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And newspapers have been embracing the Internet as never before.Д«ut there's a cautionary tale here for newspapers mulling the idea of all joining together and putting their journalistic expertise behind a pay wall. Encarta eventually included some crowdsourcing, for instance. That's the model that news organizations have long used as well.Д®very information provider is changing.

Hiawatha Bray over at gives the details here. Britannica, for its part, is planning to adopt Wiki techniques, as Encarta did, but is not likely to go whole hog into open-source editing.

It was interactive, but it still was based on the old 'push' model that Britannica, Americana, Funk & Wagnalls, and other encyclopedias used. Pleasant as that was, it was a fairly inefficient way of checking facts.Д®ncarta was modern when information providers (newspapers, databases, encyclopedias) were still considering whether it made sense to go online at all - and if so whether to charge users for the experience.Д®ncarta was Web 1.0. It incorporated the old Funk & Wagnall's and Collier's encyclopedias. First as a CD/ROM, Encarta was a very cool digital encyclopedia for the '90s. Any bookish kid remembers curling up with 'A-Aardvark' on a rainy day and following the serendipity of knowledge where it led.Д®ncarta was a wonderful product, too. You can subscribe to premium content for $69.95/yr (the sales pitch includes this amazing fact: 'Save $1,325.05 off the print EncyclopГ¦dia Britannica.' $1,325.05!)Д«ritannica is a wonderful publication.

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And a search for Wikipedia provides one paragraph plus a pop-up window telling you you are trying to access premium content.

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A search for Encarta in the free portion of the Britannica site turns up nothing. Editors of traditional reference works such as the EncyclopГ¦dia Britannica have questioned the project's utility and status as an encyclopedia.' Some commentators suggest that Wikipedia is generally reliable, but that the reliability of any given article is not always clear. 'Wikipedia has been accused of exhibiting systemic bias and inconsistency critics argue that Wikipedia's open nature and a lack of proper sources for much of the information makes it unreliable. (Don't worry, it won't cause a cognitive meltdown of the Internets.) Among other things, you get an extensive article with this self-aware passage: More mad science: Go to and search for Wikipedia. It's impossible to find an Encarta entry on the subject of 'Encarta.'

Who added it? Who knows? But that's the kind of instant updating that an organic, crowd-sourced encyclopedia born on the Internet can do.Д®, of course, has the news of Encarta's demise, too, but as points out, it's in a Microsoft product announcement FAQ on the site. Encarta Japan will be discontinued on December 31, 2009.' 'All editions of Encarta except Encarta Japan are being discontinued as of Octo. As of an hour after the announcement by Encarta's parent, Microsoft, this sentence had been added: Go to the third paragraph of the Encarta entry in Wikipedia. What does that say about how we get information? And about the future of newspapers? What it never did was truly embrace the power of the Internet. It began life as CD/ROM and increasingly went online. Encarta was the early digital encyclopedia.