Even worse, if you or someone else doesn't "defend" your article, it could be completely defaced/rewritten when you're not watching. Proof of this is that often the best articles are the ones from the "lone hobbyist", writing undisturbed about her/his favorite subject.
Right on.
Wikipedia was a great concept at first, but it's become such a big back-and-forth mess that I don't bother with it anymore. There's just too much worthless junk for it to be reasonably useful.
I'd rather use something trustable, like even Encarta, which is basically free on the internet unless you need the premium features. At least I can rest assured that the content is clean, organized, and reliable. I would definitely recommend against citing Wikipedia as an official source for any kind of research.
> Slate published articles critical of MS all the time,
>even when they were owned by Microsoft.
>Just sayin', that's all.
And what happen to Slate?.
But that's a good Idea to make MS spin off Encarta.