Nupedia

Founded by Jimmy Wales in 2000 and financed by Bomis, Nupedia was a free project of Encyclopédie, for which Larry Sanger was engaged as editor as a chief. It was distinguished from Wikipédia by a strict policy for the integration of the new articles, the scientific committee aiming at making of it an encyclopedia of quality comparable with the professional encyclopedias on the market. It was often qualified more serious, but the scarcity of the contributors was fatal to him. Nupédia was definitively closed the September 26th 2003. At the time when it ceased its operations, 24 articles had been integrated into the encyclopedia, 3 articles existed in a double form and 74 articles were under development.

History

Intended to be a Encyclopedia Internet with the contents under free license, the Nupédia project initially had its own license: the Open Nupedia Content License. In January 2001, under the impulse of the sales leaflet of the Free Software Foundation of Richard Stallman, Nupedia transferred its contents under the License from documentation free GNU. However, Stallman also engaged, at the same time, its project of encyclopedia Internet, the project GNUPedia, entering in competition with Nupédia. In spite of its contents under a free license, the participation in Nupédia remained subjected to a rather heavy process of tender of the texts, contrasting with the designs subjacent with the movement of the Free software.

At that time, that is to say in January 2001, because of the frustration caused by the slowness of the progression of the encyclopedia Nupedia, Larry Sanger proposed creation in parallel of a Wiki with an aim of increasing the speed of development of the articles of encyclopedia, which tended to stagnate because of the heaviness caused by the reading panel. Let us note that the creation of Wikipédia then did not seem a Fork of Nupédia and did not take again the contents of them (thing however made since the closing of Nupedia), but was rather, in the beginning , installation like a kind of “hopper of entry” for the articles in front of, possibly, being integrated into Nupédia. Wikipédia thus appeared parallel to Nupédia, as a complement, and this news gives rejoined the partisans of the two approaches, by thus joining the defenders of the approach more flexible than offered GNUPedia. This way, GNUPedia did not have truly the chance to develop and its competition with Nupedia/Wikipédia fell through. While developing and while attracting its contributors, Wikipédia however quickly came to trace its own advance and reached from there an operating process largely independent of Nupedia, although Larry Sanger took part in the formulation of the majority of the policies of origin, parallel to its work for Nupedia.

Just like it contributed to the abortion of the project GNUPedia, Wikipédia also contributed to gradually calling into question the existence of Nupedia. In February 2002, Bomis put an end to the remuneration of Larry Sanger for its work of editor as a chief, which led this one to leave the projects Nupedia and Wikipédia shortly after. After it had left it, Nupedia was erased gradually behind Wikipédia (only two articles crossed the process of evaluation after 2001). As it became increasingly stagnant, the idea that Nupedia can constitute a stabilized version (validated) of the articles developed by Wikipédia was occasionally evoked, but ever established. September 26th, 2003, the Web site of Nupedia was definitively closed and its contents were integrated into Wikipédia.

September 16th, 2006, Larry Sanger launched a new project of validated encyclopedic corpus, based on Wikipédia, under the name of Citizendium.

Leading process

The process of edition of Nupedia included/understood seven stages:

  1. Assignment

  2. Finding has lead reviewer
  3. Lead review
  4. Open review
  5. Lead copyediting
  6. Open copyediting
  7. Final approval and markup

The conditions to contribute to Nupedia were relatively high. Thus, the leading policy stipulated: “We wish that the authors be true experts in their fields and (except for some exceptions) which they have a Doctorat”

The software development

Nupedia was fed by NupeCode, a Groupware Open source, under public License general GNU.

Internal bond

External bond

  • nupedia on archive.org

Be-X-old: Нупэдыя Simple: Nupedia

Random links:Louis de France (1276-1319) | Wellesley College | Minshuku | Guiscard | Grouping serologic by the polyoside C