Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

I miss Microsoft Encarta (2019)

hanselman.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 202 posts

Re: I miss Microsoft Encarta (2019)

#141

Post by thelazydogsback »

asiachick wrote: post #82

I 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

I worked at MS in the Multimedia group working on things like sound-card and CD-ROM drivers, "MMSDK" tools, etc., and the venerable (lol) Radio Shack VIS, which had a version if Encarta. FWIR, most of the animations used Marcromind Director -- I remember working on the code that loaded these files to optimize it for CD-ROM loading, because the code would just seek all over the place rather than load into RAM and access from there.

Re: I miss Microsoft Encarta (2019)

#142

Post by cooper12 »

crazygringo wrote: post #124
asiachick wrote: post #82

I 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

Wikipedia certainly does have animations and videos. Here's a list of literally every article with a video, there are over 5,000 of them at least: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Articles_containing_v... For comparison, Encarta had "over 300 videos". And while it's not interactive, there are definitely animations on Wikipedia to help understand concepts, like the top of the article on pi shows a circle unrolli…

There actually are two methods of interactivity on Wikipedia right now, the Graph extension [0] and Kartographer. [1] With the first you can create charts, timelines, and histograms, based on Vega. With the second, you can add points on maps (with images), have shapes, and outlines, from OpenStreetMap. Unfortunately, both aren't used as much as they should because most are comfortable using other tools and baking things into PNGs, and these weren't advertised that heavily.

[0]: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Graph/Demo

[1]: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:Extension:Kartographer

Re: I miss Microsoft Encarta (2019)

#144

Post by cooper12 »

asiachick wrote: post #82

I 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

Wikipedia only accepts freely-licensed content (for example, CC-BY or CC-BY-SA; it must allow commercial use). People who are creating professional-quality video are not giving it away for free. Video takes a non-trivial amount of effort to script, record, create imagery for, and edit. That's on top of obtaining equipment like a camera, mic, computer for editing, etc. Sure everyone has a smartphone these days, but I think you were implying more than shaky badly-framed vertical video. If you'd like to see more videos on Wikipedia, the best place to start is by contributing yourself. I've done the same for photographs of local things in my area.

Re: I miss Microsoft Encarta (2019)

#145

Post by topkai22 »

hanselot wrote: post #72
kar1181 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We 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!

I 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. Lo…

I think your memories may be merging over time. Win XP didn't come out till 2001, so it was probably win 98/98 SE running in your classroom.

One of the things I remember about school computing in the 90s was how varied the equipment could be. My school had 2-3 computers per classroom, but 2nd grade had Apple IIs, 3rd grade had... possibly an Amiga?, and 4,5,6 grade had a mix of IBM PCs and one Mac, but with what ever OS originally shipped on them, ranging from straight DOS + Windows <3, win 3.1, and Win 95. It was wacky.

Re: I miss Microsoft Encarta (2019)

#146

Post by leoxv »

dleslie wrote: post #140
leoxv wrote: post #75

Encarta (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://con…

> 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 trus…

The Wikipedia policy on this is clear: "Do NOT use articles from Wikipedia (whether this English Wikipedia or Wikipedias in other languages) as sources." from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Verifiability#Wikipe...

However, this is an issue to be watchful of indeed, as Wikipedia grows ever larger and gets used more and more.

See also http://wikicite.org (storing citations in Wikidata) which could help bring in better citation (quality) tools. Scholia is an interesting project using that citation data: https://scholia.toolforge.org/

Re: I miss Microsoft Encarta (2019)

#147

Post by toast0 »

rchaud wrote: post #121

I 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…

> 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.

Re: I miss Microsoft Encarta (2019)

#148

Post by duxup »

kar1181 wrote: post #30

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…

I loved buying the ultra cheap CDs of random sounds, videos, and etc back in the day.

It was like magic.

Re: I miss Microsoft Encarta (2019)

#149

Post by dr_orpheus »

oriesdan wrote: post #31
kar1181 wrote: post #30

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…

One 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 dec…

There's still one thing that I absolutely prefer looking for a page in a book rather than searching online, and that's recipes for cooking. I can't stand scrolling through pages of people telling me about the history of this thing they cooked while ads are popping up to get to the actual recipe.

And if anyone has any suggestions for better places online to look for recipes, I'd be happy to have them! I like Cooking for Engineers [0] but still usually use a book.

[0] http://www.cookingforengineers.com/

Re: I miss Microsoft Encarta (2019)

#150

Post by aimor »

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…

In 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/c6VRy https://imgcdn.dev/i/c6Wn2

and you can compare that to some Wikipedia hosted comparisons:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Size_of_Wikipedia#/m... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Size_of_Wikipedia

Post reply on HN