Also Encarta was much more engaging. It wasn’t just a mass of text with a few token images thrown in. It was a carefully curated compilation of multimedia, interactive content, educational games as well as textual write ups. It’s content was also discoverable in a plethora of ways that the web should ideally be suited to yet Wikipedia doesn’t even begin to approach.
Sure, Wikipedia has more articles; but the content is of a significantly lower quality by every other standard going.
Again you’re only discussing things at a textual level. Encarta wasn’t like other encyclopaedias - Encarta was a fully interactive multimedia experience.
The issue yourself and others who haven’t used Encarta is that you’re thinking about it as purely a text document store, which couldn’t be further from the truth. Encarta is more like a museum than it is like Wikipedia. It has a smaller curated set of write ups but has all the interactive exhibits, games, and multimedia content that a good museum has. Wikipedia is about breadth of content where as Encarta was about engagement.
This is something you’d expect the web to excel at but unfortunately the race to breadth of content has resulted in a less interesting delivery of said content.
> The issue yourself and others who haven’t used Encarta is that you’re thinking about it as purely a text document store, which couldn’t be further from the truth. Encarta is more like a museum than it is like Wikipedia. It has a smaller curated set of write ups but has all the interactive exhibits, games, and multimedia content that a good museum has. Wikipedia is about breadth of content where as Encarta was about engagement.
I do have used Encarta, and I really enjoyed it. I felt like you were talking about pure content quality, when it was (as I understand) rather about the way that (good) content is presented. If one had the time and tools to make games and interactive interfaces from Wikipedia’s content, do you think it could eventually match the Encarta experience? Some WP articles have videos/sounds/gifs but I find them too rare.
> I felt like you were talking about pure content quality
You probably just skimmed my post then because I’m really don’t know terms like “multimedia”, “games”, and phrases like “It wasn’t just a mass of text” could be confused with “pure content quality”.
> If one had the time and tools to make games and interactive interfaces from Wikipedia’s content, do you think it could eventually match the Encarta experience?
Absolutely. Encarta isn’t something that is unapproachable. In fact I literally said “This is something you’d expect the web to excel at” in my last comment :)
> Some WP articles have videos/sounds/gifs but I find them too rare.
Not only rare, poorly presented as well. Encarta has an engaging UI/UX, Wikipedia isn’t designed that way. So even the few articles with multimedia content are still less engaging than the average Encarta article.
That’s not necessarily a bad thing though. Sometimes people want their information presented in a bland broadsheet format, other times they want a pretty infograph. Each has their place.
Sure, Wikipedia has more articles; but the content is of a significantly lower quality by every other standard going.