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 whole wikipedia for easy distribution like encarta.
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 suspect the sort of person who writes Wikipedia articles about Pokemon would not go and write articles about Nigerian history instead if Pokemon articles were not allowed, and vice versa. Wikipedia contributions are not really a zero sum game.
Well, for storage (and thus offline) purposes it is of course exactly a zero sum game. I for one would really like a say 3 GiB version of English Wikipedia without Pokemon and Porn, or a 33GiB version with useful images.
However broad and non-deltionist might be best for online Wikepedia, a more curated i.e. deletionist version would certainly be very useful for offline usage and quite a few other purposes.
> I for one would really like a say 3 GiB version of English Wikipedia without Pokemon and Porn, or a 33GiB version with useful images.
There are several offline snapshots of different sizes of Wikipedia that do exactly this. Some of them are more thoroughly curated, others are a snapshot of the most popular articles, etc.
What I could not find easily was a full English Wikipedia with images and all available in an easily accessible format (like the Kiwix snapshots). I'd put a whole hard disk for this purpose, because the size is in the gigabyte-terabyte range.
In terms of space, the text is over 1000x smaller than the multimedia: ~20GB (uncompressed) for the text vs ~45TB (compressed) for multimedia (est accounting for growth vs 23TB@2014).
Well, I was hoping for less than 93GiB compressed, given that this exceeds the storage capacity of several devices I'd like to use it on and I'd estimate the total amount of info I care about to be far smaller than that. And small is beautiful: if everything fits into ram, you can do various interesting data munging tasks on the data (which is after all not uninteresting) very quickly.
I am aware that there are various offline wikipedia compilations and I am grateful they exist and to the people who work on them, but last I looked using them looked like a bit of pain, and on checking again that still appears to be the case. I get the impression that if I want to have something of decent quality that fits into the 10s of GiB range I'd consider reasonable¹, I'd have to manually munge together several non-Pokemon topics I consider important plus one of the text only dumps. This would be more palatable if I had a strong impression that once I hit upon a working process I could rinse-and-repeat on a yearly basis.
Do you have any experience with this?
¹E.g. the 100k top article page linked by sibling does not look super promising, ~700 math articles vs ~10k fluff (sports, entertainment etc.).
I have the ~80GB "full english" snapshot I grabbed some time ago and use with Kiwix. It's not quite "full", it doesn't have quite all images and video, etc. But the size is still reasonable for a desktop/laptop PC.
I also have a 10GB snapshot on my phone, but it's a bit lacking. I don't have enough storage on my phone to fit the bigger one. But a battery powered offline Wikipedia is high on my list of necessary things in case things go south.
I haven't found a great way to keep these synced up, glad to hear if someone has a good solution for up-to-date offline wikipedia.
I think the point was that if you are looking at a subject where the relative importance is less obvious than Pokemon vs Nigerian politics then you could gauge importance implicitly from the existence of the article in a curated encyclopedia - not that contributers should be forced to spend more time on more important topics.
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.
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.
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.
I recall reading that there was a time the Wikipedia article on the lightsaber was longer than the article on the printing press. No longer the case, thankfully.
“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).
> all the content of English's wikipedia without images and videos in just 36GB
36GB seems like a really big number if it's just text. A cursory Google search says 1MB will hold about 500 pages of text (ignoring compression). So 36GB would be something like 18 million pages? Let's say a 1000 page book is 10cm wide, so 18M pages wind up as 1800 meters of books, or 180 meter-wide bookshelves with 10 shelves each, which is maybe a large library? It seems like a lot of that must be external sources. I wonder what percentage was actually written by Wikipedia editors?
Not sure what you mean with external sources, but I have seen nothing but user generated content in there (but I haven't read all wikipedia articles, obviously).
A few things to note, though:
1/ it's not pure text content, it's html content, this has a significant overhead
2/ a zim file is not just compressed content, but also huge indexes referencing where is which content. You look for your article's title in the reference table, you find the position of your article in the file and you decompress just that part. This is what allows for selective decompression without decompressing the whole content.
The zim file format is far from ideal for compression efficiency - all the best algorithms typically don't allow random access without decompressing everything.
Also, wikipedia has a lot of spam and orphan pages, insanely long lists, etc. Those are hard to algorithmically filter out.
I used this in Cuba. It was immensely useful, both to pass the time, and to look up many things of interest along the way without waiting to go to an internet zone.
I was a passenger in a car driving through central Cuba and thought I saw a sign towards Australia. Breaking out Kiwix I found the article and was relieved to see I wasn't going crazy.
Later on I was in an Uber in Australia driven by a Cuban man, and I thought I'd impress my friends with my worldliness by mentioning that there's a town in Cuba called Australia. The driver furrowed his brows and said flatly "no there's not", much to their delight. Can't win em all!
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.
I remember we had something like "Encarta 98" (was that a thing?) on my dads computer. It was a family computer and my brother and me were sitting in front of it, watching videos and reading all the stuff in there and whatnot. I always dreamed that school was like this. Hasn't happened until today, which is sad.
I think I had Encarta 97 or 98 and reading all the pages of the stuff I liked, even printing them. At some point I memorized most of the texts of those pages.
My Dad was too cheap for Encarta. We had a shareware version called something like Infopedia. I remember doing a homework project at a friend's house and being quite jealous of the proper version!
We had the book as children. It was a massive (to my child's hands) hard cover book. I spent ages paging through it, looking at all the cute little illustrations. Whenever I had a question that my father coulnd't answer, we'd rush over to the bookshelf to find it there. It always seemed to have the answer.
I miss paper encyclopedias. A roommate had the complete 1974 Winkler Prins, and I loved to just browse through it. Admittedly, browsing through Wikipedia is also fun, but still, browsing through a paper book is a very different experience. My kids don't see the point, unfortunately.
Convenience replaces nostalgia: Why miss Encarta when you have Wikipedia? I liked the Encarta experience: it was amazing to see videos, photos and everything in a nice UI back then, but today we have Wikipedia, Wikimedia, etc. It's a way superior experience and there's x100 content.
A one stop shop is kinda nice. The quality of the content is really good too. Wikipedia is probably good enough for the most part though.
I remember being so excited and enchanted by encarta and even non digital encyclopedias and books as a kid. The idea that I could crack open a volume and learn anything felt magical, in a non digitized world.
Encarta was charged with multimedia. It was a really new and exciting experience for a kid growing up before Flash sites started really even became popular. Loading up Encarta, you'd get a musical intro with flashes of footage from shuttle launches, famous speeches, native American tribes, animals, etc. Then immediate after, you get a button called "Explore". Clicking that zooms you into a web of categories, with each one zooming further and further down into more fine-grained topics where you could get previews about what you were about to discover.
The articles were concise and full of video or other interactive pieces. Certain topics would have a brief sound recording as an introduction. I even remember you could assemble a dinosaur to learn about the different parts.
Every prominent UI interaction, from a button click to expanding a context menu, had a unique and satisfying sound. That would be a huge problem for most people with most UI today, but given that there was so much media being played, it fit in naturally.
The interface itself was basically a web browser, so it helped to teach kids about simple concepts, like navigation, hyperlinks, bookmarks, internal vs external resources, and so on. It was a great pre-introduction to surfing the web.
For a kid, I think Encarta would be a much more fun and engaging experience than Wikipedia when choosing an encyclopedia. If you want to see what Bill Gates envisioned for multimedia learning around the time, you should check out the (hilariously cheesy) videos that came with his book "The Road Ahead"
And don't even get me started on how cool the Grolier Multimedia Encyclopedia was at the time.
(Am I really getting nostalgic over encyclopedias over here? ...)
I remember going through some 3D model of the colloseum in it, always thinking it’s maybe actually a game but it was just a static 3D model. Must have spent hours there.
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.
Encarta might have been one of my first experiences doinking around with computers - I remember replacing the .WAV file for a cheetah with the sound of a car's engine and trying (but failing) to convince my brother it was the REAL sound of a cheetah. There is something about the data being bounded and explorable, both through the software and the file system that was... neat.
My family finally got a Windows PC in 1996, and Encarta was one of the first pieces of software we installed. I can't claim that I miss it much, but at the time it was definitely magical.
Plus, you could cite your reference with style, i.e.: "I got this information straight outta Compton... you are about to witness the strength of street knowledge".
> 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!
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.
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.
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 decades can change… I would call painful the idea of manually looking for a page in a book rather than doing a computer search, nowadays.
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.
Long story short, they gave up trying to police it after about a year, when no matter what they tried, we always found another way to get the games back, in the process of course we learned quite a bit about computing (happy accident? Who cares, my love of computers started in that stupid class)
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.
I think you are correct.
It likely was 98SE. We were running the same OS at home. Sorry, I had discarded my Windows metadata long ago, keeping only the absolutely vital bits for dev work, and supporting people that were born a long time ago.
Me too - since the rise of ad-funded SEO 'content farms', it's become damn hard to find information written by someone who has even a passing familiarity with the topic.
This is largely my attitude right now. I may have also described the current internet as "giant steaming shithole" a time or two because it's so polluted with dubious information and algorithmically generated content.
At the same time I've been going through some old books (mid-19th century) that were in my grandfather's house. There are some that cover extremely specific subject matters. They are well indexed, so that finding good information might indeed be easier than googling for it. I'm not saying that it's superior to internet search, but sometimes we forget that there is actually information that has never been digitized.
The internet is actually good for 19th century books. It's very rare that I can't find what I want on books.google.com. It's the early 20th century where the problems start.
Although if you are after focus and depth, arguably you would be reading some sort of primary source rather than an encyclopedia. I've definitely been at a library, had a quick question on something tangentially related to what I'm reading, and pulled up Wikipedia on my phone to quickly look something up. I wouldn't want to read a whole book on a phone, since I agree with you that I can more easily absorb information from an actual book. That being said, looking up something on my phone is far less distracting than having to get up, put the book down, and go over to look something up in an encyclopedia or dictionary.
In our country there are no public libraries, you only get access to a library during high school and university studies. When Microsoft Encarta arrived it was amazing because of the animations and color images but content is shorter compared to the ones on the libraries. Internet changed everything on information availability.
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.
I don't mind the useless life story that accompanies every recipe these days. It's easy enough to scroll to the bottom of the page. I virtually never make any given recipe as-is anyway, and if it's something I'm going to make repeatedly I have my own document template that I use to write up the recipe and save it locally.
I can't remember the last time I used a paper recipe, and I find it strange to attribute a preference to paper to an easily avoidable side-effect of internet recipe blogging.
Check out eatyourbooks.com. It's a digital, searchable index of your paper books so you can look for recipes featuring "ras al hanout", for example, and it will tell you which books you own have recipes with that ingredient.
Yes. Also, the Encarta world map on CD I had was desirable enough to swap for a Pentium (120 or 133 MHz I believe) and some rare original IBM PC-AT chassis parts (; Encarta was an early pre-Web hypertext system from the 1992/3 multimedia/HyTime-esque era that wouldn't look bad even today. Some insiders here to share some tech internals?
Hmm, to me the term "multimedia PC" already sounded outdated from the start, similar to the "a CD ROM can contain a whole library shelf worth of data" hype.
I just thought like, this 386 PC could make sound and graphics and games. This Pentium can do it too, granted with more colors and a CD ROM drive and a fancy "where do you want to go today" movie, but does that warrant all this hype of being called "multimedia"?
Oh well, that was the 90s, things moved so fast then so of course things would sound outdated and cheesy very fast.
Exactly. Back then it seemed like a word that people not much into the computer scene or non-specialist magazines would use, while to geeks the word was a joke.
Not as cringeworthy as Bill Gates' book in the 90s opting to entirely use that term, abbreviating it to "the Highway," and outright refusing to say "Internet."
I agree. Even today I would be very reluctant to use the term "multimedia" because it sounds very dusty and boring to me. I would use "audiovisual" or something else in its place.
Though it's not really necessary to call this out anymore, seeing as virtually every corner of computing is capable of a whizz-bang multimedia experience and has been for a long time.
Even today I would be very reluctant to use the term "multimedia" because it sounds very dusty and boring to me. I would use "audiovisual" or something else in its place.
A term from the 1990's sounds dusty compared to one from the 1950's? Interesting.
> "a CD ROM can contain a whole library shelf worth of data" hype
CD-ROMs were pretty incredible for their time. Remember that when they became mainstream around 1994, hard drives were only 200 MB and floppies were 1.44 MB, so they really were game changing.
It's interesting, I split my childhood between Hungary and South Africa, and pretty much along the timeline of the 486. During the late 80s in Hungary, the Amiga certainly was a big thing, even in schools. I suspect it was due to the price; even an Amiga was considered super expensive, and if you ran into a PC it was either at your parents' work or similar, and it would have been a 286 or worse.
Although I suppose the 486 came out in '89, it was rare to see it in the schools that I went to, or in my friends' homes. Similarly with VGA and SVGA (and decent sound cards!), it took several years to become affordable and mainstream. But when they did, and when Pentiums started coming out, it was pretty much the death knell for the Amiga. I recall somberly looking at benchmarks of 486s, and comparing it to our pride and joy, a 68030-upgraded A1200, and realising that it was a losing game.
So you are absolutely right, though I think the timeline is probably a bit shifted depending on the country / economic conditions.
Even 386 was absolutely crushing A1200 in some respects. In Amigas, you had to set every bit of a pixel separately, which didn't hurt for 2D games with static art assets (which you just copied from memory onto the screen), but it was a killer for anything 3D based. In result, you could have a 386 run Doom IIRC, whereas 3d shooters on Amiga 1200 were much worse than even Wolfenstein 3D.
Oh yes, and Wolfenstein actually ran quite well even on a 286. Higher res and framerate than same time period Amiga titles. Aside from the additional inefficiency you mentioned, I think 3D is an area where none of the Amiga's specialised hardware chipsets helped (or at least, nowhere near enough / as much as they did with 2D), and the CPU performance disparity started to really show.
Amiga stopped investing/improving their unique hardware chipset and PC's simply overcame that deficiency by sheer CPU power and improved graphics output standards (EGA->VGA).
I remember when my dad bought us a copy of Encarta, I think around 2001. It had a click-and-drag Streetview style walkthrough of historical sites, including, iirc, the Great Pyramids.
I thought that was the most incredible thing ever. I remember getting my friends over after school and absolutely blowing their minds.
I owe a lot to Encarta and Microsoft Mathematics. I love that application I think it was one of the first applications that I bought with my hard earned money instead of pirating. because it was so worth it.
Ahhhh the memories. I remember that my dad had a Windows XP PC in his office and sometimes we kids were allowed to play with it.
There was this one funny feature in Encarta, that when you typed something about the moon, it would bring up a 3D simulation of the moon orbiting earth.
Annnd, you could influence the moon's orbit with the mouse so that it ended up crashing into earth.
I spent a whole lot of time in my collage reading random articles from the hardbound volumes of Encyclopedia Britannica. That was the first exposure I had to high-quality information about the world on an incredible variety of topics. It was such a great feeling sitting in a beautiful library surrounded by books in silence isolated from the chaotic and noisy world outside.
I get that now all information we can possibly want is at out fingertips, but there is something to be said about properly curated information in a defined boundary, in both physical and metaphorical sense, that you can focus on without getting distracted by the next random video.
I've noticed that all Americans (and probably all English speaking countries) knows the animal Aardvark. Here in Denmark few do (where its called Jordsvin - Earthhog)- I speculate that the reason is, that English encyclopedias would mention it on the first page of the first volume and probably with a picture given its somewhat peculiar looks, and can't help to think that the Aardvark might be forgotten, now that few consumes encyclopedias the old way :-)
I loved Encarta, was so much more interactive and great for children to learn from, without getting mixed up with Wikipedia's problems with political and biased edits and such. I really wish they brought this back.
Ah the joys of hearing the CD stacker in the classroom spin away as it tried to serve a room of 30 kids content from a bunch of Encarta CDs shared over the network drives.
Man Encarta brings back memories. My parents got me the CD box set, putting into the drive, the anticipation and awe when it loaded and hours spent going through the quality content. Take it for granted how far along we have come.
Encarta was fun. Also I remember having some "specialized" encyclopedias on the CDs - about cats, about Formula-1 etc. It was very interesting to just look around random articles, like Scott says.
On the slightly related note - I've found recently that Wikipedia has several lists called Vital articles which compile the best and most essential articles. It feels a bit like those old encyclopedias. So I've decided to read through level 3 articles for fun, as a personal project.
I downloaded a 3gb file today that contains information about the human genome. But it was just an accessory file that lists a bunch of variations within the genome - not even the genome itself! Amazing to think how many books would fit into those same 3gb and yet we casually use it up with routine science now.
201 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 217 ms ] threadIn 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 whole wikipedia for easy distribution like encarta.
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.
However broad and non-deltionist might be best for online Wikepedia, a more curated i.e. deletionist version would certainly be very useful for offline usage and quite a few other purposes.
There are several offline snapshots of different sizes of Wikipedia that do exactly this. Some of them are more thoroughly curated, others are a snapshot of the most popular articles, etc.
What I could not find easily was a full English Wikipedia with images and all available in an easily accessible format (like the Kiwix snapshots). I'd put a whole hard disk for this purpose, because the size is in the gigabyte-terabyte range.
100,000 curated pages:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Vital_articles/Level...
In terms of space, the text is over 1000x smaller than the multimedia: ~20GB (uncompressed) for the text vs ~45TB (compressed) for multimedia (est accounting for growth vs 23TB@2014).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Size_of_Wikipedia
http://download.kiwix.org/zim/wikipedia/wikipedia_en_all_max...
Do you have any experience with this?
¹E.g. the 100k top article page linked by sibling does not look super promising, ~700 math articles vs ~10k fluff (sports, entertainment etc.).
I also have a 10GB snapshot on my phone, but it's a bit lacking. I don't have enough storage on my phone to fit the bigger one. But a battery powered offline Wikipedia is high on my list of necessary things in case things go south.
I haven't found a great way to keep these synced up, glad to hear if someone has a good solution for up-to-date offline wikipedia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikigroaning
https://www.somethingawful.com/news/wikigroaning/
They know about drowzee but not about the tapir.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Owlbear
“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.”
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
36GB seems like a really big number if it's just text. A cursory Google search says 1MB will hold about 500 pages of text (ignoring compression). So 36GB would be something like 18 million pages? Let's say a 1000 page book is 10cm wide, so 18M pages wind up as 1800 meters of books, or 180 meter-wide bookshelves with 10 shelves each, which is maybe a large library? It seems like a lot of that must be external sources. I wonder what percentage was actually written by Wikipedia editors?
A few things to note, though:
1/ it's not pure text content, it's html content, this has a significant overhead
2/ a zim file is not just compressed content, but also huge indexes referencing where is which content. You look for your article's title in the reference table, you find the position of your article in the file and you decompress just that part. This is what allows for selective decompression without decompressing the whole content.
Also, wikipedia has a lot of spam and orphan pages, insanely long lists, etc. Those are hard to algorithmically filter out.
I was a passenger in a car driving through central Cuba and thought I saw a sign towards Australia. Breaking out Kiwix I found the article and was relieved to see I wasn't going crazy.
Later on I was in an Uber in Australia driven by a Cuban man, and I thought I'd impress my friends with my worldliness by mentioning that there's a town in Cuba called Australia. The driver furrowed his brows and said flatly "no there's not", much to their delight. Can't win em all!
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australia,_Cuba
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
David Macaulay's "The way things work" CD-ROM
So many fond memories.
I remember being so excited and enchanted by encarta and even non digital encyclopedias and books as a kid. The idea that I could crack open a volume and learn anything felt magical, in a non digitized world.
The articles were concise and full of video or other interactive pieces. Certain topics would have a brief sound recording as an introduction. I even remember you could assemble a dinosaur to learn about the different parts.
Every prominent UI interaction, from a button click to expanding a context menu, had a unique and satisfying sound. That would be a huge problem for most people with most UI today, but given that there was so much media being played, it fit in naturally.
The interface itself was basically a web browser, so it helped to teach kids about simple concepts, like navigation, hyperlinks, bookmarks, internal vs external resources, and so on. It was a great pre-introduction to surfing the web.
For a kid, I think Encarta would be a much more fun and engaging experience than Wikipedia when choosing an encyclopedia. If you want to see what Bill Gates envisioned for multimedia learning around the time, you should check out the (hilariously cheesy) videos that came with his book "The Road Ahead"
And don't even get me started on how cool the Grolier Multimedia Encyclopedia was at the time.
(Am I really getting nostalgic over encyclopedias over here? ...)
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.
This is a great idea. If anyone at Microsoft reads this and agrees, please get whoever needs to know to know!
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.
How much a few decades can change… I would call painful the idea of manually looking for a page in a book rather than doing a computer search, nowadays.
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.
Long story short, they gave up trying to police it after about a year, when no matter what they tried, we always found another way to get the games back, in the process of course we learned quite a bit about computing (happy accident? Who cares, my love of computers started in that stupid class)
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.
to be honest: I like the web for shallow access, but when I need focus and depth, a library and a book is way more fit for my brain.
At the same time I've been going through some old books (mid-19th century) that were in my grandfather's house. There are some that cover extremely specific subject matters. They are well indexed, so that finding good information might indeed be easier than googling for it. I'm not saying that it's superior to internet search, but sometimes we forget that there is actually information that has never been digitized.
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/
I can't remember the last time I used a paper recipe, and I find it strange to attribute a preference to paper to an easily avoidable side-effect of internet recipe blogging.
I just thought like, this 386 PC could make sound and graphics and games. This Pentium can do it too, granted with more colors and a CD ROM drive and a fancy "where do you want to go today" movie, but does that warrant all this hype of being called "multimedia"?
Oh well, that was the 90s, things moved so fast then so of course things would sound outdated and cheesy very fast.
There was an actual group with recommended ‘standards’.
Though it's not really necessary to call this out anymore, seeing as virtually every corner of computing is capable of a whizz-bang multimedia experience and has been for a long time.
A term from the 1990's sounds dusty compared to one from the 1950's? Interesting.
CD-ROMs were pretty incredible for their time. Remember that when they became mainstream around 1994, hard drives were only 200 MB and floppies were 1.44 MB, so they really were game changing.
Although I suppose the 486 came out in '89, it was rare to see it in the schools that I went to, or in my friends' homes. Similarly with VGA and SVGA (and decent sound cards!), it took several years to become affordable and mainstream. But when they did, and when Pentiums started coming out, it was pretty much the death knell for the Amiga. I recall somberly looking at benchmarks of 486s, and comparing it to our pride and joy, a 68030-upgraded A1200, and realising that it was a losing game.
So you are absolutely right, though I think the timeline is probably a bit shifted depending on the country / economic conditions.
I thought that was the most incredible thing ever. I remember getting my friends over after school and absolutely blowing their minds.
It was like magic.
There was this one funny feature in Encarta, that when you typed something about the moon, it would bring up a 3D simulation of the moon orbiting earth.
Annnd, you could influence the moon's orbit with the mouse so that it ended up crashing into earth.
That was sooo fun!
I get that now all information we can possibly want is at out fingertips, but there is something to be said about properly curated information in a defined boundary, in both physical and metaphorical sense, that you can focus on without getting distracted by the next random video.
I loved Encarta, was so much more interactive and great for children to learn from, without getting mixed up with Wikipedia's problems with political and biased edits and such. I really wish they brought this back.
On the slightly related note - I've found recently that Wikipedia has several lists called Vital articles which compile the best and most essential articles. It feels a bit like those old encyclopedias. So I've decided to read through level 3 articles for fun, as a personal project.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Vital_articles