16 Facts About Encarta

Microsoft Encarta is a discontinued digital multimedia encyclopedia published by Microsoft from 1993 to 2009.

Name Encarta was created for Microsoft by an advertising agency.

In 2000, the full Encarta content became available on the World Wide Web to subscribers, with a subset available for free to anyone.

Demise of Encarta was widely attributed to competition from the free and user-generated Wikipedia, which grew to be larger than Encarta from its early beginnings in 2001 thanks to popularization by web search services like Google.

Content copied from Encarta was appended with a copyright boilerplate message after the selection.

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Microsoft had for a brief period a separate product known as Encarta Africana which was an encyclopedia of black history and culture.

Encarta 2003 incorporated literature guides and book summaries, foreign language translation dictionaries, a Homework Center and Chart Maker.

Encarta 2005 introduced another program called Encarta Kids aimed at children to make learning fun.

Encarta included a trivia game called "MindMaze" in which the player explores a castle by answering questions whose answers can be found in the encyclopedia's articles.

Until 2005, Encarta came in three primary software editions: Standard, Deluxe, and Reference Library .

Encarta generated a visible-light moon atlas with names of major craters and hyperlinks.

Encarta was able to use various Microsoft technologies because it was extensible with software components for displaying unique types of multimedia information.

Encarta used database technologies to generate much of its multimedia content.

For example, Encarta generated each zoomable map from a global geographic information system database on demand.

Encarta content was accessible using a conversational interface on Windows Live Messenger via the MSN Bot "Encarta Instant Answers".

However, despite the inclusion of news-related and some supplementary articles, Encarta contents had not been changed substantially in its later years.