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Obviously this is pure nostalgia. Wikipedia + Google is superior in pretty much all imaginable ways. And available to people "in the developing world". (I don't

Obviously this is pure nostalgia. Wikipedia + Google is superior in pretty much all imaginable ways. And available to people "in the developing world". (I don't really get why Scott included that part. The number of people who have access to a PC with a Microsoft Encarta CD-ROM and also don't have web access via their phones.. my guess is that the total number is about 17, globally.) That said, nostalgia is fun sometimes.

asdfman123 7y ago
For a kid growing up, Encarta was far superior to anything Wikipedia offers today. 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.
- pastage 7y ago
  When it comes to knowledge and data more is by definition always better.
  - InitialLastName 7y ago
    That's only true if your brain is perfect and consistent at absorbing and verifying information. Even then, it's unnecessarily reductive. 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.
  - asdfman123 7y ago
    Okay, let me link to a pastebin with the entire contents of my hard drive in binary form (with sensitive data removed, of course) and you can give it to your niece to read. Surely that information is more useful than a children's book on science. More data is always better by definition. That is not the correct use of "by definition." More only means more, not better.
  - dredmorbius 7y ago
    ... In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography. purportedly from Suárez Miranda, Travels of Prudent Men, Book Four, Ch. XLV, Lérida, 1658 -- Jorge Luis Borges
antognini 7y ago
> Wikipedia + Google is superior in pretty much all imaginable ways. Ah, but does Wikipedia + Google have MindMaze?
NikolaNovak 7y ago
I'm sorry, this is just incorrect by somebody who either hadn't fully used Encarta / Compton's, or doesn't remember them. 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
- ghaff 7y ago
  There is Brittanica Online if you want an edited encyclopedia. And Rand McNally has an online atlas--though I don't have any personal familiarity with it. There's also ESRI.
- mey 7y ago
  You can download the CIA World Factbook, but it isn't an app, nor does search work offline. It is basically a scrape of the site. https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/download/ https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/download/
  - SanchoPanda 7y ago
    Interestingly, 2017 version: 170 mb 2018 version: 1.6gb
- CamperBob2 7y ago
  Seems like Google Earth is a better match for your interests than Google Maps. I don't know if it's still actively maintained, though... you don't hear much about Google Earth anymore. Not new and shiny and disruptive enough, I guess.
com2kid 7y ago
The content on Wikipedia far exceeds what Encarta had available of course, but Encarta was made during the height of the multimedia boom and features rich interactive media and educational narratives. 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. [1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SzpNT8wAD3A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SzpNT8wAD3A
- groundlogic 7y ago
  I certainly agree on the benefits of curation. 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.
ghaff 7y ago
Yeah, as the article alludes to, Encarta was a product of the period after CDs came out but before there was much of a WWW, before most people had an Internet connection, and what home connections existed were mostly dial-up modems. 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.
momokoko 7y ago
I would strongly disagree in this case. Wikipedia can be very opinionated and holds bias towards fringe information that has a niche passionate base of followers. 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.
jszymborski 7y ago
Undoubtedly there is a healthy dose of nostalgia, however there's a lot to learn here. Wikipedia is unbeatable for breadth and depth, but there's a lot to be said for curation.
partiallypro 7y ago
No offense, but I don't think you ever used Encarta, at least not much. Encarta was much more interactive, even including 3D walk arounds of historical sites & quizzes.
wpietri 7y ago
Yeah, "I really miss the era where we were so deprived that now-small things seemed amazing" is a bit of a weird take. 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."
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
liability 7y ago
> "Wikipedia + Google is superior in pretty much all imaginable ways" 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!)
- type0 7y ago
  and sometimes even by bots
- pushpop 7y ago
  Also Encarta was much more engaging. It wasn’t just a mass of text with a few token images thrown in. It was a carefully curated compilation of multimedia, interactive content, educational games as well as textual write ups. It’s content was also discoverable in a plethora of ways that the web should ideally be suited to yet Wikipedia doesn’t even begin to approach. Sure, Wikipedia has more articles; but the content is of a significantly lower quality by every other standard going.
  - hk__2 7y ago
    > 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.
    - pushpop 7y ago
      Again you’re only discussing things at a textual level. Encarta wasn’t like other encyclopaedias - Encarta was a fully interactive multimedia experience. 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.
rtkwe 7y ago
Not purely. Things like the timeline shown near the bottom don't really exist as far as I can tell on Wikipedia. Also the many writers few editors leads to articles feeling rather disjointed at times with information being repeated pointlessly in different ways in different sections sometimes, there's something to be said for the edited entries of yore in that regard. 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.
cosmodisk 7y ago
Disagree.Your argument is like why buy Financial Times when all the info is out there for free. Wikipedia,while a brilliant invention on its own, is not, and probably never will be a substitute for Encyclopedia type of sources, including Encarta. Subjects like politics, history, nutrition and medicine are very sensitive ones and there's tons of resources out there that tend to either massage the data,or bend the reality all together,which renders them absolutely unreliable.
- hk__2 7y ago
  > Disagree.Your argument is like why buy Financial Times when all the info is out there for free. Wikipedia,while a brilliant invention on its own, is not, and probably never will be a substitute for Encyclopedia type of sources, including Encarta. Subjects like politics, history, nutrition and medicine are very sensitive ones and there's tons of resources out there that tend to either massage the data,or bent the reality all together,which renders them absolutely unreliable. 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.
shanselman 7y ago
I included the developing world stuff because it’s true. I’ve lived all over the African continent and no, not everyone is connected always. Sometimes there’s just an old PC in a room, disconnected. My mother in law taught in lower Gweru and they have no internet. What little digital work is done is moved on USB sticks. Encarta is used all over Cuba, Iraq, and elsewhere.
Spooky23 7y ago
I'd disagree. Encarta had different, almost magazine-like ways to present information. Google has too many blind alleys these days, and Wikipedia is very inconsistent. Wikipedia is great, until you need to explain to children how to weigh the credibility of the information provided.
quickthrower2 7y ago
I cam here to say similar, although I'd phrase it as "Encarta was amazing in the 90's, but with Wikipedia you get a much richer and in depth encyclopedia, albeit without the interactive/multimedia type interface that kids might prefer". 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?)

asdfman123 7y ago

For a kid growing up, Encarta was far superior to anything Wikipedia offers today. 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.

pastage 7y ago
When it comes to knowledge and data more is by definition always better.
- InitialLastName 7y ago
  That's only true if your brain is perfect and consistent at absorbing and verifying information. Even then, it's unnecessarily reductive. 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.
- asdfman123 7y ago
  Okay, let me link to a pastebin with the entire contents of my hard drive in binary form (with sensitive data removed, of course) and you can give it to your niece to read. Surely that information is more useful than a children's book on science. More data is always better by definition. That is not the correct use of "by definition." More only means more, not better.
- dredmorbius 7y ago
  ... In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography. purportedly from Suárez Miranda, Travels of Prudent Men, Book Four, Ch. XLV, Lérida, 1658 -- Jorge Luis Borges

antognini 7y ago

> Wikipedia + Google is superior in pretty much all imaginable ways. Ah, but does Wikipedia + Google have MindMaze?

NikolaNovak 7y ago

I'm sorry, this is just incorrect by somebody who either hadn't fully used Encarta / Compton's, or doesn't remember them. 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

ghaff 7y ago
There is Brittanica Online if you want an edited encyclopedia. And Rand McNally has an online atlas--though I don't have any personal familiarity with it. There's also ESRI.
mey 7y ago
You can download the CIA World Factbook, but it isn't an app, nor does search work offline. It is basically a scrape of the site. https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/download/ https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/download/
- SanchoPanda 7y ago
  Interestingly, 2017 version: 170 mb 2018 version: 1.6gb
CamperBob2 7y ago
Seems like Google Earth is a better match for your interests than Google Maps. I don't know if it's still actively maintained, though... you don't hear much about Google Earth anymore. Not new and shiny and disruptive enough, I guess.

com2kid 7y ago

The content on Wikipedia far exceeds what Encarta had available of course, but Encarta was made during the height of the multimedia boom and features rich interactive media and educational narratives. 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. [1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SzpNT8wAD3A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SzpNT8wAD3A

groundlogic 7y ago
I certainly agree on the benefits of curation. 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.

ghaff 7y ago

Yeah, as the article alludes to, Encarta was a product of the period after CDs came out but before there was much of a WWW, before most people had an Internet connection, and what home connections existed were mostly dial-up modems. 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.

momokoko 7y ago

I would strongly disagree in this case. Wikipedia can be very opinionated and holds bias towards fringe information that has a niche passionate base of followers. 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.

jszymborski 7y ago

Undoubtedly there is a healthy dose of nostalgia, however there's a lot to learn here. Wikipedia is unbeatable for breadth and depth, but there's a lot to be said for curation.

partiallypro 7y ago

No offense, but I don't think you ever used Encarta, at least not much. Encarta was much more interactive, even including 3D walk arounds of historical sites & quizzes.

wpietri 7y ago

Yeah, "I really miss the era where we were so deprived that now-small things seemed amazing" is a bit of a weird take. 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."

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

liability 7y ago

> "Wikipedia + Google is superior in pretty much all imaginable ways" 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!)

type0 7y ago
and sometimes even by bots
pushpop 7y ago
Also Encarta was much more engaging. It wasn’t just a mass of text with a few token images thrown in. It was a carefully curated compilation of multimedia, interactive content, educational games as well as textual write ups. It’s content was also discoverable in a plethora of ways that the web should ideally be suited to yet Wikipedia doesn’t even begin to approach. Sure, Wikipedia has more articles; but the content is of a significantly lower quality by every other standard going.
- hk__2 7y ago
  > 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.
  - pushpop 7y ago
    Again you’re only discussing things at a textual level. Encarta wasn’t like other encyclopaedias - Encarta was a fully interactive multimedia experience. 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.

rtkwe 7y ago

Not purely. Things like the timeline shown near the bottom don't really exist as far as I can tell on Wikipedia. Also the many writers few editors leads to articles feeling rather disjointed at times with information being repeated pointlessly in different ways in different sections sometimes, there's something to be said for the edited entries of yore in that regard. 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.

cosmodisk 7y ago

Disagree.Your argument is like why buy Financial Times when all the info is out there for free. Wikipedia,while a brilliant invention on its own, is not, and probably never will be a substitute for Encyclopedia type of sources, including Encarta. Subjects like politics, history, nutrition and medicine are very sensitive ones and there's tons of resources out there that tend to either massage the data,or bend the reality all together,which renders them absolutely unreliable.

hk__2 7y ago
> Disagree.Your argument is like why buy Financial Times when all the info is out there for free. Wikipedia,while a brilliant invention on its own, is not, and probably never will be a substitute for Encyclopedia type of sources, including Encarta. Subjects like politics, history, nutrition and medicine are very sensitive ones and there's tons of resources out there that tend to either massage the data,or bent the reality all together,which renders them absolutely unreliable. 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.

shanselman 7y ago

I included the developing world stuff because it’s true. I’ve lived all over the African continent and no, not everyone is connected always. Sometimes there’s just an old PC in a room, disconnected. My mother in law taught in lower Gweru and they have no internet. What little digital work is done is moved on USB sticks. Encarta is used all over Cuba, Iraq, and elsewhere.

Spooky23 7y ago

I'd disagree. Encarta had different, almost magazine-like ways to present information. Google has too many blind alleys these days, and Wikipedia is very inconsistent. Wikipedia is great, until you need to explain to children how to weigh the credibility of the information provided.

quickthrower2 7y ago

I cam here to say similar, although I'd phrase it as "Encarta was amazing in the 90's, but with Wikipedia you get a much richer and in depth encyclopedia, albeit without the interactive/multimedia type interface that kids might prefer". 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?)