I Miss Microsoft Encarta
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In the summer of '91, I was tasked with assembling a 386 PC with an early CD-ROM drive to demo an early build of Encarta at a trade show. It was a lot of effort to find a combination of hardware and drivers that would work reliably together.
Encarta itself (at least at that time) was written as a Word document. Hyperlinks were defined using footnotes, and animation and audio placeholders were defined with custom OLE objects. The whole thing got exported as RTF and fed to a compiler, which created the runtime data structures optimized for CD-ROM access and that also built a full-text search index. The compilation was very slow and required huge amounts of RAM.
Around this time, the team had some awareness of HTML as one of many emerging hypertext markup languages, but the internet was still a few years away and no one knew what format would "win" for hypertext. In any case, there were no tools or browsers at all, so we had to build everything -- including our own search engine for the CD-ROM.
That was a pain - I think I ended up writing RTF by hand.
It was rather simple, but thanks to its hyrarchical structure extremely accessible, even when you just started using the operating system.
DEC's extraordinarilly well structured documentation added to the whole experience.
Compared to that most technical documentation today is outright atrocious.
- 1945 linked microfilm pages in the essay "As We May Think" by Vannevar Bush [2]
- 1964 the term "hyperlink" in Project Xanadu by Ted Nelson
- 1983 the "highlighted link" in HyperTIES system by Dan Ostroffin [3]
- 1989 manifesto for the Web by Tim Berners-Lee
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperlink#History
[2]: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-m...
"Douglas falls asleep in front of a television and dreams about future time when he may be allowed to play a more active role in the information he chooses to digest."
Interesting, as the 486 came out in late '89. Seems you'd like a little more oomph, but perhaps they were too expensive at the time.
It wasn't so much about oomph as it was about buggy device drivers that would inevitably blue screen at some point, or flaky CD-ROM drives that just never seemed to read the same data twice the same way.
Seems like a case of "high-spec dev machine" vs "example target device".
To put that in perspective, $2000 in 1991 is $3700 in today’s dollars, and the 486 would be a staggering $13,500 today.
[0] https://books.google.com/books/about/InfoWorld.html?id=0FAEA...
Although '91 is earlier than I got back into PCs, strongest memories are probably more around '93, '94. The 486SX might have been the ~$2000 computer at that time. I remember later having the AMD 386/40 and 486/100 made better performance affordable.
Internet history fairy here to make sure people know that the internet has been in continuous operation since 1969 [1]. (And DARPA started funding research for the express purpose of creating a global computer network in 1960.)
What was still a few years away in '91 is awareness or interest in the internet by a significant fraction of consumers (or by Bill Gates for that matter).
[1]: Some people would deny the name "internet" to any network prior to the introduction of the internet protocol suite in 1982, but it was the same user-visible services (email, ftp, telnet, netnews, etc) running on both the earlier network that began operation in 1969 and the later network that some want to reserve the name "internet" for. In other words, the switch in 1983 from NCP to TCP/IP was mostly transparent to users.
We had internet; what we didn't yet have was HTTP.
And we didn't yet have a graphical web browser that ran on Windows or Mac. And MSDOS was AFAIK never adapted to allow the computer to interact with the user while something was downloading or uploading. (I.e., it lacked the necessary kind of multitasking.)
I wrote about this topic a few years ago (https://tedium.co/2017/07/13/who-killed-the-encyclopedia/), and it led a former CEO of Encyclopaedia Britannica to speak up (I added some of his comments to the piece). There was a lot of back-room wheeling and dealing around digital encyclopedias during that era, much of it centered around Encarta—Microsoft acquired a lot of publishers during that period and it effectively disrupted most of the rest out of existence.
But even considering that, Encarta was special. I think Microsoft had the right idea—it was the killer app for CD-ROMs—though it turned out that the internet would only make it a temporary success story.
It didn’t have to be like that, honestly. Imagine what might have happened if, for example, Microsoft worked more closely with the Wikimedia Foundation on the highly visual treatments the company was known for with Encarta. The nonprofit ownership was a good move, but the fact that MS seemed to cede the market entirely, especially so soon after disrupting the whole thing, was unfortunate.
Literally a week after getting Encarta a door to door encyclopedia salesmen came to our house and I showed him why I did not need his books. You could see the look of terror in his eyes.
That's an alien relic of an anecdote as there ever was.
The world has profoundly changed in the last twenty five years. Cheap, ubiquitous, networked computing has almost completely rewired society and changed business, jobs, dating, friendship, travel.
I really wonder what the next big changes will be. Cheap satellites in orbit and dramatically reduced LEO costs? Better battery tech? Advances in materials science? Human cloning and genetic modification? What modern trappings of the present time will feel used and dated in twenty years?
There might be some parallels here today with machine learning. Neal Stephenson's quote about the future already being here but not being evenly distributed seems appropriate.
The takeaways I get of this:
1. Exponentially-developing technology can pass you by quickly. The Internet went from exceedingly obscure to global in the ten years of the 1990s. Broadband wasn't ubiquitous by 1999, but it was increasingly available.
2. Standards matter. Even constructing a workstation that could handle reading Encarta was a challenge, and the tools to compose, render, and especially, present multimedia content (images, audio, video) were not common. Microsoft went the closed-source proprietary route, dooming them to the dustbin (though pieces were salvaged).
3. Standards are hard. Re-read above.
4. There are thresholds of utility that make or break things. I've been around infotech long enough (somewhat pre-dating the periods discussed here) that I've seen numerous technologies go from extreme cutting edge to widely adopted to passe. (And quite a few proposed but never gaining critical mass.) The reasons why any given tech fails right now are numerous. Luck plays a major role.
The present has exceptionally cheap bulk storage (my tablet has a 128GB removable microSD card for about $50), high-speed, ubiquitous, and wireless networking, and tools for sharding and distributing updated documents and file formats (git, rysnc, etc.). This makes distributed updatable large-scale works possible.
The technology of written works has undergone several seismic shifts, from clay tablet to papayrus roll to codex to moveable type. Less well-known (but only slightly) are the updatable formats: loose-leaf, three-ring, and replaceable bindings, all introduced in the late 19th century, which enabled updatable works. These were true "periodicals", where sections could be updated with amendments or replacements as information changed.
The database, digital file, early version control, Wiki, and distributed version control are, IMO, all legitimately novel forms of written works, which should be recognised as such. They have and will continue to change how content is created and used, and affects and interacts with society.
I can see your point that content outside a curated context replaces an encyclopedia to an extent, and up until about 5-10 years ago, as clickbait and black-hat SEO finally won out, much noncommercial Web content was at least informative, if of generally lower quality than traditional printed sources. Convenience has a huge edge over quality, though. These days, it's Wikipedia's curated content, especially for complex breaking news stories, that is my first go-to. After Idleword's (Maciej Cezglowski's) piece on Hong Kong hit HN last week, I finally took a look at Wikipedia's article on the protests there. A full 73 page long article with references on a protest movement only a couple of months old. That's staggering, and exceeds all but the very best news sources. (Another case I'd noted was the Oroville Dam case, where Brad Plumer's article for Vox was the only trad med piece I could find even remotely approaching Wikipedia's article. The first instance of this I recall was the 2004 Boxing Day quake/tsunami in Indonesia / Indian Ocean.)
Wikipedia, on the other hand, greatly enhances Web search, though it also benefits generally from the high profile resulting from that.
Wikipedia's crowdsourcing, the reliance on underlying technologies (Wiki, HTML, mediawiki markup), and on a huge set of organisational systems, standards, practices, and solutions Wikipedia and the Wikimedia Foundation have arrived at, were transformational. Though those too strongly resemble the largely equivalent or analogous practices of earlier encyclopaedic efforts dating back to at least Diderot, as well as other reference works (OED, see Simon Winchester's The Professor and the Madman).
(Note: updated to add 2nd 'graph beginning "I can see your point...")
This confuses a number of different types of technology. For example, we haven't undergone a shift from codices -- we still use that form for all our written works today.
Clay and papyrus are materials on which text is written. Scroll and codex are physical forms in which long texts are organized. Movable type is a technology for recycling printing blocks. None of those three types of things are related to the other two, except that it's impossible to store clay as scrolls because it will dry. Clay is stored looseleaf.
Interestingly, the history of writing in the Near East shows exactly the same confusion -- a big reason written Aramaic grew more popular than Akkadian was that it was drawn on paper and Akkadian was carved into clay, despite the fact that logically nothing's stopping you from carving letters into clay or drawing cuneiform on paper.
Moveable type, cheap paper, mass literacy, vernacular language, typographic conventions, high-speed presses, and mass distribution, create a wholly different impact.
As Elizabeth Eisenstein noted, the printing press is an agent of social change. Generalised, all comms tech is.
So do scrolls. You're not supposed to open the entire scroll at once. The codex is better at this.
> but was still phenomenally expensive to create. On the order of a million dollars per copy.
This is nonsense. You can prepare a very expensive book, but you don't have to. The idea that books were necessarily earth-shakingly expensive to create conflicts with the known reality of commercial popular novels in the ancient world.
This reminds me of the infamous Today show segment circa 1994.
What would that look like? An incompatible sister network that offers something the existing internet does not offer? A new network created after major disasters and world wide nuclear war destroy all existing infrastructure? I can’t imagine the existing internet would ever be replaced, certainly not by something offering privacy like ToR, because not enough people really care about privacy. The average person doesn’t really give a damn.
At some point we can optimize away the IP and TCP layers.
Google. Circa 2030.
"Replacement in what sense?" probably deserves exploration.
The underlying fundamental concepts of the Internet are 1) packet-switched (as opposed to through-circuit) communications, and inter-connected networks, via BGP.
There's a lot that's layered on top of this which is seen as fundamental, but is not entirely so, most especially end-to-end connectivity and universal point-to-point access. The Internet formed under tremendously different conditions than exist today, with only a handful of nodes through 1980, and even as late as the late 1980s only a few thousands.
Roughly each order-of-magnitude increases since then seem to have come with its own set of additional headaches and concerns, mostly regarding management and mitigation of abuse. The idea of guarded borders has long been seen as anathema. I see it as all but inevitable, and the question is whether that's done well or poorly.
There are a number of earlier networking ideas which might resurface or be adapted for new use, and a survey of history might be useful here. (John S. Quarterman's The Matrix, 1990, is a fascinating time-capsule exploration of these just at the cusp of the modern Internet -- the World Wide Web does not even make mention, though "The Web, a national Canadian nonprofit conferencing system formed in 1987, does.
I'd also look at uses of the Internet and user needs.
Fundamentally, digital networks serve as communications and control media. Whether or not these need to (or can be) segregated is an open question, but splitting off, say, the IoT from other communications, might make sense, along with SCADA and military communications -- all largely control networks.
Splitting out video and voice from text and data, likewise. Much of high-demand comes from those.
As the Internet heads from the first billion or two users to the remaining five or so, questions of what technology, interfaces, and devices are appropriate for a set of digital newcomers may be worth consideration.
Or, looking at this differently: the degree to which those already here may be interested in maintaining a separate space for themselves. Not that this is necessarily equitable, but it may well prove to be attractive, say, in particular to minimise fraud and other malicious use or attacks originating from the global poor, who are in many ways justified in wanting some of the pie that's been denied to, or taken from, them.
How the needs, wants, attractions, and/or detractors or aversions affect technology development and adoption remains to be seen.
Temps up 2°C, marine ecosystems collapse, and hundreds of millions of refugees?
Heretofor uninhabitable places such as ... greenland maybe?
Also, worth considering is that it is virgin territory for exploration for minerals and other goodies.
No shortage of water either.
But even all that aside, it is newly available space. If you can build a city in a desert (Phoenix, Arizona lets say) you can build one on Greenland.
As for soil, the creation of soil in Ireland and the UK took quite a bit of time.
They nailed the current temperature rise. No reason to think the rest of the extrapolated curve is wrong.
possibly https://skepticalscience.com/1982-exxon-accurate-prediction.... (totally unverified - lots of links to the sources though)
You'd think that universal access to all human knowledge would have remade society, but actually most of the humans don't really seem to care about knowledge. We got the Arab Spring, which turned into Daesh, the Syrian Civil War, and a new military dictatorship in Egypt. (And we got anti-vaxxers, global warming denialists, and "jet fuel can't melt steel beams.") Wikileaks didn't really move the needle on Obama's re-election. If cheap, ubiquitous, networked computing is rewiring the power structures of society, that's more because of Russian trolls and Twitter bots than anything else.
Probably the changes you're talking about will come. But I'm not convinced that it's a revolution that cute girls on the bus give me their Instagram instead of their phone number.
(See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20741592 for my thoughts on other, more positive possibilities of modern informatics.)
Some do, but I can get dollars from the US into most European currencies for less than .5%.
We've come a long way from the '90s.
Revolut will also allow you to move 5K GBP per month without any fees[1].
[0] https://transferwise.com/gb/borderless/pricing#conversion_fe... [1] https://www.revolut.com/legal/fees/#exchange
For the majority of people, however, things have changed little.
Could you not do this before? Just book a plane ticket at the airline desk and ask for an empty room once you arrive at a hotel?
It might sound pretty awkward these days of pathetic instagram 'celebrities', but actually makes things like backpacking in the middle of nowhere much, much better experience. The magic is still out there
The other things he said are mostly true. Here in Buenos Aires I've never owned a car, but that has more to do with being a huge megalopolis than anything else.
Even in poor countries Facebook and cheap instant communication like WhatsApp have rewired the way people socialize and stay in touch.
This is mostly a response to the commenter before you, except your last sentence.
A budget flight to the continent and a week in an AirBnB in Europe can cost as little as a few hundred quid. Something that was only really available to the rich, or at least the very well off, is now available to almost anyone.
https://rwer.wordpress.com/2018/04/22/global-income-distribu...
I moved to London last year and have used cash roughly zero times since. Visiting my parents (outside London) is like jumping in to treacle. Finding coins for the bus? Paper tickets on the train? Give me a god damn break. Even using chip and pin is weird now since almost all my purchases, except for dining out, are either touchless, online, or via mobile app.
In 20 years i think cash (banknotes, coinage), and maybe even bank accounts as we know them today, will be an almost alien concept to kids. Brick and mortar banks will be gone entirely. I certainly haven't set foot in one over a decade.
Don't have a safety deposit box with precious metals and jewels inside?
Many, many people do - among other items (guns, cash, drugs, etc).
While "brick and mortar" banks may not exist, something of the same nature will - some kind of high-security place to store stuff like that, away from home. Maybe it will also be combined with some kind of networked backup storage for data as well...
To an extent, places like this do exist - private vault companies; always have.
I guess my point is that physical banks offer other services which can't be replicated virtually.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/19/business/safe-deposit-box...
Give this a try, go open and put some rock in your safe deposit box, then call the bank and tell them you placed a C4 explosive in the box and will detonate it if they dont deposit gold under a park-bench in 2 days time.
Then watch how safe your safety deposit box is.
I live in backwards South Africa, and even I can't remember the last time I needed to use cash. So I'm totally with you on that one.
But bankless? Eh, I think we are at least two or tree decades away from that.
And, yes, I seem to recall the price was something in the $500-$1000 ballpark. Which was definitely a lot of money in the early 70s(?) when I got it--and, yes, the salesman came to the house.
Same here! The knowledge was obsolete but the memories of my childhood were a part of it. I eventually recycled most of them after I last moved but there are a few books I still have somewhere.
A few years ago, during a move,I finally parted with the set my parents had gotten in the late 60s or early 70s. It was painful, but I had to really downsize at the time.
I still have my 1911 edition, which I can't get rid of, even if I haven't cracked a volume in a couple of years.
One word for Encarta and the like: Edutainment.
I think subscribing to that was one of the best things my parents ever did for my education. Over the course of my youth I devoured it several times and credit it to my earliest exposure to countless subjects that they'd never touch at school.
One of the most notable things about The Joy of Knowledge was the extraordinary explanatory art. One day I will have to find my books and make some scans.
Looking up things in the card catalog, and on microfiche at my local library, was as much fun as locating the book itself. Sometimes, in the course of searching the catalog, I'd come across other books that sounded interesting, so I would write down those call numbers, too.
Or browsing microfiche roll magazines and newspapers - high speed fast forward and reverse, then for 10 cents a page (!) pop off a copy to take home.
That is one part I don't miss - having to pay for photocopies...
Same experience here. It was like having the computer from the Starship Enterprise but it was right here and now and I got to use it. It’s been a long time since I felt that sense of wonder from anything in computing.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0fRX4R6MY4A
:)
Amusingly, many of the articles in Encarta were copied verbatim from there.
>"After failing to purchase rights to the text of the Encyclopædia Britannica and World Book Encyclopedia for its Encarta digital encyclopedia, Microsoft reluctantly used (under license) the text of Funk & Wagnalls encyclopedia for the first editions of its encyclopedia. This licensed text was gradually replaced over the following years with content Microsoft created itself.[7]"
It came with a parallel port dongle -not mentioned in the box copy- to ensure that the precious was not shared.
It did not work right, and I was cured of buying that stuff.
Outside professionals, not many people stored videos or audio on their PC in the early day, so all the multimedia type stuff, and to some extent including video games ... was all centered around the CD-ROM.
I used to gobble up all the super cheap "multimedia collection" type disks available at the time.
To some extent what made computers the multimedia place to be was the good old CD-ROM, well before the internet took it over.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_Domesday_Project
An early glimpse of the future, somewhat.
Whilst it's not especially useful in today's world, it's a fascinating relic, especially on trades and skills that have declined or died out. On medicine, zoology and other sciences, it's occasionally surprising how we used to think. I'd periodically pick it up and read a few entries at random, and often disappear down a rabbit hole. At some point it stopped being obsolete and pointless to become fascinating history.
That's one thing Encarta could have been had it continued - a valuable snapshot of how thought and knowledge evolved. Always updated Wikipedia can and will never be that as sadly you can't snapshot a given date, and digging through edit histories is horribly unfriendly. We may have lost something there.
Same for me. My grandfather was a teacher and I saved quite a few of the old school/teaching books after he died.
Did you know that the Empire State Building is the highest building on earth?
Well, it was, when these books were printed. :-)
It was a killer app for CD-ROM, but for the title of the killer app I'd say DeLorme's "Street Atlas USA" had at least an equal claim.
You may be wondering why I say "second PC" - well, just before graduating high school my parents bought me a laptop, a Tandy 1100HD - which was technically my first PC. Later, after I had left home on my own, I bought an Amiga 2000, then an Amiga 1200, before getting the 486.
We actually asked them about this, IIRC - it turns out a lot of that stuff was licensed from third parties, and they weren't free to release it under a free content license, and didn't have the resources to sort out what was what.
Encarta lasted from 1991-2009.
The iPod was introduced in 2001, saw sells start to fall off a cliff around 2009 and were all discontinued in 2017 - except for the iPod in name only iPod Touch. No one would say that the iPod was a failure. Encarta helped start the multimedia PC boom that helped make home computers more ubiquitous just like the iPod was Apple’s introduction to a wider audience.
Apples watch is still a watch even if it does a lot of other things. Microsoft never ported Encarta functionality to anything after 09, it just died.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ipod_sales_per_quart...
Note FYQ1 is calendar quarter 4.
For most people cellphones have mostly replaced watches, digital cameras, keychain flashlights, and MP3 players not because they are awesome at it but because having slightly better but largely redundant devices is not worth it. https://www.statista.com/chart/5782/digital-camera-shipments...
The iPod’s time had passed and the iPod Touch could just as well be called an iPad Nano. It’s more of an iPad than iPod.
Felt the same way with IE until Mozilla came along after Netscape died.
Not to sound cynical, but I believe MSFT wasn't trying to sell encyclopedias, they were trying to sell CD-ROM drives.
The upcoming Windows 93 (whoops, we slipped a little, make that 95) was going to require a billion floppy disks for distribution. Retail products were shipping in large boxes with comically tall stacks of expensive floppy disks.
CD-ROMs, on the other hand, are so cheap to distribute that AOL mailed them out as unsolicited junk mail.
It was worth sinking some money into a bunch of high-quality CD-ROM titles to get those drives standard on all PCs. Once that task was accomplished....
There was point in time where that truly felt like the future. Considering that we're now in the age of autoplaying, monetized "content" video nearly everywhere you go, it was nice to have only "primary source" video, aka stuff like the moon landing, or the MLK speech, instead of some nobody warbling on about its importance while splicing in stills of said video because they don't want to be in violation of the copyright.
The concept of finite, structured and bounded content is also extremely powerful in this era of overwhelming data, much of which rehashed and warmed over by various publications not to mention utterly infested with ads.
The concept of spending hours down a Wikipedia rabbit hole is not new, and it's one of the reasons I donate annually. But it first started with Encarta, and it's offline-only format has grown to be only more valuable as time goes on.
Start at https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DownTheRabbitHol... and before I know it time has gone.
The USTR Special 301 Report already existed in 1998 and already singled out countries for possible trade sanctions for doing the kinds of things that permitted the US to develop economically in the 19th and early 20th centuries. I don't know if Argentina was already specifically targeted, though it was in later years, especially due to La Salada (Q.E.P.D.).
Even the VB5 bit is identical. Bought a 2-3$ Encarta copy from a random guy in a random store selling pirated CDs. I remember the guy sitting in his small shop, downloading stuff over Torrent and burning them to CDs. He had a machine with the most CD-writers I had ever seen in my life.
I loved flying over terrains in Encarta's terrain explorer (or whatever it was called, I didn't really understand English back then, perhaps even learned it through Visual Studio and Encarta). Whenever I was bored and kids do get bored often, I would get on Encarta, especially since Wikipedia wasn't a thing back then.
Nowadays we read a Wikipedia article or watch a Youtube video on a topic but never interact with the content. It's all very passive. I was a child during the heyday of Encarta and I remember I had it and a few other specialized encyclopedias (one about animals, one about sea life, one about dinosaurs!!) and they were all interactive. I miss this about computers. Not all things have to be a game or passive which is what I see nowadays when a child has a screen in front of their face.
Of course Encarta wasn't there, but we have 20 years of technological advance. But for hobbyist Wikipedia authors that's too much work and for a commercial Encarta Wikipedia is too strong.
https://www.oldpcgaming.net/wp-content/gallery/encarta-97/Sn...
Best example I could find: https://youtu.be/Dl36Ty2PqMU?t=1147
My memories with Encarta aren’t that special - the searching was cool but I think I was jaded to the cdrom video thing already, wishing it could be better technically. Definitely gave you a sense of what could be possible with an endless source of material, irrespective of copyright.
Add to that, something like Encarta was curated by opinionated editors (whether or not you agree with them is different from the fact that the nature of content is different when it isn't trying to find consensus amongst absolutely everyone) and did not survive based on advertising as most internet content does today.
That set of factors made for a very different world of reading than today.
I was about to write this myself. Wikipedia has so much information that it’s easy to surf page to page, link out, etc, and end up having skimmed 50 articles and still not understand the thing you came to look at.
I was just overwhelmed by all the different software on offer, and would load up my bag with free samples and spec sheets for software I had no legitimate need for as a 10 year old, but I ate it all up. I would ride the BART home after, just pouring over my loot and being so excited to try the demos at home.
I went a few times after the internet took off, and it just wasn't the same. Who needs demos from an expo hall, when you can just download everything? There was nothing new to see at the hall, everything could be seen from your home just by visiting a url.
I love the world with the internet, but there certainly has been something lost.
I remember when our family first got Encarta, and I spent hour after hour reading and marvelling about how all this information could be so easily accessible! I think we had a 14k dial-up Internet connection at the time, and the web was barely getting started - I really had no idea how things would turn out!
I still remember the joy I had researching the Stegosaurus and the Platypus between my local library and my copy of Encarta for a school project <3.
Once some kid in my third grade class asked why race cars made noise they do when they passed, the teacher didn't give a satisfactory answer, and I was able to explain the Doppler effect to them based on animation I watched on Encarta.
Good stuff.
https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/resources/the-world...
(Enable Flash to make it slightly less cumbersome)
There was all of one or two internet providers in our county where I grew up at that time. Maybe one. We couldn’t afford it yet but my parents bought Encarta because it seemed like a wholesome tract for computer use.
I spent countless hours on there and used it for a ton of homework. IIRC my parents used it all the time as well. They likely still have the disks kicking around someplace.
Besides Encarta, the mid 90s where also the time where I was first able to buy satellite imagery on CR-ROM for all of Germany from my collected lunch money and years before Microsoft's TerraServer changed the world, which itself was long before Google Maps took over.
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/8q89q4/microsofts-terrase...
Although I do remember the hard geography questions very frequently just being "What is the county seat of (insert random US county)?"
The sad bit is that in some ways Cinemania in 1997 was superior to IMDB as it is today. IMDB is more comprehensive, but Cinemania was better designed and more fun to just browse through.
Contrast this to IMDB, which has some but not all of that information (no reviews, for instance), and what it does have is presented in a clunky, siloed fashion. It works, but it's not something that's absorbing to just browse through the way Cinemania was.
But yeah, it was a terrific resource; if nothing else it solidified Roger Ebert for young me as a source of truth on movies. :)
I've started creating an offline reference library[1] because I see that search engines will be over whelmed with crap and frankly I don't want to have to find cell service to ask my handheld device to locate a factoid.
If you've read that now more than 50% of Google desktop searches don't result in a click, it is because Google is getting better at 'one boxing' the answer so you don't need to click through to read it.
[1] That project started by digitizing my referenced by less often used text books. Which lead to me digitizing text books for others as well. After Google's win on digitizing books is fair use for air cover much of the work applies NLP and a bit of machine learning to pull out facts which are not, in themselves copyrightable.
[2] "Google Wins Copyright Suit" --- https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2016/04/18...
Another comment in this thread about having a tablet to do that suggests an interesting way to deploy something like this on inexpensive table hardware with a somewhat more bespoke (aka performant) OS and application architecture for appliance type operation. (think running a unikernel rather than a general purpose kernel in order to not spend cycles on things you won't ever need)
Since most of the text books I've scanned are hard covers I cut off the covers, scan those on flatbed scanner, then disassemble the binding to remove the pages. Cut off the margins to get to something closer to 8.5" wide (more modern text books have been "experimenting" with page sizes).
Disassembly takes about 20 minutes, scanning takes another, 10 minutes depending on how many sets I need to scan (the paper feeder for the ScanSnap is nominally 75 pages, but if it gets overloaded can misfeed). Occasionally I'll get a misfeed (two pages feed at the same time) and I generally clean the paper handling belts every 10 or 15 books because they get accumulation that make them less effective at gripping the paper.
Textbooks, are by their nature, more 'conduits of information' than works of art. (TAOCP not withstanding). Also they get regularly re-issued in order to be resold to students so their knowledge is more widely dispersed than many books.
When I was at Google I visited the book scanning operation a couple of times and they had these machines that would photograph a page, dewarp, and some of them even turn the page (some required a person to turn the pages). While I would love to have such a capability, the only way I could justify it would be to have texts I needed to add to my data set that were not mine to destroy.
My work-around for this issue so far has been to find and buy a second copy of a book on the used market to digitize, best of both worlds for me in that situation.
If you have a handful of precious books that you really can't bear to cut up, commercial non-destructive scanning services are available at ~$30 per book.
Not ideal (IMO buying the physical book should entitle you to a zero marginal cost PDF copy too, which some publishers do adhere to) but certainly better than I expected.
Interactive multimedia is dead and I think today's children are worse off for it.
Wikimedia Commons is more relaxed about licensing than Wikipedia is for text — because most of the images on Wikipedia and allied projects are not and cannot be created specifically for Wikipedia, we have to tolerate a wider spread of licensing terms. However, the images do need to be licensed for use on Wikipedia, which is already a pretty permissive license.
See my comment at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20741101 for more social context.
See http://of19.internetdsl.pl/bzdury/encarta/ (in Polish, but includes the screenshots in English, which are self-explanatory)
You can imagine my joy when, omewhere around 1991 or 1992, we got a new computer in the library at school. It was a dedicated station for the encyclopedia, and it was even set up in the same location as the printed ones were.
My faded memory recalls it being Compton's Encyclopedia. It ran on an 286 IBM PS/2 (the all-in-one unit), and it had a mouse, external CD-ROM, and a laser printer. The rumor was that it cost $10,000. It wasn't fast, it probably took closed to a minute to search for, and then retrieve an article.
They had to pick and choose what to go into depth on, but when they wanted to go into depth, they would hire the best writers in the field to explain everything really well. Issac Asimov penned more than one encyclopedia article, as did other science fiction authors.
I honestly learned most of my fundamental science knowledge from old 1950s and 1960s science fact books. Asimov in particular has multiple books that explain science really well, down to the level of nuclear fusion and fission, biochemistry, and a lot of other subjects, and I had a few other books in the same vein that were all really old, and really good.
I remember one book that was biographies of famous scientists, it went into depth about Marie Curry and her contributions to science. Reading that ~age 10 certainly impacted my views on gender equality and helped me believe that potential is not limited by gender.
Wikipedia, for all the great things about it, won't really do that. There isn't a Wikipedia page I can point literally anyone[2] at and say "read this and you'll understand the fundamentals of radiation and atomic physics".
I am sure such resources are out there on the web, but the odds of stumbling upon those resources at random is less than the odds of coming across a good science book at random in a thrift store.
That said there are some awesome YT science channels who have worked to fill this gap in quite well, but video sources are different than written sources, with each having their strength. (I read that short 10 or so page biography of Marie Curry probably a half dozen times, not going to do that with a YT video!)
[2] Where anyone is defined as "age 10 and up, with no mathematical background, who wants to be entertained while they read."
That's the entire point. I'm not the expert. Nor am I able to even understand the basics of which direction to read/learn - that's what the expert curators are for.
I dont have source at moment. But I remember reading a few years ago that wikipedia had fewer errors than most all encyclopedias on average.
There is definitely something to be said about consistency and clustering but on average I believe wikipedia is still the best in fewest errors.
I remember Encarta being pretty good about having video files showing the outlines of wars and battles... at least for the Vietnam War which is what I remember most. I prefer watching a video outline of wars and battles on youtube rather than dig right into a wall of text on wikipedia.
I almost wish for a sort of intellectual property "eminent domain" promoting more things like famous news footage into the public domain where they fit an "almanac" need. Though I admit creating any sort of such program would be really hard to do, as the boundaries would be murky and it potentially would impact the revenue of companies and groups that generally need such revenue to survive (PBS, for example).
I found out-of-bound clips in like 4 of them, and thought it was all very cool seeing all the level geometry and non-clearing graphics smearing across the screen. Probably contributed to my interest in computers and cybersecurity, ironically, no matter how much my teachers said it was a waste of time...
* The content was based on Funk & Wagnalls. Then we had a bunch of editors and writers cleaning up the content and adding new articles.
* The Windows version was always done first, then we ported to the Mac using "WLM" (Windows Library for Mac?).
* We used fractal compression for the images. If you never heard of this, look it up—pretty interesting. This was going to be all the rage, but then it wasn't.
* As a consumer product, Christmas sales were everything. Therefore, unlike most software, the schedule never slipped. There was a hard date for completion. Features would be cut to make the deadline, no matter what.
* When the web hit, we put professionally curated links into the articles. Best of both worlds. And you could get a subscription that would update articles and links monthly.
* We worked with WBUR to implement a brand-new closed captioning standard for videos.
* The codebase was ostensibly C++ and MFC, but it..was..complicated.
* Articles were edited in Word, with a bunch of custom macros, and exported to RTF. There was a lot more processing that went on after that to shove all that content onto the CD, but I wasn't too familiar with that part.
* Later versions occupied more than one CD. Swapping was a real pain, but if you had multiple CD-ROM drives, it would accommodate you.
My best memory is getting a copy shortly after CD-ROM drives were still new territory. I loaded the disc and the first thing I searched for was either rap or hip/hop. To my delight an audio clip played of Grandmaster Flash & The Furious Five - The Message...keep in mind this was at a time when Multimedia was new and the idea that CD-ROMs could hold enough data to make a richer experience was ground-breaking!
https://archive.org/search.php?query=encarta&and[]=mediatype...
Will never forget the awesome splash screen with various historic photos and the video clip with clouds(?), while/after it loaded content from the CD-ROM.
Edit: found it! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HTOAHlGaDoo
Edit 2: Okay the above was generic but I remember similar bits of it used for Encarta.
Then I encountered the BBC's Domesday Project (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_Domesday_Project) and was blown away by the quantity of information that was available on a laser disk in my school library.
Then came Encarta, which similarly impressed, and now Wikipedia.
I can't even contemplate the quantity of information and in what form it will take, when my son reaches my age, but I bet it would blow my contemporary mind.
I generally prefer text - it's easier to search, and faster to consume. But I don't assume that my preferences are always best, so...
Why was Encarta so good? Why is it good enough that we should wish we had it today? Is there some analog today that could let me "get it"? Because currently I live in a world where more and more info is moving to podcasts and videos and I hate it. Clearly I'm missing something, so help me out?
Additionally, consider that much the audience for it was people in grade school. If you were in the seventh grade in 1995, you were the perfect age to really engage with that kind of approach—which seemed awesome compared to a boring textbook.
I think in many ways, our information consumption has gotten much more dense over time. But in 1995, people would approach this like they would a nice, long magazine article. Efficiency was not the goal: It was something that hit all the senses.
Encarta had text. It was mostly text. But sometimes text isn't the best medium for conveying some information. For example, maybe there's an article about lizards. You can describe the way a lizard moves, but it makes much more sense to have a video embedded that can show you what that movement looks like with all of its nuances that would be difficult to describe and understand in text.
So, think of wikipedia, but curated by professional library scientists and verified subject matter experts with first source video and audio clips (and photos) embedded where helpful.
Simply put: It was accessible, interactive and enabled users to find information at a pace that wasn't really achievable through other means.
I first used Encarta when I was in the 6th grade, in order to find information for an essay I was writing. The local library had just gotten a new PC with a CD-ROM drive, and the librarian suggested I use Encarta as it was brand new, while any books they had on the subject would be rather old and outdated.
I got down behind the PC, launched Encarta and I was simply blown away. This was my first real multi-media experience and while computers were becoming mainstream in the early 90's, I simply hadn't seen anything like it before. Sure, an Amiga could play music and simple videos, and a fast 486 could decode MPEG video, but hard drives back then were typically less than 100 MB and the amount of storage allowed by CD-ROM's allowed Encarta to be an (until then) unparalleled experience.
Remember, until then, you'd have to use card indexes in order to find the right book about the subject, then look for the book and hope nobody else had borrowed it. With Encarta, it was as simple as typing in a search term and finding the results. Instantly. Internet wasn't really a thing back then - I'd heard about it, it existed, but it didn't reach the general populace until around '94-'95, and there simply wasn't anything comparable until Wikipedia came along.
[1] https://www.microsoft.com/buxtoncollection/detail.aspx?id=22...
It probably didn't help that it was a Microsoft-only deal as most of the stuff was an odd mix Netware-driven PC's without Optical drives (we had ZIP!) or library computers that were locked in a box so you couldn't really put a CD in them. And everything else was an Apple Mac, so you could put the CD in but you got nothing out of it.
We did have something else, I don't remember the name of it, but it was like a network-CD-drive-server device that worked on Windows 95, 98 and 2000, as well as Macs, and we had a cross-platform (flash/shockwave based AFAIK) viewer thing that was probably an encyclopaedia but it was never named or marketed as such. It didn't have videos but it did have the same information as the paper versions.
Most people who did end up owning (some version of) Encarta got a demo or companion version with some other product, much like the Microsoft Works package you sometimes got with systems, but right around that time Wikipedia was already gaining popularity.
Internet searches were of dubious quality, and libraries were inconvenient.
Encarta was the first stop for looking something up.
I remember watching that video. I was dazzled by the novelty of it and immediately tried searching for all videos and playing all I could find on the CD-ROM.
Just to compare I perused the Wikipedia "moon landing" page to compare. At first I was surprised that I couldn't find this video. Then I realized there's a separate entry specifically for the Apollo 11 mission. It links to the following page:
https://apolloinrealtime.org/11/
... which as a whole HTML5 interface to go back and experience the launch in realtime.
I'm going to watch it later, but I'll ask ahead of time-- is the author really stating that the feeling of watching that single video on Encarta was more enthralling than what I'll experience with that HTML5 interface?
Edit: wording
Novel because it was the first time the author saw the moon landing.
Unique because we are bombarded with videos all the time.
Encarta and Apollo in Real Time are not opposites, but the same: interactive experiences.
In contrast, Wikipedia is very static. I don't recall ever seeing an interactive visualization on Wikipedia like this animated and highlighted/annotated jet engine: https://s2.smu.edu/propulsion/Pages/variations.htm It's much better at getting information across than text or static images, but harder to put together in standardized text editors/languages like markup, so somewhere along the way we lost the colorful interactive animations that Encarta was known for.
I've found some math animations on wikipedia, some of which are good and some of which are totally pointless:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Mathematical_ani...
Certainly I'd love to see the wikimedia foundation fund animators to produce explanatory diagrams and animations for more things!
It is also very possible that the author didn't knew about the page you linked, which is another "issue" with Internet vs Encarta: you can find way more information on the Internet at way more depth, but... you need to find it first. Encarta was comparatively very little information and depth but everything it has is by design easily discoverable.
Edit: Found the movie!: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cQnhqqISBSA
Boy, my brother and I learned too much about Aardvarks (because they were the first item on the list).
I remember when I first popped an Encarta 1995 CD into a computer and watched an incredibly terrible clip of something (I believe it was the Hindenburg blowing up). My mind was blown.
https://wikischool.org/explore
https://wikischool.org/explore/Ludwig%20Wittgenstein?l=en&t=... (read an article chronologically)
The larger goal is to make self-study more effective and enjoyable. Desktop browser recommended for now, as the mobile UX needs improvement.
The text actually fills the screen rather than just hiding in the gutter on the left, and even though you've removed most styling cues around links and actions, it's done in a way that it's still obvious what everything does, so the main content can be clearer.
The dynamic sidebar table of contents is also particularly effective - on desktop, everybody has a widescreen monitor now and it's disappointing now few sites take advantage of it.
My only two critical points are your choice of typeface, which is awful and significantly degrades the experience (browsing with fonts turned off is a great improvement), and the speed - not only does clicking a link take several seconds to do something but there isn't really any indication whether things are happening or not.
The speed issue is really a Wikipedia (and Archive.org) API fetching issue plus some parsing time. I am planning to make the data fetching parallel, but need to do some data-source-code refactoring first. A better loading indication UI will also help.
A bug to report: inspired by comments elsewhere in this thread, I searched for "radiation", and your interface is rendering the bulleted list about different kinds of radiation above the actual first paragraph (which ends with "This includes:" to introduce the list).
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0788157930/ref=dbs_a_def_r...
The other big "problem" with Wikipedia is copyright (and it's certainly not Wikipedia's fault), but there's a surprising amount of public domain work (thanks to many governments, especially the US) and of course tons of user-submitted work that ranges from bad to incredible. Other language Wikipedias can actually be more restrictive - there's no "fair use" on Japanese Wikipedia so logos are often blurred.
It's nice that knowledge has become widely accessible with the Internet. The hard part I find now is knowing how to learn with so much access to information.
The multimedia was really really well done, and went a lot further than Wikipedia in a lot of articles. Better editorial and emphasis for sure.
[0] https://youtu.be/deVyPq-AHfc?t=223 [1] https://www.amazon.com/Music-Andes-Argentina-Tahuantinsuyo/d... [2] https://www.worldcat.org/title/music-of-the-andes-and-argent...
> In a world of 4k streaming video, global wireless, and high-speed everything, there's really no analog to the feeling we got watching the Moon Landing as a video in Encarta - short of watching it live on TV in the 1969!
This is just absurd nostalgia. Even back in the author's good old days, kids also watched this stuff on VHS and LaserDisc. These days, kids watch SpaceX landing reusable rockets live on their phones.
What was special was being able to freely browse it. Wikipedia crushes it in every imaginable respect, from being more readable, to having more rich media.
It's fine to cherish your memories of Encarta...but kids have it better now and experience the same things more richly. Sorry, dad!
These days kids type "space" into the YouTube app on their phone and end up watching videos telling them that the earth is actually flat.
She used to be a librarian. Then she was a geographer. The old school kind, the one that actually drew actual maps. The librarian skills really came in handy when drawing real maps. Everything had to be right. People could get lost in the wilderness and be using your map, or countries could be drawing international borders based on your map, war could break out over your mistakes. The printers and early dot-matrix printers put her whole department out of business though. That was fine, my siblings and I came along about then anyway.
I was too young to remember, but I think it was Encarta 95. I remember standing there next to Mom as she fired up the new program, my sister sat on her lap. She wasn't very tech savy, still isn't. We helped her out a bit with the mouse and clicking into everything.
We looked up East Germany first thing. Mom wanted to make sure Encarta was correct, right, true. We knew East Germany wasn't a thing anymore, even though a lot of the maps in school and in our children's books were saying it still was a thing. It took a while back then for things to percolate. Mom wanted to make sure this thing was as up to date as possible.
She typed it in, it took us to an index page, Mom clicked on the top listing (I think). We read a bit about East Germany. It had an end date. Mom was happy. This resource will do for her family. Then there was a bit of text that was underlined. Mom hovered over the underlined text. It said to click on the underlined text to go to that page. My sister squirmed a bit.
Mom clicked and then the internet came crashing into our house like an asteroid or an artillery shell or an earthquake; the floor was left behind. Everything changed in an instant.
It took us, automatically, to the linked page. I think I was about unified Germany. But it did it instantly. Boom, there you were. Reading.
Mom cried.
It was at that moment that Mom understood. No more card catalogs. No more having to hunt the shelves. No more having to look in the index for the page numbers, jamming your fingers in the back while you flipped through the tome. No more walking and sitting back down. No more having to ask strangers to watch your bags while you went diving into the stacks. No more checked out books you were looking for.
Just. Click. And. Read.
I asked her what was wrong. My sister was not happy with Mom crying. Mom was a bit flabberghasted. She told me about all the effort that went into just getting the information, all the time you lost, all the excitment that drained. And how that was no more. How it was so easy to read and to learn, now. The world was going to be so good for her children, for me, for my sister and my other siblings.
Mom cried in joy.
We spent something like two weeks at the library, thumbing through hundreds of books (all of Mark Twain, all of Borges, all of Proust, and some others). All of this would be a 20 minutes search nowadays.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-m...
Before websites were really a thing, having your own multimedia CD-ROM to give out was some kind of status symbol!
Personally I believe more universities should be publishing websites/wikis ala Encyclopedias like this [1] that provide good foundation sourcing for their particular fields of work and original content like video, graphics, and photos (ideally creative commons, especially the ones with public funding).
1. https://ocean.si.edu/ocean-life/invertebrates/cephalopods
I would enter the lab and start playing all files before starting work on my project - Developing software for Finite Element Analysis. It was like an old gramaphone playing the same tunes everyday and others in the lab hated me.
Since I would get in first, I had the right to start the player :-)
For no particularly good reason, I have this urge to create a local txt or basic html version of one of the major encyclopedias (something a bit more concise than the full Wikipedia). I love the idea that I could keep a summary of most human knowledge in a 400mb plain text file on my hard drive.
Really, Encarta was freakin awesome... now we have a lot more information, but nobody is curating, checking, validating and arranging it in nice and easy to consume ways :(
This looks like a video of the gameplay: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qLmudzYWY94
Why carry around another device instead of the computer in your pocket?
In a way, this phrasing also works.
Encarta was really one of the few ways I got to learn about the world before we had internet in our home (this was around 05 when we were living in E Africa). Thank you to everyone that made it happen
But never ever did I hear anyone mentioning it.
Just thought I'll let you all know.
Edit: I absolutely cannot stand the smarmy "I wrote code that you use" on his homepage. Sorry buddy, you probably don't.
Give it to Wikipedia gratis, then they can make Encarta the Wikipedia entry for Encarta.
(Encarta was 32000 articles and, as pointed out in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20741028, ridiculously biased on some subjects, in precisely the way that Wikipedia scrupulously avoids.)
The biggest problem I have with Kiwix is that, on Android, its built-in downloader for ZIM files is flaky, and I haven't figured out how to load ZIM files I downloaded in some other way yet, such as on a MicroSD card. The non-Android version works fine with such sideloaded ZIM files. (I also miss the interlanguage links; I have a few languages of Wikipedia on here, and even when I don't it's often useful to find out things like the Guarani word for "ferret". And of course I don't have a local Google Search.)
Kiwix also has ZIM files for things like Wikisource (7.2 GB for English), Project Gutenberg (54GB for English), and Stack Overflow and other Stack Exchange sites. The English Stack Overflow is 134 gigabytes.
As for the globe, a much better option than Encarta is OsmAnd~. My country is under 0.6 GB, including most of the public transit routes, down to the bus-stop level. Bonus: lat/long links in Kiwix open in OsmAnd~. Minus: OsmAnd~ doesn't have any way to load satellite imagery, even the Blue Marble MODIS dataset.
Both Kiwix and OsmAnd~ are available on F-Droid, so you know they're not malware.
But none of this is interactivity. Watch Alan Kay’s talks where he talks about kids building dynamical models in Etoys to understand gravitational acceleration. Much more interesting than the Wikipedia article on convolution by itself: I have IPython, Numpy, and SciPy on my netbook, so I can create signals and kernels, convolve them, and look at the results. I can compare my own implementation of convolution to the library implementation. I can do principal component analysis with the LAPACK functions for it. That's interactivity, and it's a far more powerful learning tool than mere hypertext. And I don't have anything like it for Android. Is there anything?
An interesting thing to note about all of these — Wikipedia, OpenStreetMap, IPython, and LAPACK — is that none of them are products of capitalism. They coexist with capitalism, but they are all products of a non-capitalist form of production, sometimes called "commons-based peer production", which evidently outperforms capitalist production in certain areas just as capitalist production outperformed feudal agriculture. The crucial question for the future of humanity, I think, is how we can extend commons-based peer production to new spheres, and the biggest obstacle seems to be artificial scarcity produced by government-granted monopolies — patent, copyright, and so on.
The original article does indeed suggest that people like me are using Encarta today rather than the things I suggested. I assume Scott is correct about that, and I wanted to offer them some better alternatives than the profoundly shitty proprietary experience offered by Encarta. I mean, what does Encarta have to say about principal component analysis or anal sex?
Encyclopedias in general are not primary sources; they're secondary and tertiary sources. Generally speaking, it's not a good idea to try to evaluate the primary sources in a field unless you already understand the field reasonably well, because primary sources are mostly wrong or misleading in ways that can be hard to detect, and this is why we prefer secondary sources for Wikipedia sources most of the time. (Perhaps you don't know what a primary source is; see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primary_source.) None of this is a significant difference between Wikipedia and Encarta or Britannica, except that Wikipedia cites many, many more sources.
In empirical studies, Wikipedia was found to contain about the same level of errors as Britannica in areas that both encyclopedias covered, but that was many years ago; Wikipedia has improved substantially since then. At this point most of the accusations of major errors in Wikipedia come from Holocaust denialists, anti-vaxxers, and the like.
It's true that every Wikipedia editor has biases, but for their edits to survive, the edits need to be acceptable to editors with very different biases, or be in a place that nobody ever looks (as with the Seigenthaler affair). That's what accounts for the sometimes annoying Wikipedia style where every strong assertion is followed by a plethora of qualifications and exceptions. Encarta and Britannica never had this advantage, so errors and egregious biases sometimes persisted during many years.
So it's not true that Wikipedia is less trustworthy than Encarta and Britannica — rather the contrary, except in the short interval before vandalism gets reverted — and it's not true that you should trust your interpretation of primary sources on health matters or business matters over Wikipedia's interpretation, unless you know a lot about medicine or business. Following links from Wikipedia to secondary sources like Cochrane Collaboration reports or Bloomberg articles is a much better idea.
It's also not true that Wikipedia doesn't have multimedia, or only recently acquired multimedia. The PCA article I used as an example above has six illustrations, and the SVD article it links to has a very helpful animation at the top of the article, an animation which dates from 2010, as well as a couple of other visualizations, and a whole lot of equations. (You could maybe argue that six illustrations isn't very many for 30 pages of text full of equations, but illustrating high-dimensional linear algebra is kind of difficult.) What it doesn't have is interactivity: there's no way to modify a data set and see how that changes its PCA, or even just to explore the PCA of an existing immutable dataset.
The anal sex article, in addition to 14000 words and 139 references, contains a fairly graphic level of multimedia content — 13 detailed illustrations, including photographs of artifacts from many historical cultures — but no animations and fortunately no interactivity either. It's a Level 4 Vital Article, meaning that it's among the ten thousand or so most important articles in the whole encyclopedia. (PCA is not.)
I suspect that what's going on here is that, even though Wikipedia has more multimedia than CD-ROM Encarta (by two or three orders of magnitude), it exceeds Encarta's textual contents by an even larger factor, so it appears to be light on multimedia, just by contrast. But I never used Encarta, so I could be wrong about that? (I went straight from MS-DOS on a 286 to the internet.)
I definitely agree that Wikipedia is not a substitute for having the rest of the web at your fingertips.
I agree that there's a lot of promise for open source resources like Linux, Wikipedia, and Bitcoin, but I see that there's also a great trade-off between Cathedral vs. Bazaar style production.
Capitalism is a system of production in which productive work is carried out by employees using means of production, such as factories, that are the private property of a capitalist that employs them, and that capitalist is the owner of the work product. Linux is largely produced this way, although originally it was produced by commons-based peer production, and so, for that matter, is the Internet Archive; Wikipedia and LAPACK largely are not. The distinction doesn't have anything to do with non-profit corporations; whether the capitalist is a non-profit corporation or a private citizen doesn't really affect the system of production much.
"Non-capitalist" doesn't mean "anti-capitalist". Capitalism wasn't anti-feudalism either! I mean, except in the sense that in Europe the nascent capitalist cities often gained independence from the feudal system, and eventually capitalist power structures became more influential than feudal ones and displaced them after a few centuries, but in that sense everything is anti-everything-else.
Very few people are less anti-capitalist than Jimmy Wales.
I think your definition of capitalism is overly simplistic. Capitalism is merely a byproduct of private property. If you hold that individuals can own property, and have certain rights to that property, then capitalism is an emergent property of an economy that respects private property as a concept.
Employee owned corporations are a thing in capitalism, as are publically owned corporations, as are state owned corporations, as are non-profit corps. I get that organizations which produce IP that is open source or non-copyrighted is novel, but I still don't follow how it's "non-capitalistic". Donations are simply an alternative revenue model.
However, that's ultimately irrelevant — what counts is that Wikipedia isn't written by employees and isn't owned by the owners of the means of production.
I gave an entirely standard definition of capitalism, though yes, somewhat simplified. If you want to use the word in a way that does not accord with its standard definition in history, sociology, economics, and politics, that's up to you, but you will of course reach different conclusions about your "capitalism" than those of us who are discussing its standard definition (your definition, for example, implies that capitalism has existed for several thousand years), and you will have a hard time understanding what we are saying. I suggest you read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitalism and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commons-based_peer_production.
"Characteristics central to capitalism include private property, capital accumulation, wage labor, voluntary exchange, a price system and competitive markets."
Capital accumulation is an emergent property of private property. If you can own things, and government protects that and is prohibited from seizing property based on arbitrary factors, then capitalism emerges by default. It's not a "command-based" economy once private property and individual rights are established.
Markets aren't centrally managed in any way, they simply emerge as a property of people trading private property. That employees trade time for someone's else's private property (cash) is just a system that tends to work. I think there's other systems, it's certainly not the only way to organize, but it seems weird to say that it's non-capitalist. When I join a volunteer based organization, and donate my labor, it doesn't mean it's non-capitalist. The organization has simply chosen to give away IP rather than give away services (as a homeless shelter or food bank might do).
Also, in general, I think you should read more stuff that's objectively true instead of stuff written to persuade you to support a particular political agenda. Reading persuasive tracts like the ones you're paraphrasing gives power to the leaders of the political faction the tracts are from; reading things that are objectively true gives power to you instead.
Calling out Wikipedia as non-capitalist is superfluous. It's bizarre, because you still fail to acknowledge that non-profit institutions have existed for centuries, and no one ever bothered to label them "non-capitalist". You are conflating two orthogonal subjects. Sure, profit is an essential component of capitalist economies, but the exclusion of profit does not make an organization non-capitalist any more than it makes it non-communist or non-feudalist.
In general, you should avoid being condescending. I don't give power to anyone, those are my words.
I didn't understand what an encyclopedia was.
That said, nostalgia is fun sometimes.
Ah, but does Wikipedia + Google have MindMaze?
I have been looking for 5+ years for a tablet or PC "Atlas" which can easily, with a click of button, show me graphs, or colour regions, based on specified criteria such as political types; economy; climate; productivity; and other interesting stats.
Wikipedia articles are horribly inconsistent about format and details they use for different geographic regions. They are even worse at showing overviews, especially across categories and regions. It takes me hours to gather info I'd get in Encarta in a few clicks, at which point I give up. Google Maps doesn't have any of these markings / mappings easily accessible; and neither is trivially accessible offline.
This is not to say Google Maps and Wikipedia aren't AWESOME - because they are; and I wouldn't dream of replacing them with Encarta for 99% of things. But there are significant use cases which have been lost and not replaced with anything of equal ease of use.
FWIW: I'd pay $50+ right now for a good off-line atlas. All I can find in app stores when I search for "Atlas" is scans of maps :S
2017 version: 170 mb
2018 version: 1.6gb
I never used Encarta, so it might be great, but you can get better data today at the cost of being harder to use. But a lot less bias.
That said maps are cool, and they are still really expensive, even with http://openstreetmap.org and https://www.naturalearthdata.com
That entire time period is full of lost multimedia gems. From cooking CDs that had vetted recipes taught by professional chefs, to the Microsoft Wine Guide![1]
Sure now days all of that information is available on the web, but people have to sort through 90% garbage to find the good stuff. The number of recipes on the web put out by people who just don't even know how to cook is astounding.
There is something to be said for high quality curated experiences, and that is what those multimedia CD-ROMs offered.
Using google was awesome before SEO.
I never really used Encarta deeply - I bought my Misumi CD-ROM reader in like 1994, without a bundle.
As a result, it was hard not to be in a bit of awe at how much information of various types you could suddenly have at home in the form of little silvery disks.
Google provides very shallow info and bites that give rise to information that is clever as opposed to well thought out.
I do not want to infer that they are bad resources, but I would argue that they are significantly lacking in the department of balanced, curated and well thought out information.
Sure, Wikipedia wins in sheer volume but that's it. Encarta was a well curated collection of knowledge that was consistent and perfectly suited for its audience.
More is not always better.
If you have an enormous amount of information, but know that some unknown 10% of that information is inaccurate (at a facts level, not just in a "I don't agree with the presentation or perspectives portrayed" way), that's dramatically worse than having slightly less information that you can be fairly sure has been (at least factually) verified.
Same with writing quality; a huge amount of information written in a way that your brain can't absorb efficiently (whether because it's in a foreign language, written incoherently, or interspersed with profanity and editorializing) is less useful and worse than less information written in a clear and consistent style.
That is not the correct use of "by definition." More only means more, not better.
purportedly from Suárez Miranda, Travels of Prudent Men, Book Four, Ch. XLV, Lérida, 1658
-- Jorge Luis Borges
Wikipedia is unbeatable for breadth and depth, but there's a lot to be said for curation.
Encarta was much more interactive, even including 3D walk arounds of historical sites & quizzes.
I mean, I have plenty of my own tech nostalgia, like the way at 300 baud you could hear the bits and practically whistle them. Happy memories! But I try never to confuse that with "my childhood was a historical peak". Because it wasn't particularly.
You know plenty of people were just as nostalgic for their encyclopedia volumes and thought kids had it too easy with this CD-ROM nonsense. And I'm sure that people complained that the first encyclopedias made learning too easy, that kids wouldn't value what they didn't work for. And this is a tradition of "the kids are too soft" that goes back at least to Socrates: "[Writing things down] will introduce forgetfulness into the soul of those who learn it: they will not practice using their memory because they will put their trust in writing, which is external and depends on signs that belong to others, instead of trying to remember from the inside, completely on their own."
Excluding grammar and style maybe. A lot of Wikipedia, including many articles on important subjects, are painful to read. Either because they were written by committee or simply by somebody with poor language skills (sometimes even worse than my own!)
Sure, Wikipedia has more articles; but the content is of a significantly lower quality by every other standard going.
Source? Research papers on this subject don’t find a great difference in quality between Wikipedia and other encyclopedias.
The issue yourself and others who haven’t used Encarta is that you’re thinking about it as purely a text document store, which couldn’t be further from the truth. Encarta is more like a museum than it is like Wikipedia. It has a smaller curated set of write ups but has all the interactive exhibits, games, and multimedia content that a good museum has. Wikipedia is about breadth of content where as Encarta was about engagement.
This is something you’d expect the web to excel at but unfortunately the race to breadth of content has resulted in a less interesting delivery of said content.
I do have used Encarta, and I really enjoyed it. I felt like you were talking about pure content quality, when it was (as I understand) rather about the way that (good) content is presented. If one had the time and tools to make games and interactive interfaces from Wikipedia’s content, do you think it could eventually match the Encarta experience? Some WP articles have videos/sounds/gifs but I find them too rare.
You probably just skimmed my post then because I’m really don’t know terms like “multimedia”, “games”, and phrases like “It wasn’t just a mass of text” could be confused with “pure content quality”.
> If one had the time and tools to make games and interactive interfaces from Wikipedia’s content, do you think it could eventually match the Encarta experience?
Absolutely. Encarta isn’t something that is unapproachable. In fact I literally said “This is something you’d expect the web to excel at” in my last comment :)
> Some WP articles have videos/sounds/gifs but I find them too rare.
Not only rare, poorly presented as well. Encarta has an engaging UI/UX, Wikipedia isn’t designed that way. So even the few articles with multimedia content are still less engaging than the average Encarta article.
That’s not necessarily a bad thing though. Sometimes people want their information presented in a bland broadsheet format, other times they want a pretty infograph. Each has their place.
I think it'd be really neat and useful for wikipedia to add things like that. A filterable searchable timeline to say "show me all the wars fought in or involving country X" or a map with layers showing different information or events.
What make you think Wikipedia would be more prone to these problems than other encyclopedia, including Encarta? Research has shown that the quality of Wikipedia is comparable to other encyclopedias, which might surprise some people given that anyone can edit it. Encarta will never have specialist in all domains known on Earth; something that Wikipedia can have.
Wikipedia is great, until you need to explain to children how to weigh the credibility of the information provided.
I'd also say that a monthly dump of Wikipedia to DVD/BluRay/USB would meet the offline requirements. Or as you say mobile phone internet access (for low bandwidth ... is WAP still a thing?)
I found that it had only very basic information and didn't go into any detail. I was very disappointed because I was expecting so much more information about the topics I looked at and the multimedia elements just seemed to be there to show off the technology rather than actually be useful. I put it away and never looked at Encarta again. I know wonder if there was useful information that I never found because I didn't spend enough time looking at it.
I also found many paper encyclopedias to be disappointing as well, and were only useful for giving me a short summary when I knew absolutely nothing about a topic. I really enjoyed the special Encyclopedia Britannica volumes with more in-depth articles on a smaller number of topics. Those were much better than the regular volumes with minimal information.
I think I wanted to learn so much more about the topics I was interested in, and information was hard for me to find in those days. Only my local public library had books the sufficient depth of knowledge to make me happy.
If I had known about the amazing skills of professional librarians back then, I would have had a librarian help me find information. At the time, I just thought that they were there to shelve books and check them out to people and had little other skills.