Microsoft Encarta Concerned About Wikipedia?

Microsoft's Encarta must be feeling the pressure from Wikipedia. As traffic to the open-source, wiki-driven encyclopedia increases ... ... the folks at Microsoft must be wondering what it takes to keep people coming to its mainstream encyclopedia with its professionally written and edited articles. In what must be an effort to compete head-to-head with Encarta have decided to let readers be editors. Kind of. According to tested Wikipedia's standards by examining the entry on Alexander Hamilton; McHenry selected Hamilton because his birthdate is in dispute. The Wikipedia article on Hamilton (as of November 4, 2004) uses the 1755 date without comment. Unfortunately, a couple of references within the body of the article that mention his age in certain years are clearly derived from a source that used the 1757 date, creating an internal inconsistency that the reader has no means to resolve. Two different years are cited for the end of his service as secretary of the Treasury; without resorting to another reference work, you can guess that at least one of them is wrong. The article is rife with typographic errors, styling errors, and errors of grammar and diction. No doubt there are other factual errors as well, but I hardly needed to fact-check the piece to form my opinion. The writing is often awkward, and many sentences that are apparently meant to summarize some aspect of Hamilton's life or work betray the writer's lack of understanding of the subject matter. A representative one runs thus: Arguably, he set the path for American economic and military greatness, though the benefits might be argued.' All these arguments aside, the article is what might be expected of a high school student, and at that it would be a C paper at best. Yet this article has been edited' over 150 times. Some of those edits consisted of vandalism, and others were cleanups afterward. But how many Wikipedian editors have read that article and not noticed what I saw on a cursory scan? How long does it take for an article to evolve into a polished, presentable masterpiece,' or even just into a usable workaday encyclopedia article? The Encarta project appears to find a happy balance between community contributions and adherence to encyclopedic standards. Unfortunately, it's a model other organizations could follow only if they recognized the benefit that would accrue from the cost. Encarta was already doing some interesting things for an encyclopedia. There's an Shel Holtz is principal of a shel of my former self