Nupedia was an English-language Web-based encyclopedia whose articles were written by experts and licensed as free content. It was founded by Jimmy Wales and underwritten by Bomis, with Larry Sanger as editor-in-chief. Nupedia lasted from March 2000 until September 2003, and is mostly known now as the predecessor of the free wiki encyclopedia, Wikipedia.

Unlike Wikipedia, Nupedia was not a wiki; it was instead characterized by an extensive peer-review process, designed to make its articles of a quality comparable to that of professional encyclopedias. Nupedia wanted scholars to volunteer content for free. Before it ceased operating, Nupedia produced 24 articles that completed its review process (three articles also existed in two versions of different lengths), and 74 more articles were in progress.

In June 2008, CNET hailed Nupedia as one of the greatest defunct websites in the still young internet history.

History

In the autumn of 1999, Wales began thinking about an online encyclopedia built by volunteers and, in January 2000, hired Sanger to oversee its development. The project officially went online on March 9, 2000.

By November 2000, however, only two full-length articles had been published.

From its beginning, Nupedia was a free content encyclopedia, with Bomis intending to generate revenue from online ads on Nupedia.com. Initially the project used a homegrown license, the Nupedia Open Content License. In January 2001, it switched to the GNU Free Documentation License at the urgings of Richard Stallman and the Free Software Foundation. However, Stallman got behind Hector Facundo Arena's GNUPedia project at the same time, which led to concerns about possible competition between the projects.

Also in January 2001, Nupedia started Wikipedia as a side-project to allow collaboration on articles prior to entering the peer review process. This attracted interest from both sides, as it provided the less bureaucratic structure favored by GNUPedia advocates. As a result, GNUPedia never really developed and the threat of competition between the projects was averted. As Wikipedia grew and attracted contributors, it quickly developed a life of its own and began to function largely independently of Nupedia, although Sanger initially led activity on Wikipedia by virtue of his position as Nupedia's editor-in-chief.

Besides leading to discontinuation of the GNUPedia project, Wikipedia also led to the gradual demise of Nupedia. Due to the collapse of the internet economy at that time, Jimmy Wales decided to discontinue funding for a salaried editor-in-chief in December 2001 and Sanger resigned from both projects soon thereafter. After Sanger's departure, Nupedia increasingly became an afterthought to Wikipedia; of the Nupedia articles that completed the review process, only two did so after 2001. As Nupedia dwindled into inactivity, the idea of converting it into a stable version of approved Wikipedia articles was occasionally broached, but never implemented. The Nupedia website at nupedia.com was shut down on September 26, 2003, but a few pages were still available at a mirror,. Nupedia's (limited) content has since been assimilated into Wikipedia.

Editorial process

Nupedia had a seven-step editorial process, consisting of:

1. Assignment
2. Finding a lead reviewer
3. Lead review
4. Open review
5. Lead copyediting
6. Open copyediting
7. Final approval and markup

With the benefit of hindsight, the level of the bar to becoming a Nupedia contributor was probably unrealistically high, with the policy stating: "We wish editors to be true experts in their fields and (with few exceptions) possess PhDs". However, the reviewers evaluating drafts of an article generally would have no special expertise regarding the article's subject. Reviewers were identified by screen name, and although there was a facility that allowed reviewers to post their bios, many did not; thus, the expert who was writing the article was often obliged to modify it, based on comments from effectively anonymous reviewers, with no way of knowing their qualifications. The process was also different from Wikipedia's because the expectation was that reviewers would criticise the articles without actually editing them. As the number of participants in Nupedia was so small (many orders of magnitude smaller than the number of participants in the mature stages of Wikipedia), there was generally no dialogue between people with knowledge on the article's subject.

Software development

Nupedia was powered by NupeCode collaborative software. NupeCode is free/open source software (released under the GNU General Public License) designed for large peer review projects. The code was available via Nupedia's CVS repository. One of the problems experienced by Nupedia during much of its existence was that the software lacked functionality. Much of the missing functionality had been mocked-up using underlined blocks of text which appeared to be hyperlinks, but actually were not.

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

See also

• GNUPedia
• List of online encyclopedias
• List of wikis

References

1. Mark Frauenfelder: The next generation of online encyclopedias. The Industry Standard/CNN.com, November 21, 2000
2. GNUPedia Project Starting
3. Nupedia, the free encyclopedia
4. [1]

External links

• Earlier versions of Nupedia (from the Internet Archive)
• Larry Sanger: The Early History of Nupedia and Wikipedia: A Memoir Part 1 and Part 2. Slashdot, April 2005
• NuNupedia project page on Sourceforge (currently broken, as of July 2008)
• Archive of Nupedia on 8media.org (http://pedia.nu used to redirect here)