Mbo: No, of course not.

M.Ted: I don't know if they did or not. True, no evidence as yet. I'm sure MS felt their interests were at risk.

Here's what I posted to r.m.f this morning and it's all I know:

I wish I'd taken notes on the TV program, but I didn't. The interviews were with the various editors-writers. As I recall they were asked to drop all references to the slaughter by the encyclopedia owner, MS. MS had been threatened by Turkey which has officially denied any part of it. Usual stuff. (Sorry to preach but the outrage isn't against Turkey for doing the kind of deep shit many governments do - it's against MS for doing it for money) Supposedly MS employees in Turkey would be harassed at least. More likely it was a wink-wink-nudge-nudge. The writers rebelled and finally reached a compromised that the "incident" wouldn't be mentioned in the Turkey article and downplayed to one line in the Armenian article.

FYI alt.culture.armenian ran many pieces on it at: http://www.deja.com/[ST_rn=ps]/qs.xp?ST=PS&svcclass=dnyr&firstsearch=yes&preserve=1&QRY=microsoft+turkey+armenian&defaultOp=AND&DBS=1&OP=dnquery.xp&LNG=english&subjects=&groups=&authors=&fromdate=august+15+2000&todate=&showsort=score&maxhits=25 including a quote from "Chronicle of Higher Education."

The Chronicle seems to be reputable and is online but by subscription only. http://chronicle.com/ I reproduce that article below as it was quoted.

BTW, the little I read at alt.culture.turkish was equally outraged. The humans there don't like lies or genocide either. Up the internet!

In a related issue, I read an article in "The Watchtower" several years ago that utterly denied the charge as well and gave the usual supporting lying arguments. This was a matter of doctrine as much as church politics, considering the timing of the events and their timing of "end of days." I was stunned to see this and foolishly threw away the paper. Subsequent door-knockers have flatly denied knowledge of any such doctrine and have claimed to search "The Watchtower" back issues for me without finding it. I must leave that as it sits. But I can still picture the article.

The Chronicle of Higher Education August 18, 2000 (page 20)

"The Other Side of Genocide"

Covering up genocide is a tricky business. Probably the best place to start is with the word itself. Coined in 1944 to describe Nazi Germany's systematic murder of millions, it's since been disputed in nearly every other usage, from the U.S. government's early waffling on whether Rwanda's Hutu annihilation of the Tutsis qualified, to the Turkish government's continuing campaign to convince the world that several hundred thousand starved Armenians does not a genocide make.

That's where Microsoft's Encarta comes in. Helen Fein, Executive Director of the Institute for the Study of Genocide, says the online encyclopedia almost helped deny the genocide.

In 1996, Encarta asked Ms. Fein to write an entry on genocide. Her short essay, which included a brief mention of the murder or deportation of at least 1.1 million Armenians by the Turkish Ottoman government during World War I, was accepted and published.

But this past June, Encarta called Ms. Fein and asked her to revise her entry, in response to "customer complaints." She learned that Ronald Grigor Suny, a political scientist at the University of Chicago and the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, had been asked to revise his entry on Armenia as well. Ms. Fein says Encarta wanted her to include a few lines on the "other side of the story" - the Turkish government's side, that is Mr. Suny says an Encarta editor named Frank Manning explained to him that the revision would leave the facts in place, but remove the word "genocide."

"Their proposed changes suggested that all narratives are equal, that we can't know for sure whether or not the Armenians brought the massacres on themselves," says Ms. Fein.

According to Mr. Suny, Mr. Manning told him that the Turkish government had threatened to arrest local Microsoft officials and ban Microsoft products unless the who, what, and why of the massacres were presented as topics open to debate. Microsoft representatives would neither confirm nor deny the threats, but Namik Tan, a spokesman for the Turkish Embassy called the charge "so ridiculous I cannot speak."

He acknowledged that the embassy wrote at least two letters to Microsoft urging it to remove the term "genocide" from the two entries, and to cite Armenian rebellion as the cause of any suffering, but he insists that the Turkish government "does not make threats."

When Ms. Fein and Mr. Suny threatened to remove their names from the article and to publicize Microsoft's censorship, however, Encarta editors backed down. Ms. Fein and Mr. Suny agreed to add that the Turkish government denies the genocide, but held firm to the facts of its occurrence.

When the Chronicle attempted to reach Encarta's editors, a publicist from the company said they were all on vacation. A second publicist added that every story has two sides, even one about genocide.

Indeed, Ms. Fein notes that the Encarta entry on Turkey, which is unsigned, still does not mention the Armenian genocide at all.