There's a growing consensus among Wikipedia fans, and others, that Microsoft should donate the contents of the soon-to-be-defunct Encarta encyclopedia to the collaborative online repository that contributed to its demise. But Microsoft may have other plans -- even if doesn't yet know what they are.

In answering my initial set of questions about Encarta's planned closure yesterday, the company made it clear that it's trying to figure out whether it could offer some other product better-suited to the market.

"The decision to exit the Encarta business is one piece of a broader strategy to continue to evolve our product offerings to address the next wave of people’s search and research needs," a Microsoft representative said in an email. "We will continue to evaluate online reference business opportunities and will consider how Encarta and key learnings acquired over the past nearly 20 years of developing it can inform and strengthen our future educational solutions."

Particularly in the area of Internet search, the Encarta content has always seemed like an underutlized asset. Microsoft has offered free access to Encarta via its search engine, but the company has never quite figured out how to leverage Encarta into a big competitive differentiation against Google and Yahoo.

Could the closure of Encarta let Microsoft do something truly innovative with the content on its own? It's not clear, but given the possibility, it might be difficult to persuade the company to loosen its grip on the material, let alone donate it wholesale.

But it's worth a try. As he noted in the comments on our earlier post, Mathias Schindler of Wikimedia Germany has contacted Microsoft about the possibility, and others have been making similar efforts.

Wikipedia isn't the only option. Larry Sanger, a co-founder of Wikipedia now leading the alternative Citizendium.org, said via phone this morning that his group is also interested in talking to Microsoft about a donation of Encarta content. Alternatively, the group may also be able to arrange the funds for a purchase, he said.

Citizendium recently surpassed 10,000 articles, and Sanger predicted that an infusion of Encarta content would get even more people involved in the site.

For companies such as Microsoft, one challenge with encyclopedias is that they rapidly become worthless, from a business perspective, if people aren't updating them, Sanger noted.

"A lot of work went into creating those encyclopedias, and it’s just a huge shame if people can’t benefit from it," he said.

Microsoft hasn't yet responded directly to my follow-up question about whether it would consider any donation of Encarta content. I'll update this post depending on the response.

In the meantime, Tom Corddry of the original Encarta team offers his thoughts on the encyclopedia's demise in this illuminating comment on the New York Times' Bits blog.

"We expected from the beginning that Encarta would eventually be superceded by online information-seeking," he writes. "As brilliant as Wikipedia is, I don’t think that Wikipedia by itself killed Encarta. I think the Web as a whole made Encarta obsolete."

Update, 9 a.m.: It appears that Microsoft is, in fact, looking to make further use of the Encarta content on its own. Here's what the company said in response to my question about the possibility of donating the material to Wikipedia:

Microsoft’s vision is that everyone around the world will have access to quality education, and we believe that we can use the learnings and assets we’ve accrued with offerings like Encarta to develop future technology solutions that will help us realize that vision.  As we shift our investments away from content creation, we are able to place an even greater focus on the future innovations that will allow consumers to do more in the way of accessing, creating and sharing content.
 
That said, we are looking at ways to utilize what we’ve learned to inform and deliver on those innovations. While Encarta will no longer be available as we know it after October 2009, you will see the essence of the offering come through in future innovations.  Stay tuned.