On Tue, Mar 31, 2009 at 1:48 AM, Maria Fanucchi <[email protected]> wrote: > RIP Encarta. > For better or for worse, it was for many people, especially children, the > first encyclopedia they ever encountered. It may eventually have sparked the > interest of, and inspired, more than a few Wikipedians.
The first encyclopedia I encountered was a supermarket set, published by Grolier I think, made available one volume per week in 1991. Every grocery trip, my mother would buy me the next volume, and in a box somewhere I still have the complete set—in fact, I used them to fact-check some of my earliest Wikipedia articles, back when we were still creating pages about the commonest of things, any new content was a positive contribution, and we weren't quite so strict about citing sources. A few years later, my parents bought a copy of one of the first editions of Encarta, distributed on a single CD-ROM. "Multimedia" was still a buzzword, and having audio sprinkled throughout—even video, for select topics—was an amazing thing. I grew up in an anti-Microsoft household, and we ran Encarta under IBM OS/2, but despite my prejudice, I couldn't help but find Encarta the greatest thing ever. I was disappointed when I had read every article in less than a week, but the proof of concept was there. (I don't think I need to wax nostalgic any further; obviously, long story short, I got here.) So, yes, I do have some nostalgia for Encarta. Its day is long gone, and this is certainly overdue, but I've never really harbored any ill will toward it. > Let's hope some of their material can be released (I'm hoping specifically > for some of the multimedia, such as snippets of music made with rare > instruments, and the sound files of letters, numbers and various phrases > said in many languages, by native speakers). I second that. Even now, when I think about Encarta, the first thing that comes to mind is a recording they had of a Baroque piece played on the harpsichord. (Not that that's rare, but they did do a great job deciding what pieces warranted multimedia presentation, and they had some good ones.) Austin _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
