That said, nostalgia is fun sometimes.
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.
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."
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
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.
Encarta was much more interactive, even including 3D walk arounds of historical sites & quizzes.
Wikipedia is great, until you need to explain to children how to weigh the credibility of the information provided.
Ah, but does Wikipedia + Google have MindMaze?
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.
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.
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.
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?)
Wikipedia is unbeatable for breadth and depth, but there's a lot to be said for curation.
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.