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I Miss Microsoft Encarta

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Re: I Miss Microsoft Encarta

#81

Post by pushpop »

liability wrote: post #42
groundlogic wrote: post #2

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 somet…

> "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!)

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.

Re: I Miss Microsoft Encarta

#83

Post by ChuckMcM »

dman wrote: post #73
ChuckMcM wrote: post #15

I miss it as well, as the author points out it isn't large and is easily contained on a thumbnail flash drive (several times over!). 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 do…

How do I get a peek into this world according to Chuck slice of cyberspace?

An interesting question that I have yet to have a good answer for. The fair use exemption was pretty good air cover for using the digitized data, but text book publishers are rather litigious bunch. Not a bear I want to poke just yet.

Re: I Miss Microsoft Encarta

#84

Post by Tokkemon »

One of my favorite CD-ROMs from my childhood was an Encarta offshoot called Microsoft Exploropedia, World of Nature. Basically Encarta for natural sciences but tailored for kids. That game was the bomb.

Re: I Miss Microsoft Encarta

#86

Post by pastage »

NikolaNovak wrote: post #11
groundlogic wrote: post #2

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 somet…

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 ab…

Even as a young teen in the eighties I never understood that part of maps, they are so shallow and prone to bias. Even just creating a map with only on the ground facts is always biased, there is always bad editorialization.

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

Re: I Miss Microsoft Encarta

#87

Post by pastage »

asdfman123 wrote: post #27
groundlogic wrote: post #2

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 somet…

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.

When it comes to knowledge and data more is by definition always better.

Re: I Miss Microsoft Encarta

#88

Post by ChuckMcM »

shortformblog wrote: post #80
ChuckMcM wrote: post #15

I miss it as well, as the author points out it isn't large and is easily contained on a thumbnail flash drive (several times over!). 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 do…

This sounds amazing. I know it’s a personal project, but you should seriously share it with more people at some point.

The idea came from the fact that I wanted to play with the NLP work and wanted more useful data sets to start from (parsing Shakespeare gets old :-). And the fact that my fairly simple search engine for PDFs was basically just a classic n-tuple index into the word clouds minus stop words and gave good recall (like the old AltaVista) but not good precision.

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)

Re: I Miss Microsoft Encarta

#89

Post by bonestamp2 »

ergothus wrote: post #65

I'm either old enough or out-of-touch enough that I never used Encarta. Reading the comments here, I see a lot of mention of the interactive elements and video. 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…

> I generally prefer text

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.

Re: I Miss Microsoft Encarta

#90

Post by nickthegreek »

shortformblog wrote: post #37

Encarta is a great example of Microsoft winning a market, and after it was defeated, letting it fade out. Wikipedia in some ways beat it, but the interactivity elements of Encarta make it something that you kind of wish had a more direct role in the modern day. 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…

I remember getting Encarta 95 back when it first came out (I was 14 at the time) and the interactive elements and audio clips blew my mind. It changed how I thought about information and got me that much more invested in learning technology.

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.

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