GNE

» see gne.sourceforge.net as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

On 18 December 2000 Richard Stallman published an essay called "The Free Universal Encyclopedia and Learning Resource", arguing that the encyclopedia of the future should be built the way free software is built, by many people writing pieces under a license that guarantees anyone can copy them. The project started in January 2001 under the name GNUPedia, moderated by Héctor Facundo Arena, an Argentine programmer and GNU activist.

It immediately ran into another project with almost the same name. Nupedia, funded by Bomis and run by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger, had been going since March 2000 with a seven-step peer review process. Wales owned the gnupedia.org domain and pointed it at Nupedia, posting to the FSF's own mailing list on 21 January 2001 to say so. There was an argument about whether the GNU project was forking Nupedia, and the FSF side solved the name problem the way the GNU project always solves name problems, with a recursive acronym. GNUPedia became GNE, for GNE's Not an Encyclopedia.

The rename carried a real editorial decision inside the joke. GNE dropped the word encyclopedia because it had decided to do without the thing encyclopedias have, which is editors. Its homepage said so plainly: "GNE's Not an Encyclopedia! GNE is a library of opinions, an attempt to build a comprehensive documentation of all human thought." Submissions were accepted on any subject so long as the article did not advertise non-free material and was worth reading, and the submission page added that an article about your daily routine is unlikely to interest anyone. Under the heading "No Central Control!" the site promised that an accepted article would never be altered without its author's consent and that moderators would not influence any article's bias.

Wikipedia went live the same month GNE started. It had the less bureaucratic structure the GNE people wanted and the open editing GNE did not have, and it grew while GNE argued about its API. Stallman put GNE into inactive status and backed Wikipedia instead. The bug-gne archive is still online, and the month-by-month counts say more than any account of it written since: 1,067 messages in January 2001, 326 in February, 67 in March, nine in April, two in May, and then one in August.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ spedom of speech ~

The GNE homepage was still being served from SourceForge in December 2011, and the archived copy contains a sentence that reads: "In an age when the spedom of press and spedom of speech is systematically eroded world-wide, it is important to maintain gerces where controversial or minority ideas can be published alongside accepted lines of thought."

Somebody ran a find-and-replace across the site at some point, mangled "freedom" into "spedom" and whatever the other word was into "gerces", and nobody ever fixed it. That typo sat on the front page of a Free Software Foundation project for a decade, inside the one paragraph explaining why the project existed. The screenshot Wikipedia uses, taken in 2010, has it too.

~ 1,067 then 1 ~

Mailing list volume is a cruel metric but it does not lie about enthusiasm. January 2001 is the month a thousand people had an opinion about how a free encyclopedia should work, and the archive shows them having it. By April the traffic was single digits, and the June revival was engineers arguing about an API for a system that had no content to serve.

June's 68 messages were mostly a single thread about the API, and four of them were copies of a mail worm the list forwarded because it was still running and nobody was moderating it. The last on-topic thread arrives in August 2001 and is called "legal matters".

What follows is a DVD copier advertisement and a question about barcode source code, arriving at an address nobody was reading.

~ what GNU's own page says ~

gnu.org still carries a page called "The Free Encyclopedia Project", and its account of the end is three sentences long. "Just as we were starting a project, GNUpedia, to develop a free encyclopedia, the Nupedia encyclopedia project adopted the GNU Free Documentation License and thus became a free commercial project. So we decided to merge GNUpedia project into Nupedia. Now, the Wikipedia encyclopedia project has adopted the philosophy of Nupedia and taken it even further."

That is a tidier story than the archive supports. GNUPedia renamed itself specifically to stop being an encyclopedia, kept its own moderators and its own submission rules, and ran under the GNE name for most of 2001. The page has been on gnu.org in that form for years, last touched in September 2011, and it is still the official account.

~ what was actually right about it ~

GNE's objection to Nupedia was that a panel of credentialed editors enforcing quality standards would also, unavoidably, enforce a point of view. Jonathan Zittrain later described what GNE proposed instead as closer to a collective blog than an encyclopedia, which was meant as a criticism and is also a fair description of a great deal of what the web became.

This argument happened somewhere I was not. It lived entirely on GNU mailing lists in 2001, and my connection in Turkey that year was a modem billed by the minute, which is the worst possible instrument for following a list that produced a thousand messages in a month. The result of the argument turned up a few years later anyway, for me as for everybody, as a website with an edit button.

GNE itself is not quite gone. gne.sourceforge.net still resolves and answers, with a 403 and two bytes.

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