Wikipedia alternative
And the 7-letter answer is ENCARTA
I don’t remember ever seeing it referenced here, though. Do you?
Do you ever use it yourself? If I may ask, why?
Never heard of it. Now that I visited it, I probably won’t ever be back: too busy, flashy, and I hate to say it, but very USA-centric.
Encarta is Microsoft’s for-fee encyclopedia. It is not a wiki; there are no public contributions I’m aware of. You will see it referenced on the MSN.com page, but little enough elsewhere. It must madden Microsoft to no end that everybody’s taking pages (“give it away for free and destroy the competition”) from Microsoft’s playbook.
Encarta was the encyclopedia software which used to ‘come with’ a family PC, in my experience. I ended up with 3 or 4 of the install CDs. My kids never did use it though - this was before teachers would let students use electronic media sources in their footnotes.
Encarta still exists? My old 486 machine came with a CD with Encarta on it, before the web was ubiquitous. I don’t know what their business model was, but they were undercutting the pay ones, like Britannica, before wikipedia undercut them.
I found it basically useless.
I actually had the gall to cite Encarta quite regularly in my grad-school term papers. Also, Computer Dictionary for Dummies and my Novell NetWare 4 user guide.
It always gave me a thrill.
I recall Encarta being the exact opposite of Wikipedia. The latter never loses its ability to amaze with entries on even the most obscure things, whereas Encarta never ceased to astonish with its glaring omissions.
Oddly enough, I was talking with someone about Encarta just yesterday. In their mind, there was a complete void between the days of traveling encyclopedia salesmen and Wikipedia.
So, I told them all about how people could go out to Incredible Universe or CompUSA and buy a copy of Encarta. They were amused at the idea that people would actually go pay for what’s available completely free now.
Did you tell them that we used to pay for porn? That always seems to amuse…
I used to enjoy playing around with Encarta World Atlas, but that’s more-or-less obsolete now that Google Earth is on the scene.
I used it in 1996.
Does Encarta still have that multiple-choice trivia game where you’re wandering through a castle, trying to break a spell or something? I remember it from my Encarta CD in 1995.
I thought about using it in … 2004? I needed, as data for a project, sets of the same text translated into multiple languages. Didn’t matter what text, I just needed lots of it. I looked into Encarta but it didn’t have what I needed, the translated articles were incomplete and not perfect translations.
But to look up information? No, not that I recall.
I still used Encarta pretty regularly, until a few months ago, as a resource in writing puzzles and trivia games.
Wikipedia is more comprehensive, but it’s also far less reliable, and is frequently written by people for whom English is a 5th language.