Section 20.7. Final Attempts to Save Nupedia

20.7. Final Attempts to Save Nupedia

Nevertheless, I was interested in pursuing Nupedia's development. It still seemed salvageable to me.

I recall two incidents in which I tried to have Nupedia revived. First, I approached Jimmy with the offer to try to find a buyer/managing organization for Nupedia. I suggested that since Bomis did not have enough money to support it, and since Jimmy did not appear to have any specific intentions with the project, I might be able to find a university or other organization that would take on the responsibility. In the end, we did not pursue this possibility. Later, I offered to buy Nupedia myselfthat is, the domain name, the membership list, and whatever other proprietary material Bomis might have controlled. I wanted to start it up again as a simpler, more streamlined, but still fully peer-reviewed project. I thought, moreover, that if I owned it, I might be able to give it to a suitable sponsoring educational or nonprofit institution. Jimmy seemed cool to the idea, and did not ask for any specific offers.

Nupedia, then, didn't die just from the inefficiency of its system. To some extent it was also allowed to die, even after it was clear that its former editor in chief expressed an interest in continuing the project under an entirely different system. The result was that, without a leader or organization that could support its mission, Nupedia died a slow death. The server it lived on had some trouble in 2003, and as a result, the web site went offline. For whatever reason, the web site was never brought up again after that.

Perhaps there was a concern that Nupedia would essentially fork Wikipedia. I feel that such a concern would not have justified letting Nupedia wither untended. The projects, Wikipedia and Nupedia, were naturally complementary parts of a single, symbiotic whole. That at least is how I always regarded them. From the founding of Wikipedia, I always thought Wikipedia without Nupedia would have been unreliable, and that Nupedia without Wikipedia would have been unproductive. Together they were to be an "unstoppable high-quality article-creation juggernaut."^[57]

^[57] "Britannica or Nupedia?" op. cit.

It is still disappointing to me that we made plans and promises to thousands of Nupedians, including hundreds of extremely well-qualified people, some of them leaders in their fields. We spent many thousands of hours, all told, on the project. I apologize to those people, and I can only hope that they will find some future open content encyclopedia project worthy of their participation, one that will show the world the potential that Nupedia had.