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I miss Microsoft Encarta (2019)

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Re: I miss Microsoft Encarta (2019)

#161

Post by agambrahma »

As 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 :-)

Re: I miss Microsoft Encarta (2019)

#162

Post by CobrastanJorji »

I 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.

Re: I miss Microsoft Encarta (2019)

#163

Post by bawolff »

cooper12 wrote: post #142
crazygringo wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 thi…

I personally dont think vega has worked out that well. Its too low level to be used by wikipedians effectively but its too high level to make effective abstractions over. I think its a good first attempt but we really need a v2 interactivity plan.

Also if you havent read, https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Yurik/I_Dream_of_Conten... is an interesting essay by the guy who used to be working on the graph stuff at wikipedia.

Re: I miss Microsoft Encarta (2019)

#164

Post by BrandoElFollito »

agambrahma wrote: post #161

As 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 a…

> 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/ (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)

Re: I miss Microsoft Encarta (2019)

#165

Post by bawolff »

Dirlewanger wrote: post #125
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

>a 25yr old website Yeah, that's a feature. I like that. No bloated JS framework taking 10 seconds to load, no obnoxious whitespace, minimal changes to the desktop experience when they implemented mobile. I admit they're a little slow to implement quality-of-life things (the hover-over preview being one of them). I also think link rot is a real problem too. Even though it's not necessarily their domain, I think Wikip…

There is efforts to auto replace dead links with links to internet archive. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:InternetArchiveBot

Re: I miss Microsoft Encarta (2019)

#166

Post by 29athrowaway »

wishysgb wrote: post #129
29athrowaway wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some 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://www.somethingawful.com/news/wikigroaning/

I 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.

Some 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.

Re: I miss Microsoft Encarta (2019)

#167

Post by bluedino »

scoutt wrote: post #60

I 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 3D…

>> The content on those CDs was permanent.

For better or for worse, you can read about current events (or even from a year or so ago) on wikipedia. Which you couldn't do with your CD based encyclopedia.

Re: I miss Microsoft Encarta (2019)

#168

Post by bluedino »

The 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.

Re: I miss Microsoft Encarta (2019)

#169

Post by jcranmer »

rchaud wrote: post #123
cookiecaper wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not familiar with Authorware specifically, but there's a whole lost world where computing was extremely rich in visuality, dynamism, and play, and the striking thing is that these qualities were expected to enhance peoples' useful output. Some of the early Smalltalk demos exhibit this beautifully, and they're from the 70s. It almost feels like the era of "rich media" embodied by Encarta, "animated storybooks", et…

I too mourn the loss of the "interactive web" for want of a better phrase. Computer programs like Encarta used to be fun to explore and interact with. The same can be said of many '90s and '00s sites that would feature Easter eggs, or a unique method of navigation. Bring any of this up today, and you'll immediately be met with a barrage of critiques about Flash security, or UX dogma like "Users prefer to scroll, not…

I think the biggest issue with the "interactive web" is that we found that interactivity isn't necessarily always a good thing. Sometimes, the simpler, boring, perhaps "soulless" technology is the most appropriate technology for the task.

Remember Microsoft Bob? Or 3D filebrowsers for Unix? Turns out, those weren't improvements over the more traditional filesystem browsers that persist to this day. More recently, the tile concept that MS tried in Windows 8 didn't catch on either.

When I took a course on information visualization, one of the takeaways was that, even as we're learning about several different techniques for displaying data, sometimes (more often than you'd think!) the most effective technique is a simple table. A well-formatted table, to be sure, but a table can be more powerful than even an interactive graph.

More to the point: I'm talking to you with pure text, even less interactive content than a microfiche machine reading a newspaper. But what interactivity would enhance my content or clarify my point instead of providing a distraction?

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