I would imagine it was harder to get information on topics as you would’ve had to buy/borrow encyclopedias to do.
Were there proprietary predecessor websites?
Tell me about the dark ages!
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Instead of a webpage, you had a whole shelf of books laid out in more or less the same fashion as Wikipedia.
Fun fact: I learned about the Internet from the encyclopedia and begged my parents to get online. I used to just read those things like regular books. I only learned recently that when I first went online in 1993, the World Wide Web was literally only months old.
Mostly you either went without knowing stuff, or you had to go to the library. I knew a couple of wealthy folks who had their own sets of encyclopedia at home which could cost thousands of dollars.
lol all these other replies in the thread talking about having encyclopedias at home. That was some rich family stuff.
Most people went to the library or just listened to whomever said what they remembered most confidently.
Encarta for the computer was a thing but, from what I remember, it was barely helpful. I guess it’s possible that my family had a cheap version. In my experience the best I could hope from it was to start where I should research at the library.
Arguments at the dinner table were solved by an exasperated FINE, I’ll get up and get the encyclopedia just to prove you wrong
Also, we had Encarta. It wasn’t online, but on a CD-ROM so you could view it digitally compared to the dozens of hefty books
We didn’t have that so the old copy of Websters dictionary was hauled out.
We didn’t have encarta either. We would break out the encyclopedia
And any school project started with the encyclopedia and then a trip to the library for further research.
When I learned about Wikipedia it was awesome.
Let me tell you about borrow return policy at libraries and the associated fines for late returns and how to find something using the dewey decimal classification system. Fun times!
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dewey_Decimal_Classification
https://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/world-records/largest-library-book-fine-paid
Sort of this: https://youtube.com/shorts/HHpwvXNtpBo
But also it was kind of depressive, because you would think “I wonder how X works” and that was that, you never learned petty stuff because doing so was too much hassle for a simple curiosity.
Before wiki you could still find answers on Google or Yahoo, but there was no source of truth and you could find any answer you wanted if you looked for it, so it was taken with a grain of salt. Before that, yes, encyclopedias or asking someone who knew about it, but then you could get wrong answers and not know about it.
Back then we used to think that people seemed stupid because they didn’t have access to information, so if they had learned something wrong there was no way of convincing them otherwise.
I had a Microsoft Encarta on a cd that I used for projects when I was young, Wikipedia launched midway through my grade 5 and by grade 6 I was using it for research (despite the “you can’t trust Wikipedia, anyone can edit it!” that was still a thing into grade 12 from my teachers) for any school project. My parents also had a copy of the Oxford’s Canadian English dictionary that was an absolute time, used that a heck of a lot too.
I use Wikipedia as a jumping off point, good to get information, get the details from citations. I wasn’t old enough to do complex work pretty wikipedia, but I’d imagine it’d be the same thing, encyclopaedia to lookup a topic, dive into reference materials for details from there.
I remember being amazed by that disc, and how it seemed to contain the summation of all human knowledge at the time.
I think Wikipedia without media files and only text and formatting can fit on a lot a single USB drive
A big one. Right now wikipedia weights around 100 GB.
Wewould have to purchase the encyclopedia britanica every few years
I loved going to the library’s giant shelf of encyclopedias and picking one at random and flipping through the pages and skim reading.
The books were heavy and had a distinctive smell, and occasionally someone tore out a page and then that was just lost knowledge.
If there was a speicific question, Librarians were essentially our search engine, you’d ask them a question, and they’d think on it, maybe even ask a couple follow up questions, and they’d tell you to come back in a little bit or even a couple days, and when you return they’d hand you a list of books to find and checkout/read to find your answer.
It wasn’t fast, but it made finding answers and factoids its own adventure.
Going to the library was probably quicker back then when you could judt ride a dinosaur!
One word: Encarta.
Three thousand this 👆
Remember the Mindmaze game in Encarta?
Yes! I loved the mind maze. I was never really good at it (English is not my native language), but it was always fun to play.
I would bother my parents afterwards with all the facts I had learned. They were indulging at first, but even the greatest of patience will run out eventually :)
This.
“Don’t just copy and paste from Encarta” was commonly recited by my teachers when I was younger
I’m a little bit younger than you, so for me, it was used Wikipedia as a starting source, but do not reference it. Find your own information. We just used Wikipedia to familiarize ourselves with a topic and the terms that we would then have to actually look up and source other sites.
And before that, Britannica
Encyclopædia Britannica also used to have a version released on DVD.
I remember when this came out, blew my mind. 1 cd vs a couple hundred kg worth of huge analogue encyclopaedia books.
The introduction of CD-ROM was mind blowing for me. Encyclopedias, interactive storybooks, talking Carmen Sandiego?!
It felt so futuristic.
Everyone’s talking about encyclopedias but they weren’t always that useful either. They can only fit so much information in those books so some topics would only get like 3 sentences dedicated to them. So yeah, if you were writing a research paper for school you’d spend lots of time at the library trying to find books that had another smidge of information you needed.
If you were lucky, you’d find a really good book that was very relevant to your topic and lean heavily on that. Otherwise, you’d wind up with like a few sentences each from a dozen books that you have to tie together somehow. Wasn’t fun.
Askjeeves.com and then later google.
As a scientist, I used the CRC Handbook of Chemistry and Physic a lot, also known as the ‘rubber book’. Mainly to look up refractive index values at the time (1990-2000). It’s full of all sorts of reference values, boiling points at different pressures. Physical constants & formula.
It’s surreal to me that there are people who don’t know what life before Wikipedia was like, lol.
Maybe it’s relevant to understand that the increased access to information hasn’t always translated to people being more informed. There are many people in my life who don’t actively look things up and who don’t have the curiosity or willingness to even check Wikipedia.
So it is still now a bit like what it was like pre-Wikipedia - people mostly relied on other people for knowledge, and knowledge was thus local and socially shared, not necessarily that factual or based in books. I still think this is the dominant way people live, but now social media is an extension of that “local” socially-mediated knowledge. TV and radio were sorta like social media before, it was the way things became “viral”.
I think now like then, looking something up on Wikipedia sets you apart from a lot of people, it makes you bookish, nerdy, or pedantic - as if the folk knowledge wasn’t good enough for you and you have become a traitor to your people by seeking something more from the stacks.
The Encyclopedia Brittanica, they advertised that shit constantly on nickelodeon. That and Encarta, a good old disc of knowledge. I suppose OP is unfamiliar, and that’s fine, but I’m not sure I can stretch it to thinking that there were just absolutely no resources available.
And it also comes down to you weren’t aware you could get that knowledge instantly, and so you didn’t miss it, per se. I did research papers on whomever in grade school and I went to the library and pulled out a couple books, mainly for the sake of padding the bibliography.
I was in eighth grade when wiki showed up, and by high school it became “no wikipedia” as a policy, but at that point, savvy enough individuals were using wiki for it’s bibliography.
And so, in short, the change wasn’t super pronounced. If I had a desire to learn something, I’d figure out some way to go learn it. The convenience is obviously there, though, I certainly don’t want to take anything away from wiki and what it’s done.
