Ask Lemmy

As a scientist, I used the CRC Handbook of Chemistry and Physic a lot, also known as the 'rubber book'. Mainly to look up refractive index values at the time (1990-2000). It's full of all sorts of reference values, boiling points at different pressures. Physical constants & formula.

Everyone's talking about encyclopedias but they weren't always that useful either. They can only fit so much information in those books so some topics would only get like 3 sentences dedicated to them. So yeah, if you were writing a research paper for school you'd spend lots of time at the library trying to find books that had another smidge of information you needed.

If you were lucky, you'd find a really good book that was very relevant to your topic and lean heavily on that. Otherwise, you'd wind up with like a few sentences each from a dozen books that you have to tie together somehow. Wasn't fun.

Back in the days before the interwebs and pocket computers with access to all the knowledge and history of mankind, there were the outdated encyclopedia at home that you'd pop out occasionally, the up to date encyclopedia at the library that you never got around to check out anything casual and then there was the truth by the person arguing the most insistent that they were right.

Instead of a webpage, you had a whole shelf of books laid out in more or less the same fashion as Wikipedia.

Fun fact: I learned about the Internet from the encyclopedia and begged my parents to get online. I used to just read those things like regular books. I only learned recently that when I first went online in 1993, the World Wide Web was literally only months old.

All information was passed down orally by people specially-trained to serve as “oral repositories”—in various cultures they were called bards, makars, aoidos, and various other terms. Important information was often set in verse to aid memorization.

There was a transitional period when writing and printing were used, and an even briefer period when these were supplemented by encyclopedias on CD-ROM before the birth of Wikipedia.

Well, you see, we'd learn everything from my best friends older brother that smoked too much weed and was unemployed.

If he was wrong, then you simply didn't know he was wrong and you'd go around spouting off nonsense, cause yeah huh I heard it from Jake's brother

Google was decent at one point. The true enshittification only started to be felt in earnest ~2015.

Before that there were books and index searches at the library. You would go pull, say, 11 books on Robespierre and the French Revolution. Then systematically index search each one for relevant info to research and write up whatever you were writing up. Same with journal papers though they had their own search devices and were typically housed in those cool rolling stacks.

Wiki is user based. Anyone can write or modify anything on a wiki. There are mostly good intentioned players, but even so. I’m sure thee are people who sidle in to tweak their own Wikis or have a publicist create it. I’m old enough it’s never been my go to unless I’m looking up media. What year did Baldurs Gate come out? Who wrote Buffy the Vampire Slayer? What was JJ Abrams involvement with Fringe? What episode of TNG was Picard taken hostage and tortured with the lights? That sort of thing. That said, if you find something is lacking in a wiki, you can fix it yourself.

Were there proprietary predecessor websites?

There were and still are publicly owned (or semi-privately, depends were you're looking). They were called (public) libraries.
They were great back then (as a kid, as a student and as an adult) and they're still great nowadays, just less... popular, alas.

I was a pretty big contributir to Everything2.com
It's not as encyclopedia-like as wikipedia, but still a reasonably good source of information. The biggest annoyance was that you couldn't include pictures in a writeup.

The Encyclopedia Brittanica, they advertised that shit constantly on nickelodeon. That and Encarta, a good old disc of knowledge. I suppose OP is unfamiliar, and that's fine, but I'm not sure I can stretch it to thinking that there were just absolutely no resources available.

And it also comes down to you weren't aware you could get that knowledge instantly, and so you didn't miss it, per se. I did research papers on whomever in grade school and I went to the library and pulled out a couple books, mainly for the sake of padding the bibliography.

I was in eighth grade when wiki showed up, and by high school it became "no wikipedia" as a policy, but at that point, savvy enough individuals were using wiki for it's bibliography.

And so, in short, the change wasn't super pronounced. If I had a desire to learn something, I'd figure out some way to go learn it. The convenience is obviously there, though, I certainly don't want to take anything away from wiki and what it's done.

Wewould have to purchase the encyclopedia britanica every few years

Library, my grandparents encyclopedia collection and then encarta

At home? If you had an encyclopedia you did that. You may also only have some of an encyclopedia, because they would randomly discount some but not others, or you'd get two random free with an order of one book, etc.

For school and such, you went to the library to use their encyclopedias and other reference materials.

Later on, encarta and other such things on your PC, and maybe some random scientist hosting a page on their subject at their college/university.

Encarta and Comptons

We used encyclopedias, first physical, then virtual.

Also, there was the public library (which was, and still is, awesome).

Don't know I live in 1880 back in good ol` days of the empire