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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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.