Wikipedia, where volunteer editors quickly update popular entries, Encarta can be embarrassingly outdated.
In January, Wikipedia got 97 percent of the visits that Web surfers in the United States made to online encyclopedias, according to the Internet ratings service Hitwise. Microsoft delivered the coup de grâce Monday to its dying Encarta encyclopedia, acknowledging what everyone else realized long ago: it just couldn’tĬompete with Wikipedia, a free, collaborative project that has become the leading encyclopedia on the Web.
