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If it wasn't in an encyclopedia, you just trusted word of mouth.
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this post was submitted on 27 Nov 2023
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There was also those in between few years where we Encarta’ed everything.
I mean, some houses had encyclopedias before this as well. The problem with those is they got outdated quickly for anything current and near past and were expensive. Occasionally, a big archaeology find could shake up a section as well.
they usually weren't that outdated for most things.
sure new info becomes available all the time, but some things take time to hash out anyway. when i was a kid in the 90's, we had a late 70's encyclopedia set. i used to just read them all the time.
was some of the info a bit incomplete compared to more modern methods? absolutely. but at least it gave you a good jumping off point. it might spark an interest in a particular subject, that could be furthered at the school or local library. also by the mid 90's we had a newer CD-ROM based encyclopedia set.
i always appreciated that my stepdad tried to make sure i had books, but also a healthy dose of practical knowledge as well. i remember having a old Boy Scouts field manual and a few other books, that taught me a number of useful and practical skills.
Yeah, even on Wikipedia, most of the key information is stuff that hasn't been significantly changed in decades. The stuff in a 30 year old Encarta CD was probably enough to pass many undergraduate degrees. It's only once you start doing advanced stuff that it matters that it's 30 years out of date.
What the Encyclopedia Britannica and Encarta weren't as good for was searching for information. Like, say you wanted to know why the sky is blue, or the name of the bird with a huge beak pouch, you wouldn't know where to start. One of the things that makes modern online systems so good is that you can ask random questions and get back facts.
I was mostly thinking geography for outdated things. Bit of a shakeup going into the early '90s, heh. Yeah, except in a few domains, things were usually current enough.