What was life like before Wikipedia?
What was life like before Wikipedia?
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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Everybody's like "Encarta" but before CD-ROMs etc, we had massive ass sets of encyclopedias. You'd actually have an encyclopedia subscription so they could send you errata for stuff that changed over time. Sort of like paper DLC for reality.
It sucked.
But pre-Internet it was fun to sit around and flip through the encyclopedias/dictionaries and read stuff. If you were lucky you'd find something sex-related.
This unlocked a childhood memory! I forgot that my parents once randomly let door to door salemen in to sell us this crazy large set of books. I think my parents were desperate because I was awful at school and somehow thought someone who didn't try would now do so because I have all the information I needed... I feel bad, but I never used them once, a giant waste of money.
Lol. We had a giant set of kids Britannica's that my folks got from a door to door salesman. I wonder if that was the primary vector for encyclopedias.
The set I grew up on was https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encyclopædia_Britannica#1974–1994
I enjoy the "firestorm of criticism" bit. And
On 9 March 1976 the US Federal Trade Commission entered an opinion and order enjoining Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. from using: a) deceptive advertising practices in recruiting sales agents and obtaining sales leads, and b) deceptive sales practices in the door-to-door presentations of its sales agents
Patch notes: USSR removed, balance changes to military stats