Nupedia

In January 2000 Larry Sanger, a philosophy doctoral candidate finishing a dissertation in epistemology, emailed Jimmy Wales with an idea for a website; Wales, who had already been toying with the idea of an Internet encyclopedia, counter-proposed his encyclopedia plan and asked whether Sanger would like to lead it. In February 2000 Sanger moved to San Diego to work at Bomis, Wales’s Internet portal company, and in the months before the public announcement he drafted many of Nupedia’s ideas and policies in discussion with Wales and another Bomis partner, Tim Shell.⁠[1][1][1][1][1]

Nupedia was publicly announced on March 9, 2000, seeking contributors and editors with expertise in almost any field; its content would be offered free to consumers and businesses, and other websites could republish it as long as they credited Nupedia as the source. In his first message to the Nupedia mailing list, Wales wrote of his dream that the encyclopedia would one day be available to schoolhouses around the world for just the cost of printing, and said Bomis would put its experience in designing and promoting high-traffic websites, and its profits, behind the project. In mid-March Sanger reported that the project had 602 members and that, of the 140 who had filled out membership forms, about 25–40 percent were PhDs or otherwise clearly bona fide experts.⁠[1][1][1][1][1][1]

Version 3.2 of Nupedia’s editorial policy set out its workflow: the editor-in-chief or a subject editor added a topic name to the database and assigned a writer, often an expert on the topic; the draft was posted to the relevant review group, where peer reviewers suggested revisions; once approved by the subject editor it went to the copyediting group for grammar and usage, and was finally converted to XML and uploaded to the website. The policy defined the long-term goal as an open content encyclopedia, cross-referenced and searchable, freely available on the web and in other inexpensive formats and with more content than any encyclopedia in history, whose articles would be peer-reviewed, academically respectable, unbiased and translated into many languages.⁠[2][2][2][2][2][2][2]

By the summer of 2000 the first article, on atonality, had been formally published and the Advisory Board was in place; in November version 3.31 of the Nupedia.com “Editorial Policy Guidelines” was published. Over these months a board of scholars developed a seven-step review process.⁠[1][3]

By November 2000 Nupedia had a staff of two employees, with occasional help from other Bomis programmers, and had published only two full-length articles, one on the Classical era of Western music and one on atonal music. Sanger said another 115 articles were in the pipeline, with several dozen under review and several dozen more assigned; the project had enlisted more than 80 editors and peer reviewers, most of them holding doctorates. He hoped Nupedia’s articles would be more in-depth and more scholarly than those in BritannicaEncyclopædia BritannicaEncyclopædia Britannica is a general English-language encyclopedia first published in Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1768; the name also refers to its publisher, Chicago-based Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. (which presents itself as The Britannica Group). The print edition ended in 2012, and the company’s main businesses since then have been the online encyclopedia Britannica.com, digital education products for schools and libraries, and Merriam-Webster dictionaries.Open the full entry. By the end of 2000 the project had spent $250,000.⁠[4][4][4][4][4][3]

Nupedia’s license let anyone use its content for free as long as they credited Nupedia as the source and allowed the content to be freely distributed; Bomis hoped to earn revenue by selling advertising on Nupedia.com. Sanger said that even if the project did not pan out financially, its open-source roots would keep it going as a purely volunteer effort; writers, reviewers and editors were unpaid, and authors whose articles were published could receive a T-shirt or a coffee mug.⁠[4][4][4][4]

By early 2001 Nupedia’s productivity problems had become acute: more articles needed to be published and there was public interest in contributing, but the expert-dependent multistep review process could not keep up. On January 2 Ben Kovitz, a friend of Sanger’s, introduced him to wikis; Sanger soon proposed the idea to Wales and on January 10 posted a proposal titled “Let’s make a Wiki” to the mailing list, envisioning that wiki articles that reached a high level would enter Nupedia’s regular editorial process. Because Nupedia contributors did not want Nupedia associated with a wiki site, the new project was named Wikipedia and launched on its own domain on January 15, 2001. At the time the Nupedia mailing list had about 2,000 people.⁠[1][1][1][1][1][5][1]

Sanger recalled that by the summer of 2001 he had proposed, and with lukewarm support set up, the Nupedia Chalkboard, a wiki closely managed by Nupedia staff that was meant both as a simpler way to develop Nupedia articles and as a way to import articles from Wikipedia; but members of the public who wanted to write in a wiki simply used Wikipedia, while most Nupedia editors and reviewers did not see the need for it, and the Chalkboard went largely unused.⁠[1][1][1]

By the end of 2001 Nupedia had about 25 articles online, with about 150 more at various stages of review, while Wikipedia already had about 18,000. Nupedia had recruited more than 2,000 participants in all, who later formed the core of the Wikipedia community.⁠[3][3]

In 2002 Sanger was laid off by Bomis amid cost-cutting after the dot-com bust. In a March 1, 2002 message to the mailing list he resigned as editor-in-chief of Nupedia and gave up any position of authority in Wikipedia; he wrote that since early February he had been able to work only as a part-time volunteer, and that Nupedia could be revived only if money were found to pay an editor-in-chief or an emeritus professor were willing to volunteer.⁠[6][7][7][7]

In September 2003 the server hosting Nupedia crashed and was never restored. Most of Nupedia’s original content was later absorbed into the English Wikipedia.⁠[8][8]

Nupedia’s policy required articles to be unbiased and offered a test: on every issue where there might be even minor dispute among experts, is it very difficult or impossible for the reader to tell which side the author is on? Authors had at minimum to mention opposing views taken seriously by any significant minority of experts, so that every party to a controversy could judge that its views had been fairly presented. Sanger recalled that a “nonbias” principle was one of the first policies he and Wales agreed on; at the start of Wikipedia, Sanger ported Nupedia’s “Avoid Bias” policy there, and it was later superseded by the “Neutral Point of View” policy written by Wales.⁠[2][2][2][2][9][9]