Wikipedia is less and less reliable for anything but the obvious. I know top universities advise users to avoid using it as a reference, and rightfully so. Encarta or a realiably curated source of knowledge would be quite useful!
I Miss Microsoft Encarta
101–110 of 419 posts
Re: I Miss Microsoft Encarta
#102Encarta 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 h…
With a little bit of investment, the Civilization game series could be leveraged to replace that feeling you got from Encarta.
Re: I Miss Microsoft Encarta
#103I would also add that I miss Microsoft Cinemania ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Cinemania ), which was to IMDB what Encarta was to Wikipedia. The sad bit is that in some ways Cinemania in 1997 was superior to IMDB as it is today . IMDB is more comprehensive, but Cinemania was better designed and more fun to just browse through.
Yeah, I remember some of the historic reviews from Leonard Maltin and Roger Ebert in it being incredibly informative. Particularly where they had good video excerpts of the reviews from their respective syndicated television review segments. (Remember when TV News used to have regular movie reviews? It's almost strange how in the 24/7 news channel era we've lost more types of segments than we've gained.)
That was definitely a strong point of Cinemania -- it integrated a bunch of different types of information about a movie (plot description, cast list, video and still images, reviews of it by respected critics, etc.) into a cohesive, unified interface.
Contrast this to IMDB, which has some but not all of that information (no reviews, for instance), and what it does have is presented in a clunky, siloed fashion. It works, but it's not something that's absorbing to just browse through the way Cinemania was.
Re: I Miss Microsoft Encarta
#104I was always curious whether or not these other encyclopedias could function as good sources for Wikipedia articles?
Personally I believe more universities should be publishing websites/wikis ala Encyclopedias like this [1] that provide good foundation sourcing for their particular fields of work and original content like video, graphics, and photos (ideally creative commons, especially the ones with public funding).
1. https://ocean.si.edu/ocean-life/invertebrates/cephalopods
Re: I Miss Microsoft Encarta
#105The thing about Encarta to me is that it felt so much more interactive than what we have today. Nowadays we read a Wikipedia article or watch a Youtube video on a topic but never interact with the content. It's all very passive. I was a child during the heyday of Encarta and I remember I had it and a few other specialized encyclopedias (one about animals, one about sea life, one about dinosaurs!!) and they were all i…
I never mess interactivity when browsing Wikipedia. I love that WP is text-based, so that I can read it in my own preferred tempo. I rarely watch videos since to me they always feel too slow compared to reading text. I understand on an intellectual level that Youtube is a great platform that provide lots of value and entertainment to lots of people, but I never feel that greatness since it’s not something that I personally appreciate. Oh well, to each their own :)
Re: I Miss Microsoft Encarta
#106Obviously 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…
Disagree.Your argument is like why buy Financial Times when all the info is out there for free. Wikipedia,while a brilliant invention on its own, is not, and probably never will be a substitute for Encyclopedia type of sources, including Encarta. Subjects like politics, history, nutrition and medicine are very sensitive ones and there's tons of resources out there that tend to either massage the data,or bend the real…
> Disagree.Your argument is like why buy Financial Times when all the info is out there for free. Wikipedia,while a brilliant invention on its own, is not, and probably never will be a substitute for Encyclopedia type of sources, including Encarta. Subjects like politics, history, nutrition and medicine are very sensitive ones and there's tons of resources out there that tend to either massage the data,or bent the reality all together,which renders them absolutely unreliable.
What make you think Wikipedia would be more prone to these problems than other encyclopedia, including Encarta? Research has shown that the quality of Wikipedia is comparable to other encyclopedias, which might surprise some people given that anyone can edit it. Encarta will never have specialist in all domains known on Earth; something that Wikipedia can have.
Re: I Miss Microsoft Encarta
#107Although Wikipedia is without a doubt extremely impressive, I definitely do have a very soft spot in my heart for Encarta. Much of it is nostalgic, but the immediacy, content consistency and ability to use as an interactive offline experience was fantastic. What a time capsule it is.
Re: I Miss Microsoft Encarta
#108What I remember most about Encarta is how impossible the "Mind Maze" game was as a kid
If there was something like Mind Maze today, I might check it out.
Re: I Miss Microsoft Encarta
#109Wikipedia could do a better job integrating media. I remember Encarta being pretty good about having video files showing the outlines of wars and battles... at least for the Vietnam War which is what I remember most. I prefer watching a video outline of wars and battles on youtube rather than dig right into a wall of text on wikipedia.
I still remember using one of the earliest Encarta versions and seeing a tiny postage stamp sized video animate and play some half broken wav file for the first time. I remember it hitting me like a baseball bat: we can do VIDEOS on computers now! This will change everything! TV is going to die because there are no ads on computers!
Those were more innocent times, to be fair.
Re: I Miss Microsoft Encarta
#110I'm still not able to heard the full version of Sicuriada as played in Encarta, the full version is only available in cassette version of Music of the Andes and Argentina and can only be borrowed on library far away from me :(.