I would estimate that more than half of the informative links posted direct to Wikipedia; even more if you don’t count political cites. Where did the SDMB turn before Wikipedia hit a critical mass. I speculate that happened in mid 2005, when Wikipedia reached half a million articles.
The question is, before that time, what was the Doper’s go-to site, and, if different, what was (is) your favorite?
Google would be one.
I used to have and love a little program called GuruNet. It would sit in your toolbox and if you shift-clicked a word it would look it up and give you tabs for dictionary, a couple encyclopedias, medical dictionary, thesaurus, etc. about that word. It was one of the few things I was willing to buy every time I got a new computer.
It ended up turning into Answers.com and I don’t know if they still have a client app.
GuruNet sounds pretty darn cool. Were the dictionaries, etc. on your hard drive, or did it direct you to a linkable website?
As for Google, that’s not really what I was looking for, since Google just searches other sites (for the most part), and doesn’t have www.google.com/panfriedsemen, www.google.com/1920sstyledeathray, or www.google.com/airplane+treadmill that a poster would directly link to as a cite.
I remember that before Wikipedia became popular here most cites were in GQ and GD and even then - like now - they linked to newspapers and government websites. The forum with the second most cites was CS and those were almost always to the IMDB, which nowadays has lost popularity to wiki but is still a very used source here.
The data was on their server, and the app would pull it down and display it like webpages.
Here’s a picture of what looks to be a later, more browsery looking version: http://images.techtree.com/ttimages/story/gurunet-ss.jpg
It would appear that Answers.com still has the app (perhaps slimmed down a bit), but now called the “1-Click Answer”: http://www.answers.com/main/download_answers_win.jsp
Hm, no I just tried installing and it’s significantly more trimmed down. Ah well.
I like to use government sites, research sites, state historical archives, book archives that are searchable, sites for people that do a hobby, cooking cites, county extension sites, and use Google to bring up sites that I search for somebody that I think has it right. Wiki gets used when I don’t really care if everything is dead on and can change anytime. I use it for generalized information, that can give somebody a broad picture. The Library of Congress is a good source for a lot of stuff as is Life Histories.
