User:Ragesoss/Corddry


 * Tell me about how you became in involved with Encarta. What was your background?


 * At Noam Cohen's NYT Bits Blog article, a commenter named "Patrick", who says he worked on Encarta, complains about Wikipedia's distortion of the naming of Encarta. How did Encarta get its name?  Was its codename really "Gandalf"?


 * How did you and the others on the Encarta team view what you were doing, in terms of Britannica and other traditional encyclopedias?


 * From a business perspective, was Encarta a success? How long did it take to recoup the start-up costs?


 * One storyline about Encarta has been, "Oh, it had great images and multimedia and that's why it had the success it did, even if its articles weren't that great." You've pushed back against that in terms of article quality.  But could you talk a little bit about the images and multimedia?  How important were they?  Do you see media rights issues, and particularly Wikipedia's involvement with copyleft and free culture ideology, as a significant factor either inhibiting or enabling Wikipedia's success?


 * Another commenter who says he worked on Encarta, "Jim Ok", says that much of the original Funk and Wagnall's content got re-written by Encarta editors. As Encarta evolved over the years, how much of that original base remained?


 * Looking back, do you think Encarta's end was preventable? Were there any major mistakes (either during your tenure or later) in terms of how the project developed that doomed it? Or did it sort of live out its natural life, with replacement by the Internet in general being inevitable in the long run?


 * What role do you think Wikipedia, specifically, played in the shutdown of Encarta? Is Wikipedia and the rest of the web an adequate replacement for professionally-produced general encyclopedias, or is there something important that will be lost when the last of them shuts down?


 * Do you have any insight into what might happen to Encarta's content? Some Wikipedians have been reaching out to Microsoft to try to get it released under a Wikipedia-compatible free license.  Do you see any chance of that happening?


 * What do you make of ongoing disintegration of the newspaper industry? Do you think as viable a replacement as in the case of encyclopedias will emerge?  Or is journalism a different beast?


 * What have you been doing since leaving the Encarta project?