Nupedia
Encyclopedia
World Wide Web
The World Wide Web is a system of interlinked hypertext documents accessed via the Internet...
encyclopedia
Encyclopedia
An encyclopedia is a type of reference work, a compendium holding a summary of information from either all branches of knowledge or a particular branch of knowledge....
whose articles were written by experts and licensed as free content
Free content
Free content, or free information, is any kind of functional work, artwork, or other creative content that meets the definition of a free cultural work...
. It was founded by Jimmy Wales
Jimmy Wales
Jimmy Donal "Jimbo" Wales is an American Internet entrepreneur best known as a co-founder and promoter of the online non-profit encyclopedia Wikipedia and the Wikia company....
and underwritten by Bomis
Bomis
Bomis was a dot-com company founded in 1996 by Jimmy Wales and Tim Shell. Its primary business was the sale of advertising on the Bomis.com search portal, and to provide support for the free encyclopedia projects Nupedia and Wikipedia...
, with Larry Sanger
Larry Sanger
Lawrence Mark "Larry" Sanger is an American philosopher, co-founder of Wikipedia, and the founder of Citizendium....
as editor-in-chief. Nupedia lasted from March 2000 until September 2003, and is mostly known now as the predecessor of Wikipedia
Wikipedia
Wikipedia is a free, web-based, collaborative, multilingual encyclopedia project supported by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. Its 20 million articles have been written collaboratively by volunteers around the world. Almost all of its articles can be edited by anyone with access to the site,...
.
Unlike Wikipedia, Nupedia was not a wiki
Wiki
A wiki is a website that allows the creation and editing of any number of interlinked web pages via a web browser using a simplified markup language or a WYSIWYG text editor. Wikis are typically powered by wiki software and are often used collaboratively by multiple users. Examples include...
; it was instead characterized by an extensive peer-review
Peer review
Peer review is a process of self-regulation by a profession or a process of evaluation involving qualified individuals within the relevant field. Peer review methods are employed to maintain standards, improve performance and provide credibility...
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
CNET
CNET is a tech media website that publishes news articles, blogs, and podcasts on technology and consumer electronics. Originally founded in 1994 by Halsey Minor and Shelby Bonnie, it was the flagship brand of CNET Networks and became a brand of CBS Interactive through CNET Networks' acquisition...
hailed Nupedia as one of the greatest defunct websites in the still young internet history.
History
In late 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
Free content
Free content, or free information, is any kind of functional work, artwork, or other creative content that meets the definition of a free cultural work...
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
GNU Free Documentation License
The GNU Free Documentation License is a copyleft license for free documentation, designed by the Free Software Foundation for the GNU Project. It is similar to the GNU General Public License, giving readers the rights to copy, redistribute, and modify a work and requires all copies and...
at the urgings of Richard Stallman
Richard Stallman
Richard Matthew Stallman , often shortened to rms,"'Richard Stallman' is just my mundane name; you can call me 'rms'"|last= Stallman|first= Richard|date= N.D.|work=Richard Stallman's homepage...
and the Free Software Foundation
Free Software Foundation
The Free Software Foundation is a non-profit corporation founded by Richard Stallman on 4 October 1985 to support the free software movement, a copyleft-based movement which aims to promote the universal freedom to create, distribute and modify computer software...
. However, Stallman got behind Hector Facundo Arena's GNUPedia
GNUpedia
GNUPedia was a project to create a free content encyclopedia under the auspices of the Free Software Foundation...
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:- Assignment
- Finding a lead reviewer
- Lead review
- Open review
- Lead copyediting
- Open copyediting
- Final approval and markup
Authors were expected to be experts in their fields (although the definition of expert allowed for a degree of flexibility, and it was acknowledged that some articles could be written by a good writer, rather than an expert per se) and editors were expected to be "true experts in their fields and (with few exceptions) possess PhDs".
Software development
Nupedia was powered by NupeCode collaborative softwareCollaborative software
Collaborative software is computer software designed to help people involved in a common task achieve goals...
. NupeCode
NupeCode
NupeCode is free/open source software 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...
is free
Free software
Free software, software libre or libre software is software that can be used, studied, and modified without restriction, and which can be copied and redistributed in modified or unmodified form either without restriction, or with restrictions that only ensure that further recipients can also do...
/open source
Open source
The term open source describes practices in production and development that promote access to the end product's source materials. Some consider open source a philosophy, others consider it a pragmatic methodology...
software (released under the GNU General Public License
GNU General Public License
The GNU General Public License is the most widely used free software license, originally written by Richard Stallman for the GNU Project....
) designed for large peer review
Peer review
Peer review is a process of self-regulation by a profession or a process of evaluation involving qualified individuals within the relevant field. Peer review methods are employed to maintain standards, improve performance and provide credibility...
projects. The code was available via Nupedia's CVS
Concurrent Versions System
The Concurrent Versions System , also known as the Concurrent Versioning System, is a client-server free software revision control system in the field of software development. Version control system software keeps track of all work and all changes in a set of files, and allows several developers ...
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
SourceForge
SourceForge Enterprise Edition is a collaborative revision control and software development management system. It provides a front-end to a range of software development lifecycle services and integrates with a number of free software / open source software applications .While originally itself...
, but never reached a sufficient stage of development to replace the original software.
See also
- GNUPediaGNUpediaGNUPedia was a project to create a free content encyclopedia under the auspices of the Free Software Foundation...
- List of online encyclopedias
- List of wikis
- WikipediaWikipediaWikipedia is a free, web-based, collaborative, multilingual encyclopedia project supported by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. Its 20 million articles have been written collaboratively by volunteers around the world. Almost all of its articles can be edited by anyone with access to the site,...
- ScholarpediaScholarpediaScholarpedia is an English-language online wiki-based encyclopedia that uses the same MediaWiki software as Wikipedia, but has features more commonly associated with open-access online academic journals....
External links
- Earlier versions of Nupedia (from the Internet ArchiveInternet ArchiveThe Internet Archive is a non-profit digital library with the stated mission of "universal access to all knowledge". It offers permanent storage and access to collections of digitized materials, including websites, music, moving images, and nearly 3 million public domain books. The Internet Archive...
) - Larry Sanger: The Early History of Nupedia and Wikipedia: A Memoir Part 1 and Part 2. SlashdotSlashdotSlashdot is a technology-related news website owned by Geeknet, Inc. The site, which bills itself as "News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters", features user-submitted and ‑evaluated current affairs news stories about science- and technology-related topics. Each story has a comments section...
, April 2005 - NuNupedia project page on Sourceforge