The arrival of good internet search along with the ever increasing pool of web content doomed a curated content approach such as was used by Encarta (which coul

The arrival of good internet search along with the ever increasing pool of web content doomed a curated content approach such as was used by Encarta (which could never aspire to be as broad or deep as the web). I can tell you, based on watching sales figures and talking to many customers, that web search was a much bigger factor for the business than was Wikipedia. In any case it would have been much trickier to get the level of crowd input given to Wikipedia by a for profit enterprise. Regardless of tools or formats used.