Nupedia

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Nupedia
Nupedia.svg
http://www.nupedia.com/ (switched off)
motto The Open Content Encyclopedia

From the beginning of 2001 also The Free Encyclopedia

description Project to create a free content encyclopedia
Registration to participate
languages English
owner Bomis
Originator volunteer workers
Published January 2000
status Discontinued September 2003

Nupedia was a free , commercial online encyclopedia in mostly English and the forerunner of Wikipedia . The programs NupeCode and its successor nunupedia are, like the Wikipedia software MediaWiki, under the GNU General Public License .

history

Nupedia was founded in March 2000 by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger . The project was financed by Bomis , an online provider of forums on entertainment, sports, science fiction, erotic and pornography.

Nupedia had an extensive, seven-step peer review process that was supposed to ensure the high quality of the articles. Nupedia developed very slowly. The first entry in the article namespace was about atonality and was published on July 25, 2000. By November 2000 only one more article was added in full length, after 18 months it was about 20. When the project was discontinued in September 2003, only 27 articles were completed.

A small group of specialist authors worked on Nupedia's articles, and all articles were carefully checked before publication. The articles were initially subject to Nupedia's own Open Content License ; in January 2001, at Richard Stallman's insistence, they switched to the GNU Free Documentation License . At the same time, however, he started the GNUPedia project, which aroused fears of possible competition between the two projects. Because Nupedia had a very bureaucratic workflow, the articles were of high quality but the project was slow to grow.

In 2001 Jimmy Wales started the Wikipedia project. It was originally only intended as a preliminary stage for Nupedia articles, but it attracted many players and developed a great deal of momentum. 200 articles were created in the first month and 18,000 in the first year. The success not only led to the termination of the GNUPedia project, but also of Nupedia. Bomis ended his sponsorship in January 2002, and Larry Sanger resigned from both the Nupedia and Wikipedia projects shortly thereafter. In the period that followed, only two articles were completed for Nupedia. The project ended in September 2003. Some of the articles have been transferred to Wikipedia.

The domain nupedia.com, under which the project was previously available, has since been switched off.

See also

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Website on January 18, 2001 compared to the website on March 1, 2001
  2. ^ Larry Sanger: Re: Nupedia: Questions. In: nupedia-l. Nupedia.com, March 10, 2000, archived from the original on May 6, 2001 ; accessed on January 2, 2013 (English): "Of course, the reason it's presently devoid of content is that we only started one month ago."
  3. ^ Other Frequently Asked Questions about Nupedia. In: Nupedia.com. Archived from the original on August 29, 2000 ; accessed on January 1, 2013 .
  4. ^ Marshall Poe: The Hive. The Atlantic , September 2006, accessed June 15, 2010 .
  5. ↑ Nupedia: Newest Articles ( Memento of November 10, 2000 in the Internet Archive ) (English)
  6. ↑ Larry Sanger: Britannica or Nupedia? The Future of Free Encyclopedias. July 25, 2001, accessed December 12, 2015 .
  7. ^ A b Larry Sanger: The Early History of Nupedia and Wikipedia: A Memoir. In: Slashdot. April 18, 2005, accessed December 12, 2015 .
  8. ^ Chen Shun-Ling: Self-governing online communities in Web 2.0: privacy, anonymity and accountability in Wikipedia. (PDF; 950 kB) Albany Law Journal, May 5, 2010, accessed on March 1, 2013 (English).
  9. ↑ Larry Sanger: Jimmy Wales on advertisement. Larry Sanger, January 2011, accessed January 1, 2013 .