Sorry for not being more clear. All of our reference articles are free through MSN Search. Some additional articles we publish are not, including our "Sidebar" articles, like the one you mentioned. These are a little different from normal reference articles in that they present a particular point of view and are typically signed by the author. Also, since these articles represent the opinions of a specific person, they are not editable.
Hi folks. This is Aaron Patterson, the Program Manager from the Encarta blog. We noticed there was a pretty vigorous discussion going on over at Slashdot so I wanted to chime in with a couple comments.
First -- about that Bud Light Real Men of Genius comment earlier, I was literally on the verge of rofl'ing when I read that. Our product unit manager bought me a commemorative Bud Light to celebrate. So thanks for the good humor.
On the more substantive points brought up, first I want to stress that we realize community editing will live or die based on the feedback of people who are interested in using it. So there's a lot of stuff brought up in this thread that's very relevant to us. We're going to be posting more to our blog soon (http://spaces.msn.com/members/Encarta) to follow up on a lot of the points made here and solicit feedback... I encourage anyone who has an interest to keep an eye on that blog and get involved in this discussion with us.
There are also two things I want to bring up here. I saw several people raising two issues with what we're doing that deserve some discussion. One is a question about why someone would want to contribute free labor to Encarta, when we then turn around and make money off of their contributions.
We're a commercial product, so generating revenue's important to us. We're not going to stop making money off of Encarta in the near future. But let me ask you guys this--would it change things if we gave some money back? We've discussed this several times internally, and many of us on the product team and editorial staff find it appealing, because we want to fairly compensate people who do good work. The devil is in the details of how you do that, though, since an article is contributed to by many people. Do you guys have any thoughts on how a compensation model might work?
(Also, for those who would like to read and edit all our articles without paying, did you know that you have access to all of them for free using MSN Search? Just run your search using the Encarta tab: http://search.msn.com/encarta/results.aspx?FORM=EN HP&q=)
The second thing which was brought up here was this question about how the content is licensed. This is another thing we've had some discussions about, and we're very open to feedback on what approach we should take here. Again, we're a commercial product, so we can't just GFDL the whole thing and say anyone can use everything even if it might conflict with our commercial interests. But we understand the fair desire contributors have to be able to reuse their own contributions. It's also probably going a little far if we say that someone can update three words in an article and then have all the rights they want to that whole article, but maybe broader licensing rights would make sense for the most active contributors? Do you have any thoughts on how a balance could be struck between these requirements?
We're really interested in reading any responses this generates. Our intent is to take a great reference source and make it even better with the help of the many smart people out there that use reference works. Since there are clearly many people in the Slashdot community who are thinking about this stuff, we'd like to start here.
Thanks for the feedback,
Aaron Patterson
Microsoft Encarta PM
Slashdot Mirror
Hi Axel,
Sorry for not being more clear. All of our reference articles are free through MSN Search. Some additional articles we publish are not, including our "Sidebar" articles, like the one you mentioned. These are a little different from normal reference articles in that they present a particular point of view and are typically signed by the author. Also, since these articles represent the opinions of a specific person, they are not editable.
Hope that clears things up.
Thanks,
AaronP
Hi folks. This is Aaron Patterson, the Program Manager from the Encarta blog. We noticed there was a pretty vigorous discussion going on over at Slashdot so I wanted to chime in with a couple comments.
First -- about that Bud Light Real Men of Genius comment earlier, I was literally on the verge of rofl'ing when I read that. Our product unit manager bought me a commemorative Bud Light to celebrate. So thanks for the good humor.
On the more substantive points brought up, first I want to stress that we realize community editing will live or die based on the feedback of people who are interested in using it. So there's a lot of stuff brought up in this thread that's very relevant to us. We're going to be posting more to our blog soon (http://spaces.msn.com/members/Encarta) to follow up on a lot of the points made here and solicit feedback... I encourage anyone who has an interest to keep an eye on that blog and get involved in this discussion with us.
There are also two things I want to bring up here. I saw several people raising two issues with what we're doing that deserve some discussion. One is a question about why someone would want to contribute free labor to Encarta, when we then turn around and make money off of their contributions.
We're a commercial product, so generating revenue's important to us. We're not going to stop making money off of Encarta in the near future. But let me ask you guys this--would it change things if we gave some money back? We've discussed this several times internally, and many of us on the product team and editorial staff find it appealing, because we want to fairly compensate people who do good work. The devil is in the details of how you do that, though, since an article is contributed to by many people. Do you guys have any thoughts on how a compensation model might work?
(Also, for those who would like to read and edit all our articles without paying, did you know that you have access to all of them for free using MSN Search? Just run your search using the Encarta tab: http://search.msn.com/encarta/results.aspx?FORM=EN HP&q=)
The second thing which was brought up here was this question about how the content is licensed. This is another thing we've had some discussions about, and we're very open to feedback on what approach we should take here. Again, we're a commercial product, so we can't just GFDL the whole thing and say anyone can use everything even if it might conflict with our commercial interests. But we understand the fair desire contributors have to be able to reuse their own contributions. It's also probably going a little far if we say that someone can update three words in an article and then have all the rights they want to that whole article, but maybe broader licensing rights would make sense for the most active contributors? Do you have any thoughts on how a balance could be struck between these requirements?
We're really interested in reading any responses this generates. Our intent is to take a great reference source and make it even better with the help of the many smart people out there that use reference works. Since there are clearly many people in the Slashdot community who are thinking about this stuff, we'd like to start here.
Thanks for the feedback,
Aaron Patterson
Microsoft Encarta PM