Talk:Encarta

Why is the title of an article not simply Encarta? I don't think there is a conflict. If Encarta might mean something difference, the redirect of Encarta to Microsoft Encarta is misleading. -- Taku 23:16 Mar 6, 2003 (UTC)

I note that this is now fixed. I'm just adding this comment to avoid future confusion arising from this being a seemingly unanswered question. - IMSoP 14:16, 21 Jan 2004 (UTC)

Contents

1 Logo

2 Jesus, NPOS-biased Wikipedians

3 Link of Encarta on Encarta Website

4 oops forgot to enter my username

5 Comments

6 firts edition of Encarta (1993) / Primera edicion de Encarta (1993)

7 Misc.

8 Encarta's source?

9 Wiki-Encarta

10 drastically reducing image quality?

11 not only in english language/wikipedia

12 Criticism section

Logo

Please see Wikipedia talk:Logos for my explanation of why using the logo of an encyclopedia or other reference work is a bad idea, and why I have reinserted a guideline suggesting that such logos not be used. I've carefully indicated the reinsertion as tentative, and am not doing anything about the logo presently on this page pending further discussion.

In brief: trademark law seems to turn heavily on whether the use of a trademark is by a company that is even remotely in the same business as the company that owns the trademark. Even if nobody in their right mind thinks that Wikipedia is trying to borrow Encarta's good name by using their trademark in the way we're using it, it is, nevertheless, closer to a grey area than using Howard Johnson's logo, because nobody is going to try to buy frozen Tendersweet fried clam strips from Wikipedia. Dpbsmith 20:47, 29 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Jesus, NPOS-biased Wikipedians

i wrote a full review in the early days of this article and now this article is reduced to pretty much bland empty content. The wikipedians, on the whole, are sticklers to their so-called "neutral point of view", but regardless cannot escape their collective point of "fuck everything non-opensource" view. Xah Lee P0lyglut 01:58, 2004 May 13 (UTC)

I just read the last version you edited, 11 Dec 2003. I agree that what you have said is valuable and that the current article has indeed been made more bland and empty.

It is appropriate for articles about encyclopedias to have (documented, supported, factual, verifiable) statements that help define the nature of and the differences between Encarta, Britannica, World Book, etc. A frequent problem in Wikipedia, of which I think this is an example, is that a contributor adds truthful, valuable, reasonably objective material on his own authority, which then gets removed as being apparently original research or POV. I think the stuff you contributed was probably accurate, but I'm not sure that you presented it in a way that made it verifiable.

Wikipedia IMHO does err on the side of blandness and safety. Never say anything and you'll never say anything wrong. I think too many Wikipedians' model of what an encyclopedia should be is the (ugh) World Book and not the (hooray!) Encyclopedia Britannica 11th Edition.

Judging from the tone of your remark, you probably aren't interested in revisiting this again, but I think it would be very valuable if you cared to put some of this information back, not as "a review," but in the form of statement about how Encarta relates to, say, Britannica, with some verifiable or objective backing for them.

BTW what does "NPOS" mean? Dpbsmith 13:04, 13 May 2004 (UTC)

I think it's true that some Wikipedians have a bad habit of removing POV or "on own authority" or "quality judgment" stuff, rather than refactoring it. (Certainly, I've been guilty of this in the past). I think the difficulty lies in the fact that it's a lot more effort to cite sources than it is to insert your own opinions. For example, it's quite easy to write, "The content of Encarta is not as scholarly and in depth as the 20 or so printed tomes of Britannica", but it's a lot harder for another editor to NPOV it by providing sources and quotes, so it is often omitted instead. I think it is, however, marginally preferable that things are verifiable rather than interesting.

It is clearly preferable, though, to be both interesting AND verifiable. In this particular case, I would encourage P0lyglut (if still interested) to help find some sources and reviews for Encarta, so we can improve this article. — Matt 13:38, 13 May 2004 (UTC)

e.g. This (published) article — http://ifets.ieee.org/periodical/vol_1_2002/alevizou.html — includes the statement:

"[Microsoft] in 1993 offered Encarta, a multimedia product on CD-ROM that was based on the print encyclopaedia Funk and Wagnall’s. Arguably Encarta did not have the deep information of Britannica. However it proposed an alternative value: better search capabilities, portability, entertaining media features, and was much less expensive"

— Matt 13:44, 13 May 2004 (UTC)

Link of Encarta on Encarta Website

Hi, I want to put a link to encarta website which describes encarta website. If I make it wrong or it is against copyright please correct me. (I have already entered the number of articles encarta offers for free and for charges) if any of these changes is wrong plz guide me because i am new in wikipedia and want to learn.

just by the way I tried to find wikipedia on encarta and there were no results :)

thanks

The link you added seems perfectly OK. Welcome to WP, and thanks!

Just a quick pointer - You appear to have indented your comments using spaces at the beginning of the line, which does not produce the desired effect. What you need to do to indent text is to add a ':' (colon) to the beginning of the line, which indents the paragraph, as you see here, commonly used on talk pages to seperate replies.

Adding spaces to the beginning of a line produces the stragely laid out code you saw before I removed them, as in this example:

example produced by adding a space to the beginning of the line.

This is mostly used for diagrams and formulae I think. [[User:Akadruid|akaDruid (Talk)]] 12:33, 22 Jul 2004 (UTC)

oops forgot to enter my username

hi, in last post I didn't know how to insert by name with comments I thought it will appear automatically so I am inserting it now it is Zain 20:53, 21 Jul 2004 (UTC) (hope this works) is there any way that my username is inserted automatically at the end of my everpost along with time stamp. thanks Zain 20:53, 21 Jul 2004 (UTC)

Comments

I think this article has a couple of problems; chiefly, it has sections that would be suitable for a critical review, but not for an encyclopedia article. Specifically:

Relatively insignificant information dominates the article, such as the "Contents", "World atlas", "World statistics", "Copy and paste function". It's not a problem including this information, but to make this a balanced and scholarly article it needs reworking, and possibly pruning. Example snippet, from the "Virtual flight" subsection: "...to fly a virtual airplane over the coarsely generated artificial landscape while listening to music possibly unrelated to that part of the world. The quality of the landscape is pretty low and the 480 x 240 fixed window is small. This feature seems to be unrelated to the popular Microsoft Flight Simulator. When the airplane reaches the border of that area, it just stops." — too many specifics. It would be perfectly sufficient to simply say, "The DVD version contains a primitive flight simulator."
The "A test search" section. This is original research, full of subjective opinion, and, moreover, far too small a sample size to provide a useful comparison of the encyclopedias. A good part of it is also off-topic, being related to other encyclopedias — "However, with Wikipedia, nothing is for sure." I think we should cut this out entirely.

Before I started hacking away, I thought I'd solicit some comments first! — Matt 09:06, 28 Sep 2004 (UTC)

firts edition of Encarta (1993) / Primera edicion de Encarta (1993)

I would like a lot them to provide me some data on the first edition of Encarta in the year of 1993, like exact date of their launching, how it was divided their content, the type of information multimedia that contained, as well as the tools for interactivity that could have.

Me gustarían mucho que me proporcionaran algunos datos de la primera edición de Encarta por el año de 1993, como la fecha exacta de su lanzamiento, cómo estaba dividido su contenido, el tipo de elementos multimedia que contenia, así como las herramientas de interactividad que pudo tener.

gabriel1z1z@yahoo.com-----------------

Yes, this really needs a history section. The Encyclopaedia Britannica article touches on this a bit. --ProhibitOnions 14:33, 2005 Jun 15 (UTC)

Misc.

In the Visual Browser section, there is the following text:

It may be necessary to scroll through a lot of irrelevant topics to move to the next level.

I don't know what it's trying to mean. Is it just me, or is the text not clear, even in its context?

eje211 18:20, 4 Dec 2004 (UTC)

I know the Visual Browser first appeared in the 2004 edition.

Encarta's source?

When I was younger (mid-nineties) we had the computer version of Encarta, and I also had an old set of the Funk & Wagnall's encyclopedia. I seem to remember that, for the most part, the text of the articles in the two sources were almost completely identical. Do we have information on where Encarta gets its documents? -Branddobbe 20:39, Feb 24, 2005 (UTC)

My old version of Encarta says it *is* The Funk and Wagnall's encyclopedia... 132.205.15.43 20:51, 8 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Wiki-Encarta

From

Encarta is letting users to submit edits to articles. 132.205.15.43 20:51, 8 Apr 2005 (UTC)

drastically reducing image quality?

the article says:

"Encarta is also notorious for drastically reducing the quality of images copied using the built-in image copy menu option and adding a copyright notice at the bottom, often covering up important details."

i have copied about 5 or so encarta images in the past. i didn't notice image quality degradation. There is copyright and source notice inserted at bottom of course, but to say "covering up important details" seems defamatory.

Xah Lee 22:57, 2005 Apr 8 (UTC)

not only in english language/wikipedia

http://fr.encarta.msn.com/ also in french language, introduction let us wrongly think that encarta is only in english language... another thing : you could mention that encarta doesn't mention Wikipedia in any article, and that wikipedia HAS an Encarta article... --130.83.244.131 01:06, 11 Apr 2005 (UTC) fr:Utilisateur:Moala

Microsoft publishes similar encyclopedias under the Encarta trademark in various languages, including German, French, Spanish, Dutch and Japanese. Localized versions may contain contents licensed from available national sources and may not contain the full English version contents.

This implies that localized versions may be SMALLER than the English Encarta - they could also be BIGGER... Känsterle 10:34, 12 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Criticism section

I've just reworded a sentence slightly in this section (I still don't like the repetition of some in "Some Wikipedians have noted that some" but can't think at this moment how to rephrase to avoid it.) and spotted that there is much more criticsim hidden in  comment tags. Why is this? If it belongs in the article it should be visible, if it doesn't why is it in the source? Thryduulf 10:10, 14 Apr 2005 (UTC)

I removed the self-reference, I don't think it's only Wikipedians that have noticed this, and even if it was it shouldn't really be worded like that (Wikipedia:Avoid self-references). As to the commented out stuff, it looks like a couple of random excerpts with no context. Not sure why it would count as criticism. But certainly, if it illustrates, or can be made to illustrate, some percieved flaw, then it should definitely be in. I seem to remember seeing some discussion about it being commented out, I'll have a root around. Worldtraveller 12:01, 14 Apr 2005 (UTC)

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