Hi folks. My name’s Aaron and I’m a Program Manager on the MSN Encarta team. A big part of my job is thinking about how we can do a better job collecting and responding to user feedback, as well as build community on the Encarta Web site.

We’ve had several updates to MSN Encarta available on our beta site for the past few weeks. We’re just about ready to update our official site with these new changes, and I wanted to spend some time describing them.

The biggest change in this release is that we’re adding many ways for customers to submit feedback. For starters, there’s our new blog, which you obviously know about if you’re reading this. :-) In the coming months we’ll be writing about changes we’re thinking of making to the Encarta product, as well as some new projects, too, and we want to know what you think about our plans.

Also, as Gary mentioned in his previous post, we’re now encouraging users to submit suggestions for actual changes to our encyclopedia articles. We’re very interested in hearing your opinions on how to create a thriving community of people that are passionate about building a great reference source. It probably goes without saying that we have a lot of thoughts about this too, so in an upcoming post I’ll share that thinking with you and ask for your response. In the meantime, you should check out the article editing and suggestion tools we’ve developed:

• There’s a brief overview of these new features on this page.
• All of our regular encyclopedia articles, like the Lichen article, now have links that will load the article in our Article Editor. We’ve also added a comment box to the bottom of every article so you can still tell us what you think if you don’t want to make an edit.

To support this program, we’ve hired some new research editors. Their job will be to help you out with things like fact-checking, syntax, and editorial style. Every writer can use a good editor, and we see no reason that community contributors deserve any less.

In addition to our new feedback and editing features, we’ve made a few additional changes to MSN Encarta which we hope you’ll find useful:

• The “Encarta Answers” service for getting instant answers to your questions will be available in three new languages: French, German, and Spanish. Answers is an easy way to get quick facts, answer math problems, and more through the search engine on our site or through MSN Search. My colleague John Solaro has already posted some info about it on the MSN Search blog.
• We also gave our whole site a makeover, with a simpler, cleaner design. It makes all of our pages load a bit faster, too.
• Last but not least, we stopped showing ads to Encarta Premium users! This is something that many of you have asked for, and we decided to do the right thing for our customers. Users of MSN Premium or Encarta Premium will now be able to enjoy an ad-free site, along with additional encyclopedia articles, homework tools, our magazine archive, and more.

We hope you enjoy these improvements to MSN Encarta. There’s more on the way, so stay tuned to this Space. In particular we’ll be posting some thoughts soon about community-based editing, so keep checking back.

Aaron Patterson

Microsoft Encarta Program Manager

(Update: This post originally stated incorrectly that the Encarta Answers service would be made available in four languages including Dutch. It has been updated to remove this reference. Encarta Answers is currently available in English and will be made available in French, German and Spanish.

Also, we're now live! All of our customers can now experience the article editor and our other new features. Links have been updated appropriately to point to the live site instead of the beta.)