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I miss Microsoft Encarta (2019)
- kenty 6y agoEncarta was an amazing product that I fondly remember using in school. It was essentially wikipedia before there was wikipedia with the upside that it had curated and citable sources and generally a much higher quality of writing. In my eyes, over the years, wikipedia has caught up a lot in terms of quality of writing and wikimedia now has a lot of images and video. I wonder if there is a way to just download the whole wikipedia for easy distribution like encarta.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- jxf 6y agoPart of the value of Encarta was in the human curation of what was interesting. Wikipedia includes (by necessity) everything — but an encyclopedia would probably devote more space to (say) Nigerian history than to (say) the in-game statistics of all ~1,000 Pokémon.
- p1necone 6y agoI suspect the sort of person who writes Wikipedia articles about Pokemon would not go and write articles about Nigerian history instead if Pokemon articles were not allowed, and vice versa. Wikipedia contributions are not really a zero sum game.
- patrec 6y agoWell, for storage (and thus offline) purposes it is of course exactly a zero sum game. I for one would really like a say 3 GiB version of English Wikipedia without Pokemon and Porn, or a 33GiB version with useful images. However broad and non-deltionist might be best for online Wikepedia, a more curated i.e. deletionist version would certainly be very useful for offline usage and quite a few other purposes.
- exDM69 6y ago> I for one would really like a say 3 GiB version of English Wikipedia without Pokemon and Porn, or a 33GiB version with useful images. There are several offline snapshots of different sizes of Wikipedia that do exactly this. Some of them are more thoroughly curated, others are a snapshot of the most popular articles, etc. What I could not find easily was a full English Wikipedia with images and all available in an easily accessible format (like the Kiwix snapshots). I'd put a whole hard disk for this purpose, because the size is in the gigabyte-terabyte range.
- asah 6y agoSome relevant links: 100,000 curated pages: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Vital_articles/Level/5 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Vital_articles/Level... In terms of space, the text is over 1000x smaller than the multimedia: ~20GB (uncompressed) for the text vs ~45TB (compressed) for multimedia (est accounting for growth vs 23TB@2014). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Size_of_Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Size_of_Wikipedia
- monort 6y agoWhat's wrong with kiwix snapshot of English wikipedia? It's only 93GB. http://download.kiwix.org/zim/wikipedia/wikipedia_en_all_maxi_2020-09.zim http://download.kiwix.org/zim/wikipedia/wikipedia_en_all_max...
- patrec 6y agoWell, I was hoping for less than 93GiB compressed, given that this exceeds the storage capacity of several devices I'd like to use it on and I'd estimate the total amount of info I care about to be far smaller than that. And small is beautiful: if everything fits into ram, you can do various interesting data munging tasks on the data (which is after all not uninteresting) very quickly.
- patrec 6y agoI am aware that there are various offline wikipedia compilations and I am grateful they exist and to the people who work on them, but last I looked using them looked like a bit of pain, and on checking again that still appears to be the case. I get the impression that if I want to have something of decent quality that fits into the 10s of GiB range I'd consider reasonable¹, I'd have to manually munge together several non-Pokemon topics I consider important plus one of the text only dumps. This would be more palatable if I had a strong impression that once I hit upon a working process I could rinse-and-repeat on a yearly basis. Do you have any experience with this? ¹E.g. the 100k top article page linked by sibling does not look super promising, ~700 math articles vs ~10k fluff (sports, entertainment etc.).
- quietbritishjim 6y agoI think the point was that if you are looking at a subject where the relative importance is less obvious than Pokemon vs Nigerian politics then you could gauge importance implicitly from the existence of the article in a curated encyclopedia - not that contributers should be forced to spend more time on more important topics.
- mekkkkkk 6y agoIf they were employed to do so, they would. A curated encyclopedia with paid researchers would not be bound by the whims of weebs.
- 29athrowaway 6y agoSome people call this phenomenon "wikigroaning": "the art of highlighting Wikipedia's bias toward things that don't matter". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikigroaning https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikigroaning https://www.somethingawful.com/news/wikigroaning/ https://www.somethingawful.com/news/wikigroaning/
- wishysgb 6y agoI just don't get why doesn't it matter . for what it is Pokemon is a game and in some ways a form of art, and since many humans are interested in it deeply that means that it is important to them. I think it is important human knowledge, there is no need to be elitest about it.
- 29athrowaway 6y agoSome pokemons are inspired in real world animals. Many people know the pokemon and not the animal. They know about drowzee but not about the tapir.
- Cthulhu_ 6y agoAnd yet there's a ton of information that is rejected from Wikipedia itself, which found a place on e.g. Wikia and a few other sites like that - mainly about gaming, but also about subjects like D&D, etc.
- musicale 6y agoIf Bulbasaur is on Wikipedia, then Owlbear should be also. ;-) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Owlbear https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Owlbear
- ben_w 6y agoI remember a similar comparison with Tony Blair back when he was the Prime Minister of the UK; the response was that while Wikipedia did indeed say more about Pikachu than Blair, Wikipedia also said more about Blair than did whichever “proper” encyclopaedia Wikipedia was being compared with at the time.
- musicale 6y agoWell, Pikachu has been a highly influential Pokémon for nearly 30 years.
- MaxBarraclough 6y agoI recall reading that there was a time the Wikipedia article on the lightsaber was longer than the article on the printing press. No longer the case, thankfully.
- JeanFred 6y agoCheck out Kiwix: https://www.kiwix.org/ https://www.kiwix.org/ “Kiwix is an offline reader for online content like Wikipedia, Project Gutenberg, or TED Talks. It makes knowledge available to people with no or limited internet access. The software as well as the content is free to use for anyone.”
- oriesdan 6y agoIndeed, Kiwix is the proper solution for anyone who cares about knowledge access in places where internet connection is spotty. Given the file format it uses (zim) is compressed, and meant to be accessed compressed to pluck a specific article, you can have all the content of English's wikipedia without images and videos in just 36GB. Plus, the specs of the file format are published and it's easy to build your own implementation, I did it for my needs. It's also great for privacy maximalists : I have wikipedia, wikisource and wiktionary in two languages locally, which means that most of my searches never leave my computer. Kiwix/openzim don't provide only mediawiki projects either, I've recently downloaded stackoverflow's content (although, I'll need to build a dedicated search engine for it to be really usable). You can have a look at the incredible amount of available content there: https://wiki.kiwix.org/wiki/Content_in_all_languages https://wiki.kiwix.org/wiki/Content_in_all_languages
- read_if_gay_ 6y ago> all the content of English's wikipedia without images and videos in just 36GB 36GB seems like a really big number if it's just text. A cursory Google search says 1MB will hold about 500 pages of text (ignoring compression). So 36GB would be something like 18 million pages? Let's say a 1000 page book is 10cm wide, so 18M pages wind up as 1800 meters of books, or 180 meter-wide bookshelves with 10 shelves each, which is maybe a large library? It seems like a lot of that must be external sources. I wonder what percentage was actually written by Wikipedia editors?
- indy 6y agoI'd assume that figure would also include the indexes required for searching
- bllguo 6y agothere are many ways to download wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Database_download https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Database_download
- elboru 6y agoIt also included great multimedia (images, audio, video, animations). I remember myself spending hours watching all kinds of physics animations.
- aimor 6y agoIn 2015 I was curious about the article distribution on Wikipedia so I scraped and visualized some data. At the time I was frustrated by the writing quality and I wanted to know how much of Wikipedia was 'quality' and how many of the 5 million articles were in subjects comparable to a general encyclopedia volume. My images are here: https://imgcdn.dev/i/c6fJ8 https://imgcdn.dev/i/c6fJ8 https://imgcdn.dev/i/c6VRy https://imgcdn.dev/i/c6VRy https://imgcdn.dev/i/c6Wn2 https://imgcdn.dev/i/c6Wn2 and you can compare that to some Wikipedia hosted comparisons: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Size_of_Wikipedia#/media/File:Size_of_English_Wikipedia_(1000_vol).svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Size_of_Wikipedia#/m... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Size_of_Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Size_of_Wikipedia
- ParzivalML 6y agoI also miss it.
- martin_a 6y agoI remember we had something like "Encarta 98" (was that a thing?) on my dads computer. It was a family computer and my brother and me were sitting in front of it, watching videos and reading all the stuff in there and whatnot. I always dreamed that school was like this. Hasn't happened until today, which is sad.
- rakoo 6y agoI think I had Encarta 97 or 98 and reading all the pages of the stuff I liked, even printing them. At some point I memorized most of the texts of those pages.
- watermanio 6y agoMy Dad was too cheap for Encarta. We had a shareware version called something like Infopedia. I remember doing a homework project at a friend's house and being quite jealous of the proper version!
- martin_a 6y agoI think we had a pirated copy from some buddy, too... :-D
- DoingIsLearning 6y agoJust wanted to give an honorable mention to: David Macaulay's "The way things work" CD-ROM So many fond memories.
- ycombinete 6y agoWe had the book as children. It was a massive (to my child's hands) hard cover book. I spent ages paging through it, looking at all the cute little illustrations. Whenever I had a question that my father coulnd't answer, we'd rush over to the bookshelf to find it there. It always seemed to have the answer.
- mcv 6y agoI miss paper encyclopedias. A roommate had the complete 1974 Winkler Prins, and I loved to just browse through it. Admittedly, browsing through Wikipedia is also fun, but still, browsing through a paper book is a very different experience. My kids don't see the point, unfortunately.
- meerita 6y agoConvenience replaces nostalgia: Why miss Encarta when you have Wikipedia? I liked the Encarta experience: it was amazing to see videos, photos and everything in a nice UI back then, but today we have Wikipedia, Wikimedia, etc. It's a way superior experience and there's x100 content.
- pm90 6y agoA one stop shop is kinda nice. The quality of the content is really good too. Wikipedia is probably good enough for the most part though. I remember being so excited and enchanted by encarta and even non digital encyclopedias and books as a kid. The idea that I could crack open a volume and learn anything felt magical, in a non digitized world.
- Minor49er 6y agoEncarta was charged with multimedia. It was a really new and exciting experience for a kid growing up before Flash sites started really even became popular. Loading up Encarta, you'd get a musical intro with flashes of footage from shuttle launches, famous speeches, native American tribes, animals, etc. Then immediate after, you get a button called "Explore". Clicking that zooms you into a web of categories, with each one zooming further and further down into more fine-grained topics where you could get previews about what you were about to discover. The articles were concise and full of video or other interactive pieces. Certain topics would have a brief sound recording as an introduction. I even remember you could assemble a dinosaur to learn about the different parts. Every prominent UI interaction, from a button click to expanding a context menu, had a unique and satisfying sound. That would be a huge problem for most people with most UI today, but given that there was so much media being played, it fit in naturally. The interface itself was basically a web browser, so it helped to teach kids about simple concepts, like navigation, hyperlinks, bookmarks, internal vs external resources, and so on. It was a great pre-introduction to surfing the web. For a kid, I think Encarta would be a much more fun and engaging experience than Wikipedia when choosing an encyclopedia. If you want to see what Bill Gates envisioned for multimedia learning around the time, you should check out the (hilariously cheesy) videos that came with his book "The Road Ahead" And don't even get me started on how cool the Grolier Multimedia Encyclopedia was at the time. (Am I really getting nostalgic over encyclopedias over here? ...)
- atorodius 6y agoI remember going through some 3D model of the colloseum in it, always thinking it’s maybe actually a game but it was just a static 3D model. Must have spent hours there.
- nsonha 6y agoYeah you had the whole world at your fingertips but it still felt achievable to consume all of it. Nowadays you have the whole world at your fingertips but you dont know where to even start.
- netsharc 6y agoBeing able to consume it offline certainly helped, I had Encarta 98 and dial-up, so I had the choice between going online and paying per minute, or just spend my free time reading an encyclopedia. Ha when I was even younger my parents actually got me a Disney-themed encyclopedia ( https://www.gumtree.com/p/books/walt-disney-encyclopedia-book-set-/1377616512 https://www.gumtree.com/p/books/walt-disney-encyclopedia-boo... ) and I'd actually spend time sitting somewhere reading them. A kid version of me nowadays would probably be watching YouTube, sadly.
- cx4life 6y agoEncarta might have been one of my first experiences doinking around with computers - I remember replacing the .WAV file for a cheetah with the sound of a car's engine and trying (but failing) to convince my brother it was the REAL sound of a cheetah. There is something about the data being bounded and explorable, both through the software and the file system that was... neat.
- shannifin 6y agoMy family finally got a Windows PC in 1996, and Encarta was one of the first pieces of software we installed. I can't claim that I miss it much, but at the time it was definitely magical.
- edandersen 6y agoMind Maze was a great excuse to play games at school!
- konfusinomicon 6y agoI loved playing mind maze!! Countless hours I spent playing that game at my friend's house
- 29athrowaway 6y ago"Compton's Interactive Encyclopedia" was like Encarta but it featured Sir Patrick Stewart, therefore it was a cooler experience.
- 29athrowaway 6y agoPlus, you could cite your reference with style, i.e.: "I got this information straight outta Compton... you are about to witness the strength of street knowledge".
- sleavey 6y ago> Perhaps Microsoft could make the final version of Encarta available for a free final download so that we might avoid downloading illegal or malware infested versions? This is a great idea. If anyone at Microsoft reads this and agrees, please get whoever needs to know to know!
- speps 6y agoArchive.org has it: https://archive.org/details/microsoftencartapremiumedition2009 https://archive.org/details/microsoftencartapremiumedition20...
- 7952 6y agoI miss books. The kind of "Encyclopedia of" style that had pictures, text, diagrams, and maps that were all part of a whole. Written for a general audience of curious people and not needing to cater to such a wide audience as Wikipedia.
- kar1181 6y agoThat whole period of the PC industry where 'multimedia' became mainstream was pretty magical. I know the Amiga was well ahead of the PC ecosystem for a long time in capability but it never hit schools (at least where I grew up in South Australia) like PCs did. So with the emergence of VGA and Super VGA, widespread availability (and relative affordability) of 486 DX class PCs, Soundblasters and Optical Drives, the PC overran the other home computers. Games and applications were evolving at break-neck speed and the pace of change really made you feel anything was possible. Encarta was really a product of that time. If you were doing primary / secondary school during the 90s, you'd have had to do projects where paper encyclopaedias were your primary resource. For me in a rural school it wasn't until the mid 90s we had 486PCs with CDROM drives and going from Britannica to the searchable rich media database that was Encarta was a massive force multiplier. It was a remarkable demonstration of how positive an effect technology could have on the learning experience.
- oriesdan 6y agoOne thing I remember from those times : even knowing there was an encyclopedia on the school library computer, I would not use it, because it just sounded impractical. I would need to ask for permission to use the computer, then wait for it to start, then figure how to do a search, while the competitive proposition was just picking the encyclopedia volume for the correct letter and finding my page! How much a few decades can change… I would call painful the idea of manually looking for a page in a book rather than doing a computer search, nowadays.
- kar1181 6y agoWe had a very permissive culture around the PC equipment, pretty much if a computer was free you could use it. There was no authentication or use policies. That did change towards the end of my schooling when networking and internet access was finally rolled out. Novell Netware ruined everything!
- hanselot 6y agoI remember in second and third grade we had the same thing, except, we were running pentium 2 and 3 machines around 1998. Our school lab had about 20-25 pc's, and all of them ran windows xp. We filled every conceivable space on those machines with pirated copies of gameboy emulators and various pokemon roms. It became a game of, will the computer admins ever realise, and if they do, will they do anything about it. Long story short, they gave up trying to police it after about a year, when no matter what they tried, we always found another way to get the games back, in the process of course we learned quite a bit about computing (happy accident? Who cares, my love of computers started in that stupid class)
- cute_boi 6y agoi still remember using encarta. I used it more than wikipedia on those days :D It worked so nice offline . Miss those days :(
- wishysgb 6y agoI owe a lot to Encarta and Microsoft Mathematics. I love that application I think it was one of the first applications that I bought with my hard earned money instead of pirating. because it was so worth it.
- timdaub 6y agoAhhhh the memories. I remember that my dad had a Windows XP PC in his office and sometimes we kids were allowed to play with it. There was this one funny feature in Encarta, that when you typed something about the moon, it would bring up a 3D simulation of the moon orbiting earth. Annnd, you could influence the moon's orbit with the mouse so that it ended up crashing into earth. That was sooo fun!
- noisy_boy 6y agoI spent a whole lot of time in my collage reading random articles from the hardbound volumes of Encyclopedia Britannica. That was the first exposure I had to high-quality information about the world on an incredible variety of topics. It was such a great feeling sitting in a beautiful library surrounded by books in silence isolated from the chaotic and noisy world outside. I get that now all information we can possibly want is at out fingertips, but there is something to be said about properly curated information in a defined boundary, in both physical and metaphorical sense, that you can focus on without getting distracted by the next random video.
- jalk 6y agoI've noticed that all Americans (and probably all English speaking countries) knows the animal Aardvark. Here in Denmark few do (where its called Jordsvin - Earthhog)- I speculate that the reason is, that English encyclopedias would mention it on the first page of the first volume and probably with a picture given its somewhat peculiar looks, and can't help to think that the Aardvark might be forgotten, now that few consumes encyclopedias the old way :-)
- konfusinomicon 6y agoWe got the aardvark and the danes got aalborg aquavit. Skol!
- bigbubba 6y agoThere is also a long-running children's cartoon starring a [very] anthropomorphic aardvark on American public television.
- vkaku 6y agoI don't know if people noticed, but: https://archive.org/search.php?query=Encarta+2009 https://archive.org/search.php?query=Encarta+2009 gives you links to try it out. I loved Encarta, was so much more interactive and great for children to learn from, without getting mixed up with Wikipedia's problems with political and biased edits and such. I really wish they brought this back.
- Synaesthesia 6y agoGroliers anybody?
- logicalmonster 6y agoYou bring back memories for me. That’s what I had on my first PC, a Pentium 60 Packard Bell with 8 mb of RAM.
- jaimex2 6y agoAh the joys of hearing the CD stacker in the classroom spin away as it tried to serve a room of 30 kids content from a bunch of Encarta CDs shared over the network drives.
- monkeydust 6y agoMan Encarta brings back memories. My parents got me the CD box set, putting into the drive, the anticipation and awe when it loaded and hours spent going through the quality content. Take it for granted how far along we have come.
- Yizahi 6y agoEncarta was fun. Also I remember having some "specialized" encyclopedias on the CDs - about cats, about Formula-1 etc. It was very interesting to just look around random articles, like Scott says. On the slightly related note - I've found recently that Wikipedia has several lists called Vital articles which compile the best and most essential articles. It feels a bit like those old encyclopedias. So I've decided to read through level 3 articles for fun, as a personal project. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Vital_articles https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Vital_articles
- TLightful 6y agoRemembering those huge, plate-sized CD roms fondly. Laser Discs.
- ImaCake 6y agoI downloaded a 3gb file today that contains information about the human genome. But it was just an accessory file that lists a bunch of variations within the genome - not even the genome itself! Amazing to think how many books would fit into those same 3gb and yet we casually use it up with routine science now.
- scoutt 6y agoI also remember the CD-ROM era (and before that). It was also the time when software just worked. There was no other way. The content on those CDs was permanent. Software rarely needed an updated, it didn't called home with telemetry and it didn't needed a constant internet connection to work. There wasn't subscription models for most of the software. So you want to do some 3D renderings? Just install this CD with 3DStudio. It works.
- cheschire 6y agoI don't remember this time. I remember a time when we blamed the operating system constantly for what was just as often an application memory management failure and thought that rebooting 4 times a day was normal.
- wil421 6y agoI remember what you do. Windows pop ups every hour, multiple reboots, blue screens out of no where, hardware issues, and having to upgrade via CDs. Oh shit I scratched my windows update disk!
- nailer 6y agoI don't remember that time. I remember a bunch of software that had severe errors (Office 97 parsing some emails corrupting the PST, Exchange 5.0 lacking relay control) that were only resolved by paying for a major new release. And games like 'Magic Carpet' that had game breaking bugs meaning you could never finish them, masked by making the game so difficult you would never visit the level in question.
- thdrdt 6y agoI miss the state of development from that time. I was developing multimedia CD content with software like Director and Authorware[1]. We had a project and when it was released the project was clearly done. Today projects don't finish because continuous integration is a never ending story. [1] I also miss this kinds of visual programming sometimes. Authorware was very underrated imho.
- ftr45 6y agome too
- secondcoming 6y agoEncarta was the main reason I managed to convince my mother to get a loan to buy our first PC. Look at me now, ma!
- leoxv 6y agoEncarta (1993-2009) was a big inspiration to start the Conzept encyclopedia project. Still much more to do to reach the audio-visual wow-factor and sheer fun that Encarta had, especially for children. Conzept is an attempt to create an encyclopedia for the 21st century. A modern topic-exploration tool based on Wikipedia, Wikidata, Open Library, GBIF and other information sources. Please check it out here: https://conze.pt https://conze.pt There are also various screenshots of the feature progress on Twitter which give a sense of what is already possible: https://twitter.com/conzept__ https://twitter.com/conzept__ For the future I am also looking into adding some WebXR enhancements (such as eg. for more immersive image viewing) and some form of social meetups around topics.
- leoxv 6y agoTo add: There are also auto-generated quizzes for all kinds of topics, which brings back some of the game-oriented elements of Encarta (experimental): https://conze.pt/explore/art%20genre?l=en&t=link&s=true&i=743573&u=https%3A%2F%2Fconze.pt%2Fapp%2Fquiz%2F%3Fm%3Dlist%26q%3DQ3305213%26p%3DP135%26l%3Dena https://conze.pt/explore/art%20genre?l=en&t=link&s=true&i=74... https://conze.pt/explore/Fruit%20dove?l=en&t=link&s=true&i=743573&u=https%3A%2F%2Fconze.pt%2Fapp%2Fquiz%2F%3Fm%3Dlist%26q%3DQ743573%26p%3DP171%26%26o%3Dtrue%26d%3Dtrue%26n%3D1%26l%3Den https://conze.pt/explore/Fruit%20dove?l=en&t=link&s=true&i=7... https://conze.pt/explore/Temple?l=en&t=link&s=true&i=44539&u=https%3A%2F%2Fconze.pt%2Fapp%2Fquiz%2F%3Fm%3Dlocation%26q%3DQ44539%26p%3DP625%26l%3Den https://conze.pt/explore/Temple?l=en&t=link&s=true&i=44539&u...
- dleslie 6y ago> A modern topic-exploration tool based on Wikipedia, Wikidata, Open Library, GBIF and other information sources. I find Wikipedia is increasingly relying upon meta-circular authority. Ie, a Wiki article will cite an expert who cites another expert who cites Wikipedia, and so ultimately the Wikipedia article is using itself as an authoritative source. Or the authority is fragile. Ie, the wiki article will cite a trusted source who in turn cites some Tweets as their authoritative source. Or the authority is broken. Ie, the wiki article will cite a trusted source who cites sources that are no longer present on the Internet, and so Wikipedia's broken link discovery fails. Is it possible not to rely upon Wikipedia as a primary source for your articles?
- mister_hn 6y agoI remember when I've got the Encarta 1995 and I was light years ahead of my school friends when doing researches and gather material. I guess an hypothetical Encarta 2020 would not even fit in 5/6 Blue Rays, especially considering the better quality of images and videos
- iqp 6y agoMy rural primary school got a Pentium PC with Encarta in 1996. It was placed in the library. I remember Encarta was on like 5 CDs, which the librarian kept under lock and key. You had to put your name down to book a 30 minute slot to use the PC, and take out the Encarta CDs on loan. It was a mission, and the whole time the librarian, a stern-faced woman in her mid 40s, would be standing behind you, arms folded, watching you warily lest you misused or damaged the sacred Encarta CDs. Fun times.
- asiachick 6y agoI don't know if miss Encarta but it does point out that in some ways Wikipedia feels like a step backward. Sure, wikipedia has more topics but where's a video? Where's the interactive explanations? Wikipedia feels like a 25yr old website. I know some people like that but it feels like a missed opportunity and stagnation to me
- coldpie 6y agoThat's way more effort than writing some text. That kind of content doesn't make itself for free.
- fsloth 6y agoThis. If we get tools that enables simple creation of video/interactive assets then Wikipedia will get those more. As a life long graphics geek and programmer, currently the content creation ecosystem is not really on "bicycle" level - more like unicycle while juggling chainsaws - although it's getting better. I mean I've done graphics stuff all my life, and would be quite lost how to "do a quick animation" in something closer to 15 minutes than 15 hours or 15 days.
- kashprime 6y agoI think we have Adobe to thank for stagnation in creator tools. There are smaller, harder to find companies doing pieces of the work (i.e. Photopea for Photoshop) and lots of video editing apps that have grown up around Instagram and TikTok. Blender is great for 3d modeling and more.
- pwdisswordfish0 6y agohttp://wickeditor.com http://wickeditor.com open source Flash replacement for 2020
- stuff4ben 6y agoBut they get millions of dollars in donations every year.
- galapago 6y agoSome scummvm developers are working to support the Director engine, which will allow Encarta to be "played" from scummvm.
- BiggsHoson 6y agoI think of all the school kids in the Internet era that have been told, "You cannot use Wikipedia" as a research source. Did teachers ever say that about Encarta?
- Causality1 6y ago"Multimedia" doesn't really exist anymore in the polished way it used to. If you want to learn about, say, Lewis and Clark, you could look it up on Wikipedia where you can find some pictures and a few source links where you can track down more info. Or you could watch a video about it on YouTube. Twenty years ago you could buy a single CD that would interweave video, audio, text, pictures, and interactive elements into a cohesive whole that felt much more alive. Is today's free information better than yesterday's expensive information? Probably, but I'd still point to Microsoft Dinosaurs if I wanted to light a fire in the heart of a child.
- robertlagrant 6y agoSomehow, Scott Hanselman's blog theme looks as though it was designed by the person who made Encarta's desktop icon.
- charliebrownau 6y agoeven if offline MS Encarta existed in 2020 it would be the same Global LEFT authorian corruption that wiki has I doubt any books has the uncensored truth anymore the entire mainstream is anti white, anti truth, and corrupt
- rchaud 6y agoI grabbed a copy of Encarta '97 at a street market in Kuala Lumpur for all of $3. I was 11 and it blew my mind how much info there was in it. Despite also buying FIFA '97 at shop, I looked forward to coming home from school and firing up a new article. They had a audio and video too! It's hard to explain just how incredible it was to have this info all in one place in the pre-internet age. Even today, I'd say having this kind of validated information as an integrated product offers a superior way to learn compared to Googling random articles and watching ad-ridden Youtube videos. Maybe this is the 2020-itis talking, but I can't imagine watching the moon landing or MLK's speech online without mentally preparing myself for the rudeness and straight up lunacy in the comments section.
- asdfman123 6y agoI had a similar experience with Encarta at a similar age -- in the US, in perhaps in a far more privileged environment -- but it hit me the same way. Encarta was great because it curated and presented information intentionally. Everything was in one place. You didn't get lost in rabbit holes or overwhelmed by information overload. You didn't get distracted by Instagram. It's so obvious that it barely needs to be said, but giving a kid a well-crafted learning experience is better than just throwing them into the deep end of the internet. I remember in elementary school some student asked why race cars make that distinct zooming noise as they race past. The teacher didn't know, but I was able to go to the front of the class and explain the Doppler effect based on an interactive lesson I had watched on MS Encarta.
- toast0 6y ago> Maybe this is the 2020-itis talking, but I can't imagine watching the moon landing or MLK's speech online without mentally preparing myself for the rudeness and straight up lunacy in the comments section. Don't ever scroll down to comments on YouTube or news articles. Possibly maybe peek if the video or article is very niche; the tail comments can be worthy, but the head will only make you feel bad.
- dehrmann 6y agoI recently watched some cringey home videos. When my brother got Encarta '97, I literally said "you're going to kick butt with that!"
- shireboy 6y agoMy earliest memories of this was seeing the Hindenberg video over and over again in department store demos. Oh the humanity!
- merricksb 6y agoFor those curious, here's the discussion about this article from last year: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20739629 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20739629 (1198 points/410 comments)
- tibbydudeza 6y agoI fondly remember buying the Creative Blaster MultiMedia kit (soundcard with CDROM drive) - it came only two CD's - MS Encarta and the 7th Guest. Nowadays cellular providers zero-rate data for wikipedia and other educational websites so at least every kid with access to a smartphone can access.
- mevorah 6y agoI have similar sentiment - I’ve had a side project on the back burner that adds an encarta 2003 skin to Wikipedia
- 120photo 6y agoNow any ding dong on the web can present their information as if they are experts and it gets mixed in with legit info.
- Foobar8568 6y agoI must be one of the few who miss paper encyclopedia, mourn Encyclopædia Universalis (French version of the Britannica) and "Tout l'Univers".
- webflo 6y agoI had one too
- jkingsbery 6y agoI spent a lot of time playing the maze game that came with Encarta, and like the author when I think of the "I Have a Dream" speech, I usually think about the version I watched on Encarta (as well as JFKs speech about going to the moon). Just this morning at breakfast, my daughter said to me "Did you know about goliath birdeating spiders?" I told her that I did not, but I looked it up on wikipedia. I started telling them how wikipedia is a digital version of encyclopedias, which many of us used to have in our home, came in ~20 book sets and had articles about almost everything you could want to know about. My younger daughter's response to the idea of having a 20 book set about all sorts of different topics was "Why would you do that?" Not only are things like Encarta and Encyclopedias foreign to kids growing up, the logic on why one would need something like that is lost on them. It's not necessarily a bad thing (wikipedia is awesome in its own right), but it is interesting.
- skocznymroczny 6y agoWhile we're at it, a remaster of Pandora's Box with high-res graphics would be nice too.
- agambrahma 6y agoAs someone who was fortunate to have a World Book encyclopaedia set, I think having a curated, "this is everything" experience is vastly under-rated. Encarta was better because it had some multi-media (as opposed to "just paper"). I remember being thrilled with Wikipedia when it came out, going down lots of rabbit holes, and marveling at all the up-to-date information, but a decade-and-half later, its downsides are also apparent to me: - easily leads to distraction - subject to its own kind of bias - harder to get "big picture" without some a priori mental framework I am quietly happy that World Book is still around :-)
- BrandoElFollito 6y ago> I remember being thrilled with Wikipedia when it came out, going down lots of rabbit holes, That has not changed even a tiny a bit. Everytime I start with a topic, I end up (like everyone that is a bit curious) completely elsewhere https://xkcd.com/214/ https://xkcd.com/214/ (there was another one I cannot find where someone was having an accident, the other person ran for information about how to close the wound and came back after an hour with information about (I think) Roman antiquity)
- CobrastanJorji 6y agoI think an Encarta 95 video about a laser shooting back and forth between two mirrors on a spaceship is still my mental model for how to think about time dilation. Wikipedia's wonderful, but the quality of the best multimedia content in Encarta was sky high in a way that's hard to reproduce without a team of paid artists and educators.
- bluedino 6y agoThe very first time I saw a CDROM was an encyclopedia, 1992 or so? I believe it was Grolier's or Compton's. It ran on an IBM PS/2 style system with an external CDROM that used drive caddies. It took at least a minute to search for an article and then probably another minute to load the information up. I remember there being some black and white pictures with some articles as well, and there was even a laser printer to print your findings. I remember parents saying it cost "$10,000", but I also remember that we got it using Campbell's soup labels and box tops that students turned in.
- inoffensivename 6y agoI was awestruck by Microsoft Encarta when I got a copy back in around 1994 (I was 11 years old). I spent so long just browsing through the articles and listening to audio clips.
- gosukiwi 6y agoBefore Internet and Wikipedia was a thing (at least in Argentina), there was Encarta. It helped me through many of my school projects :) I have fond memories of it. Great piece of software. I don't think it's needed in the modern world though, but who knows. Maybe in countries where internet is still not accessible.
- actuator 6y agoI love Encarta. Growing up with limited access to internet, Encarta was the world of information for me. It used to be so fun going through random articles, finding some multimedia which explained stuff with animations like for Chernobyl accident, felt so amazing at that time. The quality of content was amazing. Also, the games added such a new dimension to an encyclopedia where you wanted to learn more. Encarta is definitely the best MS software product I have used, apart from maybe some games.
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- ignoranceprior 6y agoI never had Encarta, but I grew up with a digital version of World Book Encyclopedia, bundled with my family's ancient iMac G4, and it gave me similar feelings to what this article describes.
- Riverheart 6y agoI miss Dangerous Creatures, World of Flight and Explorapedia.