Nupedia

Nupedia was an online encyclopedia whose articles were written by experts and licensed under a free content license. It was founded by Jimmy Wales and underwritten by Bomis, with Larry Sanger as editor-in-chief. Nupedia lasted from March 2000 to September 2003, and is now more commonly known as the predecessor of Wikipedia.

Nupedia was not a wiki, that is, it was not publicly editable. It was characterized by an extensive peer review process and designed to make its articles comparable in quality to professional encyclopedias. Nupedia wanted academics who volunteered content for free.

"Within a year and $120,000 invested in the project, Nupedia had only published 24 articles and Jimmy Wales decided to scrap the project." Before it came to an end, Nupedia produced 25 articles that completed the review system It also had 74 items that were still under construction.

History

Nupedia screenshot in Spanish, in October 2001.

Nupedia was always an encyclopedia of free content. Initially the project used its own license, the Nupedia Open Content License. In January 2001, Nupedia changed its license to the GNU Free Documentation License, at the request of Richard Stallman and the Free Software Foundation. However, Stallman also started GNUPedia at the same time, which led to concerns about possible competition between the projects. One problem for GNUPedia participants was that, despite Nupedia's uses of free content, the lengthy peer review process ran counter to the culture and philosophy of the free software movement.

During this same period, Wikipedia was started as a side project to enable collaboration on articles before entering the peer review process. This attracted interest from both sides, as it provided a less bureaucratic structure, preferred by GNUPedia supporters. As a result, it was never really developed and the threat of competition between the projects was nullified. As Wikipedia grew and attracted contributors, it quickly developed a life of its own and began to operate largely independently of Nupedia, although Sanger initially led activity at Wikipedia through his position as Nupedia's editor-in-chief.

Aside from leading to the discontinuation of the Nupedia project, Wikipedia also led to the gradual failure of Nupedia. Due to the collapse of the internet economy at the time, Jimmy Wales decided to discontinue funding for a paid editor-in-chief in December 2000, and some time later Sanger resigned from him on both projects. As Nupedia neared dormancy, the idea of making it a stable version of Wikipedia occasionally resurfaced, but was never implemented, and Nupedia was shut down in 2003.

Editorial process

The requirements for being an editor at Nupedia were relatively high. The policy stated "We want editors to be true experts in their fields and (with few exceptions), to hold PhDs".^{[citation needed]} No However, reviewers evaluating essays in an article would generally have no special expertise in the subject matter of the article. Reviewers were identified by pseudonyms, and although there was a facility that allowed reviewers to post their biographies, many did not. So the expert writing the article was often forced to modify it based on comments from effectively anonymous reviewers, with no way of knowing their qualifications on the subject. The process was also different from Wikipedia's because reviewers were expected to provide criticism, but not edits to articles. The number of participants in Nupedia was not enough to dialogue between people with knowledge of the subject of the article.

Software development

Nupedia was powered by the collaborative software NupeCode, free software released under the GNU Public License designed for large peer review projects. The code was available via the Nupedia CVS repository.^{[citation needed]}

One of the problems experienced by Nupedia for much of its existence was the lack of functional software. As a measure to the lack of functional software, underlined text blocks that appeared to be hyperlinks were used to indicate the articles.

As part of the project, a new version of the original software, called NuNupedia, was under development. NuNupedia was implemented for testing purposes at SourceForge, but never reached sufficient development to replace the original software.

Further reading

• Larry Sanger, The Early History of Nupedia and Wikipedia: A Memoir Part 1 (in English) and Part 2. Slashdot, April 2005.
• Larry Sanger, "Nupedia.com Statement of Editorial Policy, Version 2.1," Printable version of May 10, 2000.
• Larry Sanger, "Nupedia.com Statement of Editorial Policy, Version 3.2," Printable version of June 23, 2000.