Section 20.2. Nupedia

20.2. Nupedia

I'm going to begin with Nupedia. The origin of Wikipedia cannot be explained except in that context. Moreover, the Nupedia project itself was very worthwhile, and I think it might have been able to survive, as I will explain. Finally, some errors regarding Nupedia have been passed around although they are little more than unfounded rumors. It is unfortunate that the thousands of hours of excellent volunteer work done on Nupedia should be thus disrespected or grossly misunderstood. I personally will always be grateful to those initial contributors who believed in the project and our management, worked hard for a completely unproven idea, and laid the groundwork for the growing institution of open content projects.

In 1999, Jimmy Wales wanted to start a free, collaborative encyclopedia. I knew him from several mailing lists back in the mid-'90s, and in fact we had already met in person a couple of times. In January 2000, I emailed Jimmy and several other Internet acquaintances to get feedback on an idea for what was to be, essentially, a blog. (It was to be a successor to "Sanger and Shannon's Review of Y2K News Reports," a Y2K news summary that I first wrote and then edited.) To my great surprise, Jimmy replied to my email describing his idea of a free encyclopedia, and asking if I might be interested in leading the project. He was specifically interested in finding a philosopher to lead the project, he said. He made it a condition of my employment that I would finish my Ph.D. quickly (whereupon I would get a raise)which I did, in June 2000. I am still grateful for the extra incentive. I thought he would be a great boss, and indeed he was.

To be clear, the idea of an open source, collaborative encyclopedia, open to contribution by ordinary people, was entirely Jimmy's, not mine, and the funding was entirely by Bomis. I was merely a grateful employee; I thought I was very lucky to have a job like that land in my lap. Of course, other people had had the idea; but it was Jimmy's fantastic foresight actually to invest in it. For this the world owes him a considerable debt. The actual development of this encyclopedia was the task he gave me to work on.

I arrived in San Diego in early February 2000 to get to work. One of the first things I asked Jimmy was how free a rein I had in designing the project. What were my constraints, and in what areas was I free to exercise my own creativity? He replied, as I clearly recall, that most of the decisions should be mine; and in most respects, as a manager, Jimmy was indeed very hands-off. I spent the first month or so thinking very broadly about different possibilities. I wrote quite a bit (that writing is now all lostthat will teach me not to back up my hard drives) and discussed quite a bit with both Jimmy and one of the other Bomis partners, Tim Shell.

I maintained from the start that something really could not be a credible encyclopedia without oversight by experts. I reasoned that, if the project is open to all, it would require both management by experts and an unusually rigorous process. I now think I was right about the former requirement, but wrong about the latter, which was redundant; I think that the subsequent development of Wikipedia has borne out of this assessment.

One of the first policies that Jimmy and I agreed upon was a "nonbias" or neutrality policy. I know I was extremely insistent upon it from the beginning, because neutrality has been a hobbyhorse of mine for a very long time, and one of my guiding principles in writing "Sanger's Review." Neutrality, we agreed, required that articles should not represent any one point of view on controversial subjects, but instead fairly represent all sides. We also agreed in rejecting an alternative that (for a time) Tim and some early Nupedians plugged for: the development, for each encyclopedia topic, of a series of different articles, each written from a different point of view.

I believed, moreover, that a strongly collaborative and open project could not survive if its contributors were not "personally invested" in the project, and that this required some input and management by its users. It was very early on that I decided that Nupedia should have an Advisory Boardeditors, and peer reviewers, who would together agree to project policyand that the public should have a say in the formulation of policy.

An early incarnation of Nupedia's Advisory Board was in place by summer of 2000 or so. It was made up of the project's highly qualified editors and reviewers, mostly Ph.D. professors but also a good many other highly experienced professionals. Eventually the Advisory Board agreed to an extremely rigorous seven-step system. A lot of the details of the Nupedia policy and processes were proposed by me, but then tweaked and elaborated by others, and the policy was not published as project policy until we had a quorum of editors and peer reviewers who could fully discuss and approve of a policy statement. Even so, our policy overlooked a fundamental problem. We should not have assumed that such a complex system could be navigated patiently by many volunteers.

I spent significant time recruiting people for Nupedia, emailing new arrivals, posting to mailing lists, giving interviews, and so on. I had had some experience publicizing Internet projects when I worked on several philosophy discussion groups as a graduate student in the 1990s and I knew that getting many willing and active participants was difficult but important. I even had an administrative assistant for six months in 2000 and 2001, Liz Campeau, whose sole job was to recruit people to work on Nupedia and then Wikipedia. I think a large part of the reason Wikipedia got off the ground so quickly and so well is that it was started by Nupedians, who were then a very large base of people who wanted to work on an encyclopedia, and who had many definite ideas about how it should be done. Roughly 2,000 Nupedia members were subscribed to the general announcement list in January 2001 when Wikipedia launched. We operated the system initially using email and mailing lists, while planning and finalizing process details. That lasted from spring through fall 2000. I think our first article ("atonality" by Christoph Hust), that made it entirely through the system, was published in June or July 2000. To move the system to a completely web-based one, there was, of course, a great deal of design and programming to do. So in fall of 2000, I worked a lot with a programmer (Toan Vo) and the Bomis sysadmin (Jason Richey) to transfer the system from a clunky mailing list system to the Web. But by the time the web-based system was ready it had become obvious to Jimmy and me that the seven-step editorial process would move too slowly, even when managed on the Web. But Magnus Manske later, in 2001, made some very nice additions to the Nupedia system.

Some institutional traditions begin easily but die hard. Nupedia's Advisory Board was reluctant to seriously consider a simpler system, despite months of coexistence and uncomfortable comparison between Nupedia and Wikipedia. Nupedia editors and peer reviewers had a very strong commitment to rigor and reliability, as did I. Moreover, as Wikipedia became increasingly successful in 2001, Jimmy asked me to spend more and more time on it, which I did; Nupedia suffered from neglect. It wasn't until summer of 2001 that I was able to propose, get accepted, and install something we called the Nupedia Chalkboard. This was a wiki which was to be closely managed by Nupedia's staff. It offered both a simpler way to develop encyclopedia articles for Nupedia, and a way to import articles from Wikipedia. Established practices are hard to break, and the Chalkboard went largely unused. The general public simply used Wikipedia if they wanted to write articles in a wiki format, while most Nupedia editors and peer reviewers were not persuaded that the Chalkboard was necessary or useful.

By early winter 2001, Nupedia had published approved versions of only about 25 articles, although there were dozens of draft articles at various stages in process. I was finally able to persuade the Advisory Board to move the system to a much simpler two-step process, virtually identical to that used to run many academic journals: articles would be submitted to an editor; the editor would, if the article seemed good enough, forward it to a reviewer for acceptance or rejection; if accepted, the article would be posted. We also contemplated various ways of allowing public comment, moderation, and editing of posted articles. I believe this new, simpler system would have produced thousands of articles for Nupedia very quickly. The Nupedia community was certainly interested and motivated. The Advisory Board was gradually accepting that the system's complexity was the main obstacle to getting more articles into and through the system.

Unfortunately, Nupedia's new system arrived too late. This system should have been adopted in the winter of 2001-2002. At the same time, Wikipedia was demanding as much attention as I could give it, and I had little time to implement the new Nupedia system. I am quite sure we could have started Nupedia in early 2002 had we made the time. But Bomis lost the ability to pay me and, newly unemployed, I did not have the time to lead Nupedia as a volunteer. I did not entirely lose hope on Nupedia, however.