Nupedia

» see nupedia.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

the first time i heard of nupedia was years after it had crashed. by the time wikipedia had become a normal part of my browsing around 2004-2005, the original peer-reviewed encyclopedia had already been off for a year. i learned about it the way most readers did, from a wikipedia history page explaining that wikipedia itself had started as a side pipeline.

nupedia went live on 9 march 2000 in san diego under bomis, the search-portal company jimmy wales was running before he became the wikipedia name. larry sanger was hired as editor-in-chief. the design called for every article to pass a seven-step approval pipeline involving expert editors with academic credentials. one year in, the system had produced 21 finished articles.

wikipedia was launched in january 2001 as a feeder. the idea was that drafts could be assembled informally on the wiki before they entered the formal nupedia review. within weeks the wiki was producing more content than the peer-reviewed pipeline had managed in a year. by 2002 the priority had quietly flipped inside bomis. sanger left in march 2002 when funding for paid editorial staff was cut after the dotcom collapse, and the formal pipeline kept slowing down through the rest of that year.

~ the dossier ~

~ the actual end ~

the server hosting nupedia crashed on 26 september 2003 and the project was not restarted. by that point the editorial board had been inactive for over a year. wikipedia was crossing 150,000 articles in english alone and growing fast enough that no one inside bomis saw a reason to bring the old pipeline back up. the death notice on the wikipedia history page reads more like a footnote than a closure.

~ what it left ~

the 24 finished articles were imported into wikipedia under a free-content license. any reader who clicks through a wikipedia page on a topic nupedia got around to writing might be reading a paragraph that started life as a peer-reviewed nupedia entry. the project also became the reference point every time someone argues that an expert-credentialed encyclopedia is the only way to do this. nupedia tried that for three years. it did not scale.

the larger residue is the lesson that bomis paid for. an open editing pipeline with low gates produced more usable knowledge per month than a closed pipeline with high gates produced per year. nupedia is the project that wikipedia replaced from inside its own funding structure.

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