What was life like before Wikipedia?

One word: Encarta.

Edit: Apparently you can still order an updated print edition of the World Book Encyclopedia for the low price of $1,259.00.

This refers to Google instead of Wikipedia, but I think this cartoon still applies. 🤣

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 had this thing called a library. With books.

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.

You parents would just tell you something and you assumed it was true until you learned years later they where just winging it with bullshit.

You could argue about who was right about some obscure fact all night long, or come up with your own creative theories.
Nowadays, in less than a minute, someone will look it up, killing the conversation.

Before that, you had to get your Encyclopedia on a CD. Encarta '98 was the shit. Some of the articles had pictures and even video clips! At 320x240 resolution and 15 FPS, but my laptop was playing real video, like a TV! It was mind-blowing shit. I watched the video clip of a earthquake in Kobe, Japan over and over again. If I remember correctly, there was actually a second video of people white-water rafting. Two whole videos, that I could play on my computer. Those were the days...

In the long-long-ago, encyclopaedias were on paper, 28 volumes, and weighed 14kg. Quite comprehensive.

Then encyclopaedias were on a CD or two, around 100g.

Before Wikipedia, everything2 was a previous example of a massively-interlinked-website. You could search and maybe turn up some details.

Or prior to google being created, you would just do a search in metacrawler.com to usually turn up some OK answers.

In the long, long ago times we had these things called libraries where books were checked out and accessible by using a card. Finding out factual information could take a bit of time depending on how obscure it was, but librarians were very helpful in finding things.

Otherwise stuff was mostly passed on by word of mouth and people tended to believe whoever said stuff with the most confidence. So like today's social media, but slower and mostly in person.

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.

search engines and before that software encyclopedias and before that physical encyclopedias.

I grew up in the 90s, so we had Encarta for most of the time I needed an encyclopedia.

It also wasn't uncommon to have a (partial) set of encyclopedias at home. You could buy them, one or more volumes at a time, over the phone or occasionally from door-to-door salespeople. We also had an old set from the 60s that we inherited from my grandmother.

I'll be honest man: it sucked.

Imagine a time where you had a question, and you just... didn't get to know the answer. Like, literally every time you just had to hope someone in your general area had some level of confidence in their answer to satisfy your curiosity until you could confirm it later. Or you'd just go around repeating it to people with out confirming. Whatever.

If something was important enough, you'd go track down an answer. Remember to look it up when you got home using your parent's encyclopedias. Or make a trip to the library.

In a way, we kind of lost something: conversation and discussion. Before I feel like people really picked apart an issue where you'd all come up with a consensus over a few hours of discussion about a topic at a party or something. Then someone would come back with the answer another day, and bring in some more stuff they learned while looking it up, and it would start a whole new conversation.

Just random webpages that you took at face value because there's no way someone can publish misinformation on something as big and sophisticated as this internet thing.

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.

We had libraries and librarians, the library was an amazing place, soo, soo many books, and you could take them home for a few weeks, for free!

And if you had trouble finding something a librarian could help you find the book you where looking for.

Libraries are still fantastic, but have lost a lot of it's magic since smartphones became a thing.

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

Encyclopedias and libraries. I was lucky enough to have an encyclopedia set at home growing up, and I read the entire thing cover to cover, A to Z.

People used to call the Reference Desk at their local public library to ask a question and get an answer.

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.

library

There was Encarta.

I remember a time when people got into arguments over who played a roll in a movie. one time we drove to a video rental store to settle it.

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.

In retrospect, that Encarta had its moment and MS didn't realize that they could have just turned it into a website before Wikipedia made it entirely redundant is a major loss. It could have been a for-profit staple like Facebook, but nope.

FWIW, I am looking at the encyclopaedia my family owned before the Internet. It's still here on my shelves, along with other collections of books in bulk. People would show up to your door and sell you these sometimes, and it wasn't always a scam. It served us well.

There was a trivia game show over here when I was a kid where the final round included a very obscure question (think "what was the name of the cousin of Stalin that was a film director in the 80s" or whatever) and were given ten minutes and an encyclopaedia to look it up. It was considered very hard and most episodes it resulted in failure.

You could ABSOLUTELY resurrect that format by cutting the time significantly and giving people access to Wikipedia. That's easy money right there.

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.

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.

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.

Back in the days before the interwebs and pocket computers with access to all the knowledge and history of mankind, there were the outdated encyclopedia at home that you'd pop out occasionally, the up to date encyclopedia at the library that you never got around to check out anything casual and then there was the truth by the person arguing the most insistent that they were right.

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.

All information was passed down orally by people specially-trained to serve as “oral repositories”—in various cultures they were called bards, makars, aoidos, and various other terms. Important information was often set in verse to aid memorization.

There was a transitional period when writing and printing were used, and an even briefer period when these were supplemented by encyclopedias on CD-ROM before the birth of Wikipedia.

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.

I was a pretty big contributir to Everything2.com
It's not as encyclopedia-like as wikipedia, but still a reasonably good source of information. The biggest annoyance was that you couldn't include pictures in a writeup.

Were there proprietary predecessor websites?

There were and still are publicly owned (or semi-privately, depends were you're looking). They were called (public) libraries.
They were great back then (as a kid, as a student and as an adult) and they're still great nowadays, just less... popular, alas.

Google was decent at one point. The true enshittification only started to be felt in earnest ~2015.

Before that there were books and index searches at the library. You would go pull, say, 11 books on Robespierre and the French Revolution. Then systematically index search each one for relevant info to research and write up whatever you were writing up. Same with journal papers though they had their own search devices and were typically housed in those cool rolling stacks.

Wiki is user based. Anyone can write or modify anything on a wiki. There are mostly good intentioned players, but even so. I’m sure thee are people who sidle in to tweak their own Wikis or have a publicist create it. I’m old enough it’s never been my go to unless I’m looking up media. What year did Baldurs Gate come out? Who wrote Buffy the Vampire Slayer? What was JJ Abrams involvement with Fringe? What episode of TNG was Picard taken hostage and tortured with the lights? That sort of thing. That said, if you find something is lacking in a wiki, you can fix it yourself.

Well, you see, we'd learn everything from my best friends older brother that smoked too much weed and was unemployed.

If he was wrong, then you simply didn't know he was wrong and you'd go around spouting off nonsense, cause yeah huh I heard it from Jake's brother

Library, my grandparents encyclopedia collection and then encarta

Encarta and Comptons

Wewould have to purchase the encyclopedia britanica every few years

We used encyclopedias, first physical, then virtual.

Also, there was the public library (which was, and still is, awesome).

At home? If you had an encyclopedia you did that. You may also only have some of an encyclopedia, because they would randomly discount some but not others, or you'd get two random free with an order of one book, etc.

For school and such, you went to the library to use their encyclopedias and other reference materials.

Later on, encarta and other such things on your PC, and maybe some random scientist hosting a page on their subject at their college/university.

Don't know I live in 1880 back in good ol` days of the empire

Askjeeves.com and then later google.