Writing this from an occasionally-connected hand computer in the “developing world”, don't use Encarta. Use Kiwix. I have a 45000-article slice of the English Wikipedia here in 6 GB, with nearly all the pictures, and even animations and some video and audio, such as the radio broadcast of the Hindenburg crash. To give you an idea of its breadth, articles I've consulted recently include "anal sex", "rectum", "convolution", "ferret", "Dorothy Parker", and "principal component analysis". (This probably paints an unjustifiably interesting picture of my hobbies.) The whole English Wikipedia, 4 million articles, is 35 GB without pictures.
(Encarta was 32000 articles and, as pointed out in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20741028, ridiculously biased on some subjects, in precisely the way that Wikipedia scrupulously avoids.)
The biggest problem I have with Kiwix is that, on Android, its built-in downloader for ZIM files is flaky, and I haven't figured out how to load ZIM files I downloaded in some other way yet, such as on a MicroSD card. The non-Android version works fine with such sideloaded ZIM files. (I also miss the interlanguage links; I have a few languages of Wikipedia on here, and even when I don't it's often useful to find out things like the Guarani word for "ferret". And of course I don't have a local Google Search.)
Kiwix also has ZIM files for things like Wikisource (7.2 GB for English), Project Gutenberg (54GB for English), and Stack Overflow and other Stack Exchange sites. The English Stack Overflow is 134 gigabytes.
As for the globe, a much better option than Encarta is OsmAnd~. My country is under 0.6 GB, including most of the public transit routes, down to the bus-stop level. Bonus: lat/long links in Kiwix open in OsmAnd~. Minus: OsmAnd~ doesn't have any way to load satellite imagery, even the Blue Marble MODIS dataset.
Both Kiwix and OsmAnd~ are available on F-Droid, so you know they're not malware.
But none of this is interactivity. Watch Alan Kay’s talks where he talks about kids building dynamical models in Etoys to understand gravitational acceleration. Much more interesting than the Wikipedia article on convolution by itself: I have IPython, Numpy, and SciPy on my netbook, so I can create signals and kernels, convolve them, and look at the results. I can compare my own implementation of convolution to the library implementation. I can do principal component analysis with the LAPACK functions for it. That's interactivity, and it's a far more powerful learning tool than mere hypertext. And I don't have anything like it for Android. Is there anything?
An interesting thing to note about all of these — Wikipedia, OpenStreetMap, IPython, and LAPACK — is that none of them are products of capitalism. They coexist with capitalism, but they are all products of a non-capitalist form of production, sometimes called "commons-based peer production", which evidently outperforms capitalist production in certain areas just as capitalist production outperformed feudal agriculture. The crucial question for the future of humanity, I think, is how we can extend commons-based peer production to new spheres, and the biggest obstacle seems to be artificial scarcity produced by government-granted monopolies — patent, copyright, and so on.
While I appreciate the recommendations, the language/tone is a bit over the top. Nobody’s seriously suggesting you should dump offline slices of Google Maps, or Open Street Map (OsmAnd) in order to use an outdated virtual atlas. It’s more like we’re reminiscing on how National Geographic (and others) used to actually publish these very large world atlases, and how for it’s time, CD-ROM-delivered encyclopedias for the world’s primary platform of the day (Windows) were revolutionary.
The original article does indeed suggest that people like me are using Encarta today rather than the things I suggested. I assume Scott is correct about that, and I wanted to offer them some better alternatives than the profoundly shitty proprietary experience offered by Encarta. I mean, what does Encarta have to say about principal component analysis or anal sex?
Right. Besides those topics (though maybe it would have them?), Encarta also doesn’t have any facts of science or history beyond 2009 outside of whatever web updates might have shipped, and yet I’d also point out that Wikipedia is not considered a primary source, and writers of Wikipedia might have biases of their own. Third-party sources written by editors, like Encarta and Britannica would historically claim to be more trustworthy than Wikipedia, and this was countered by Wikipedia saying they had more breadth and faster updates from the community, with a wider set of viewpoints due to crowd input. Ultimately, Encarta folded because they couldn’t compete with free online offerings. I’d only suggest that... for health matters, or business ones, or well, any research at all: you should follow links to primary sources and evaluate them; you should do research with the rest of Google and private databases. Wikipedia is for summaries and the rest of the internet provides the source material. Encarta provided their own set of curated summaries with multimedia, something Wikipedia as a series of textual articles has not historically engaged in. So, there are definitely advantages to Wikipedia, but it doesn’t entirely negate advantages of Encarta or having the rest of the web at your fingertips. I sincerely hope unlimited high speed internet reaches everyone ASAP, including via space satellites, if cheap enough to use...
While searching for a list of topics in Encarta, I found a PC Mag article recommending Encarta over other encyclopedias of the day - it really took me back, I’d forgotten how I used to get all my software recommendations from magazines - https://books.google.ca/books?id=6qzzglITYTYC&pg=PA158&lpg=P...
I'm interested to hear whether Encarta did have articles on anal sex and principal component analysis; the slice of Wikipedia I have here is only 45,000 articles, and Encarta was 32,000, so it's surely possible. I doubt that it does, though.
Encyclopedias in general are not primary sources; they're secondary and tertiary sources. Generally speaking, it's not a good idea to try to evaluate the primary sources in a field unless you already understand the field reasonably well, because primary sources are mostly wrong or misleading in ways that can be hard to detect, and this is why we prefer secondary sources for Wikipedia sources most of the time. (Perhaps you don't know what a primary source is; see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primary_source.) None of this is a significant difference between Wikipedia and Encarta or Britannica, except that Wikipedia cites many, many more sources.
In empirical studies, Wikipedia was found to contain about the same level of errors as Britannica in areas that both encyclopedias covered, but that was many years ago; Wikipedia has improved substantially since then. At this point most of the accusations of major errors in Wikipedia come from Holocaust denialists, anti-vaxxers, and the like.
It's true that every Wikipedia editor has biases, but for their edits to survive, the edits need to be acceptable to editors with very different biases, or be in a place that nobody ever looks (as with the Seigenthaler affair). That's what accounts for the sometimes annoying Wikipedia style where every strong assertion is followed by a plethora of qualifications and exceptions. Encarta and Britannica never had this advantage, so errors and egregious biases sometimes persisted during many years.
So it's not true that Wikipedia is less trustworthy than Encarta and Britannica — rather the contrary, except in the short interval before vandalism gets reverted — and it's not true that you should trust your interpretation of primary sources on health matters or business matters over Wikipedia's interpretation, unless you know a lot about medicine or business. Following links from Wikipedia to secondary sources like Cochrane Collaboration reports or Bloomberg articles is a much better idea.
It's also not true that Wikipedia doesn't have multimedia, or only recently acquired multimedia. The PCA article I used as an example above has six illustrations, and the SVD article it links to has a very helpful animation at the top of the article, an animation which dates from 2010, as well as a couple of other visualizations, and a whole lot of equations. (You could maybe argue that six illustrations isn't very many for 30 pages of text full of equations, but illustrating high-dimensional linear algebra is kind of difficult.) What it doesn't have is interactivity: there's no way to modify a data set and see how that changes its PCA, or even just to explore the PCA of an existing immutable dataset.
The anal sex article, in addition to 14000 words and 139 references, contains a fairly graphic level of multimedia content — 13 detailed illustrations, including photographs of artifacts from many historical cultures — but no animations and fortunately no interactivity either. It's a Level 4 Vital Article, meaning that it's among the ten thousand or so most important articles in the whole encyclopedia. (PCA is not.)
I suspect that what's going on here is that, even though Wikipedia has more multimedia than CD-ROM Encarta (by two or three orders of magnitude), it exceeds Encarta's textual contents by an even larger factor, so it appears to be light on multimedia, just by contrast. But I never used Encarta, so I could be wrong about that? (I went straight from MS-DOS on a 286 to the internet.)
I definitely agree that Wikipedia is not a substitute for having the rest of the web at your fingertips.
Don't pretend like Wikipedia doesn't depend on donations from primarily capitalist economy citizens. Just because an organization is non-profit does not mean it's anti-capitalist, or commons-based. It is still a private organization run by private individuals. They just don't distribute profits to shareholders and their business model is donation-based, just as churches have been for centuries.
I agree that there's a lot of promise for open source resources like Linux, Wikipedia, and Bitcoin, but I see that there's also a great trade-off between Cathedral vs. Bazaar style production.
I don't know why you would suggest I was pretending that? The rest of your comment seems like an irrelevant rebuttal to something I didn't even suggest, except that you seem to not know what "commons-based" means, so you falsely assert that Wikipedia isn't commons-based [peer production product].
Capitalism is a system of production in which productive work is carried out by employees using means of production, such as factories, that are the private property of a capitalist that employs them, and that capitalist is the owner of the work product. Linux is largely produced this way, although originally it was produced by commons-based peer production, and so, for that matter, is the Internet Archive; Wikipedia and LAPACK largely are not. The distinction doesn't have anything to do with non-profit corporations; whether the capitalist is a non-profit corporation or a private citizen doesn't really affect the system of production much.
"Non-capitalist" doesn't mean "anti-capitalist". Capitalism wasn't anti-feudalism either! I mean, except in the sense that in Europe the nascent capitalist cities often gained independence from the feudal system, and eventually capitalist power structures became more influential than feudal ones and displaced them after a few centuries, but in that sense everything is anti-everything-else.
Very few people are less anti-capitalist than Jimmy Wales.
Fair enough, I read it wrong. When I read "commons based" I assume the word commons to mean public property, or Commonwealth concepts. And while Wikipedia doesn't copyright its material, it's still very much a private enterprise, despite depending on volunteers to add content. There are still paid employees of Wikipedia that ultimately manage it. It's not entirely decentralized in that sense.
I think your definition of capitalism is overly simplistic. Capitalism is merely a byproduct of private property. If you hold that individuals can own property, and have certain rights to that property, then capitalism is an emergent property of an economy that respects private property as a concept.
Employee owned corporations are a thing in capitalism, as are publically owned corporations, as are state owned corporations, as are non-profit corps. I get that organizations which produce IP that is open source or non-copyrighted is novel, but I still don't follow how it's "non-capitalistic". Donations are simply an alternative revenue model.
No, there are paid employees of the Wikimedia Foundation, but not of Wikipedia. They do not ultimately manage Wikipedia, just its hosting; an ArbCom ultimately manages each Wikipedia, although there are the predictable and tiresome power struggles from time to time.
However, that's ultimately irrelevant — what counts is that Wikipedia isn't written by employees and isn't owned by the owners of the means of production.
I gave an entirely standard definition of capitalism, though yes, somewhat simplified. If you want to use the word in a way that does not accord with its standard definition in history, sociology, economics, and politics, that's up to you, but you will of course reach different conclusions about your "capitalism" than those of us who are discussing its standard definition (your definition, for example, implies that capitalism has existed for several thousand years), and you will have a hard time understanding what we are saying. I suggest you read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitalism and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commons-based_peer_production.
I didn't realize that's how Wikipedia was structured. I think that's fascinating.
"Characteristics central to capitalism include private property, capital accumulation, wage labor, voluntary exchange, a price system and competitive markets."
Capital accumulation is an emergent property of private property. If you can own things, and government protects that and is prohibited from seizing property based on arbitrary factors, then capitalism emerges by default. It's not a "command-based" economy once private property and individual rights are established.
Markets aren't centrally managed in any way, they simply emerge as a property of people trading private property. That employees trade time for someone's else's private property (cash) is just a system that tends to work. I think there's other systems, it's certainly not the only way to organize, but it seems weird to say that it's non-capitalist. When I join a volunteer based organization, and donate my labor, it doesn't mean it's non-capitalist. The organization has simply chosen to give away IP rather than give away services (as a homeless shelter or food bank might do).
Sounds like you should read the rest of the article, not just part of the introduction.
Also, in general, I think you should read more stuff that's objectively true instead of stuff written to persuade you to support a particular political agenda. Reading persuasive tracts like the ones you're paraphrasing gives power to the leaders of the political faction the tracts are from; reading things that are objectively true gives power to you instead.
I don't have time to read a Wikipedia article on a subject I've been studying for decades. I have my own understanding, based on my own readings and my own experiences. Wikipedia is not the ultimate source of truth or final word on any one subject. It's a great resource, but it's far from comprehensive, and it's still subject to narrative slant.
Calling out Wikipedia as non-capitalist is superfluous. It's bizarre, because you still fail to acknowledge that non-profit institutions have existed for centuries, and no one ever bothered to label them "non-capitalist". You are conflating two orthogonal subjects. Sure, profit is an essential component of capitalist economies, but the exclusion of profit does not make an organization non-capitalist any more than it makes it non-communist or non-feudalist.
In general, you should avoid being condescending. I don't give power to anyone, those are my words.
(Encarta was 32000 articles and, as pointed out in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20741028, ridiculously biased on some subjects, in precisely the way that Wikipedia scrupulously avoids.)
The biggest problem I have with Kiwix is that, on Android, its built-in downloader for ZIM files is flaky, and I haven't figured out how to load ZIM files I downloaded in some other way yet, such as on a MicroSD card. The non-Android version works fine with such sideloaded ZIM files. (I also miss the interlanguage links; I have a few languages of Wikipedia on here, and even when I don't it's often useful to find out things like the Guarani word for "ferret". And of course I don't have a local Google Search.)
Kiwix also has ZIM files for things like Wikisource (7.2 GB for English), Project Gutenberg (54GB for English), and Stack Overflow and other Stack Exchange sites. The English Stack Overflow is 134 gigabytes.
As for the globe, a much better option than Encarta is OsmAnd~. My country is under 0.6 GB, including most of the public transit routes, down to the bus-stop level. Bonus: lat/long links in Kiwix open in OsmAnd~. Minus: OsmAnd~ doesn't have any way to load satellite imagery, even the Blue Marble MODIS dataset.
Both Kiwix and OsmAnd~ are available on F-Droid, so you know they're not malware.
But none of this is interactivity. Watch Alan Kay’s talks where he talks about kids building dynamical models in Etoys to understand gravitational acceleration. Much more interesting than the Wikipedia article on convolution by itself: I have IPython, Numpy, and SciPy on my netbook, so I can create signals and kernels, convolve them, and look at the results. I can compare my own implementation of convolution to the library implementation. I can do principal component analysis with the LAPACK functions for it. That's interactivity, and it's a far more powerful learning tool than mere hypertext. And I don't have anything like it for Android. Is there anything?
An interesting thing to note about all of these — Wikipedia, OpenStreetMap, IPython, and LAPACK — is that none of them are products of capitalism. They coexist with capitalism, but they are all products of a non-capitalist form of production, sometimes called "commons-based peer production", which evidently outperforms capitalist production in certain areas just as capitalist production outperformed feudal agriculture. The crucial question for the future of humanity, I think, is how we can extend commons-based peer production to new spheres, and the biggest obstacle seems to be artificial scarcity produced by government-granted monopolies — patent, copyright, and so on.