We had this thing called a library. With books.

Edit: Apparently you can still order an updated print edition of the World Book Encyclopedia for the low price of $1,259.00.

We had libraries and librarians, the library was an amazing place, soo, soo many books, and you could take them home for a few weeks, for free!

And if you had trouble finding something a librarian could help you find the book you where looking for.

Libraries are still fantastic, but have lost a lot of it’s magic since smartphones became a thing.

You could argue about who was right about some obscure fact all night long, or come up with your own creative theories.
Nowadays, in less than a minute, someone will look it up, killing the conversation.

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.

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.

You parents would just tell you something and you assumed it was true until you learned years later they where just winging it with bullshit.

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.

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.

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

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.

Wewould have to purchase the encyclopedia britanica every few years

It’s surreal to me that there are people who don’t know what life before Wikipedia was like, lol.

Maybe it’s relevant to understand that the increased access to information hasn’t always translated to people being more informed. There are many people in my life who don’t actively look things up and who don’t have the curiosity or willingness to even check Wikipedia.

So it is still now a bit like what it was like pre-Wikipedia - people mostly relied on other people for knowledge, and knowledge was thus local and socially shared, not necessarily that factual or based in books. I still think this is the dominant way people live, but now social media is an extension of that “local” socially-mediated knowledge. TV and radio were sorta like social media before, it was the way things became “viral”.

I think now like then, looking something up on Wikipedia sets you apart from a lot of people, it makes you bookish, nerdy, or pedantic - as if the folk knowledge wasn’t good enough for you and you have become a traitor to your people by seeking something more from the stacks.

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.