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I miss Microsoft Encarta (2019)

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Re: I miss Microsoft Encarta (2019)

#21

Post by Cthulhu_ »

jxf wrote: post #12
kenty wrote: post #2

Encarta 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 who…

Part 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.

And 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.

Re: I miss Microsoft Encarta (2019)

#22

Post by sleavey »

> 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!

Re: I miss Microsoft Encarta (2019)

#23

Post by 7952 »

I 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.

Re: I miss Microsoft Encarta (2019)

#24

Post by martin_a »

7952 wrote: post #23

I 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.

Are there good books like this? Maybe even for niche topics?

Re: I miss Microsoft Encarta (2019)

#25

Post by speps »

sleavey wrote: post #22

> 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!

Archive.org has it: https://archive.org/details/microsoftencartapremiumedition20...

Re: I miss Microsoft Encarta (2019)

#26

Post by ben_w »

jxf wrote: post #12
kenty wrote: post #2

Encarta 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 who…

Part 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.

I 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.

Re: I miss Microsoft Encarta (2019)

#27

Post by netsharc »

nsonha wrote: post #11

Yeah 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.

Being 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-boo... ) and I'd actually spend time sitting somewhere reading them. A kid version of me nowadays would probably be watching YouTube, sadly.

Re: I miss Microsoft Encarta (2019)

#28

Post by oriesdan »

JeanFred wrote: post #17
kenty wrote: post #2

Encarta 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 who…

Check out Kiwix: 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.”

Indeed, 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

Re: I miss Microsoft Encarta (2019)

#29

Post by sleavey »

speps wrote: post #25
sleavey wrote: post #22

> 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!

Archive.org has it: https://archive.org/details/microsoftencartapremiumedition20...

Nice! Do you know if it requires a licence to actually install/run, or if it's completely free now?

Re: I miss Microsoft Encarta (2019)

#30

Post by kar1181 »

That 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.

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