Nupedia
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Type of site
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Internet encyclopedia project |
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| Available in | English, German, Spanish, French, Italian |
| Owner | Bomis |
| Created by | Jimmy Wales, Larry Sanger |
| Website | www.nupedia.com at the Wayback Machine (archived April 7, 2000) |
| Launched | March 9, 2000 |
| Current status | Defunct since September 26, 2003; succeeded by |
In June 2008, CNET UK listed Nupedia as one of the greatest defunct websites in the still young internet history, noting how the strict control had limited the posting of articles.
In October 1999,Jimmy Wales began thinking about an online encyclopedia built by volunteers and, in January 2000, hired Larry 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 urging of Richard Stallman and the Free Software Foundation.
Nupedia had a seven-step editorial process, consisting of:
Authors were expected to have expert knowledge (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 the editors approving articles for publication were expected "to be true experts in their fields and (with few exceptions) [to] possess PhDs".
Ruth Ifcher was someone Sanger depended upon and worked closely with on Nupedia's early policies and procedures. Ifner, holding several higher degrees, was a computer programmer and former copy editor and agreed to be volunteer chief copy editor.
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.
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