10 years of Nupedia, the free encyclopedia
I wanted to write about Nupedia for several months. Finally, it happened! Today we have a great holiday!
The philosophy of the open-source movement is distributed throughout the industry. Now the creator of the web encyclopedia wants to apply its principles to spread knowledge in general.
According to editor-in-chief Larry Sanger (pictured), Nupedia’s website , which officially opened on Thursday, aims to become “the biggest encyclopedia in the world”
PCWorld , early March 2000.
There is also a concise translation into Russian from Computerworld Russia , also 2000.
I’ll say right away that nothing happened with this Nupedia. She failed.
The same two people, Wales and Sanger, managed to create the largest “open source” encyclopedia only the second time, and it became Wikipedia.
But Moscow was also not immediately built up and it’s still going to talk about Nupedia created exactly 10 years ago, because without this site there would be neither Wikipedia, nor many other sites (OpenStreetMap, Wikimapia, etc.), nor an entire wiki philosophy, neither the new copyright- "revolution", nor many other things. Due to all this, she was nevertheless recognized as one of the greatest non-working sites in history .
So ... Long ago, when Shuttleworths had not yet flown into space, the world was ruled by the evil blue letter “E” and neither Firefox, nor “BitTorrent” , nor YouTube, nor Facebook existed yet , humanity did not have such relevant and modern reference books that could be freely used. At the end of the 20th century, all existing at least some useful encyclopedias were either released about a century ago and much outdated (but only they could be reused because their copyright expired), or were owned by commercial companies (published since 1993). on Encarta - Microsoft, Britannica - Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. ), which prohibited any use of them except reading and quoting. Many of them were available only for money in print, on disks or on the Internet, but for a paid subscription.
')
Since the advent of the web, many people have thought about developing a network encyclopedia and have tried to create it many times. In 1993, Rick Gates proposed the Interpedia project, but he died before anything appeared in it. We also launched projects such as Everything2 and Open Site , but we have heard little about them.
In 1999, the founder of the free software movement, Richard Stallman, formulated the idea of ​​a free universal encyclopedia opposing proprietary encyclopedias. Perhaps it seemed that his project was too ambitious and unrealizable. However, the next 10 years have shown that this is not the case. In one decade, the greatest encyclopedia in the world was created - people had a choice and an alternative. And this whole huge free encyclopedia was created absolutely legally, did not violate any copyrights, and no one ever asked for permissions, did not pay and did not bow to RAO, Mikhalkov, Ernst, etc. The inhabitants of the Earth were exempt from the obligatory use of commercial proprietary encyclopedias, while the proprietary encyclopedias themselves, such as the Britons, were forced to change under the pressure of Wikipedia and its community.
In early 2000, Jimmy Wales , co-founder and CEO of the porn site for a “web portal for men” (something like Maxim and Playboy) called Bomis , who had long dreamed of creating his online encyclopedia and finally began to realize his dream, her chief editor. Wales founded his company inspired by IPO Netscape in 1996 after quickly becoming rich on the stock exchange and provided himself and his family with money for life.
Larry Sanger and Jimmy had known each other since the mid-90s (they seem to have been chatting on the Internet) and it was him who in January 2000 Wales wrote an email and hired him to work as editor-in-chief. In February, Larry arrived in San Diego , where Bomis is located and began work, which originally consisted of recruiting scientists for the project. The whole project seems to have been fully occupied by Larry, and the Wales himself seems to be not involved at all.
The nupedia, financed and owned by Bomis, was officially launched on March 9, 2000. The owner was counting on a profit from advertising on the site Nupedia.com. Nevertheless, Larry Sanger immediately assumed that when the encyclopedia was created, everyone could reprint it (by the way, Nupedia could also be downloaded with one file), and the reality of the plan’s implementation was explained by the success of Linux from Linus Torvalds and the Open Directory Project (dmoz.org ) . Thus, from the very beginning, Nupedia was a free encyclopedia, using the Nupedia Open Content License first , and then transferred to the GNU FDL at the request of Richard Stallman and the Free Software Foundation . But in spite of the “ freedom ”, Nupedia was not a wiki site , and only specialists (ideally, doctors of science) were allowed to write texts.
Depending on the qualifications of the future participant, he was asked to become an editor, writer, reviewer, copywriter or observer. To do this, the future participant had to register, join one of the groups, subscribe to the mailing list, maybe buy reference books, and so on, and so on, and so on.
Nupedia was a peer-reviewed project - after the article was written it went through seven (!!!) complex bureaucratic stages:
Despite the fact that the press wrote about Nupedia, many experts responded, versions in German, Spanish, French, Portuguese and Italian opened, by November 2000, only two full articles were published since March. If you believe Computerra , the project was spent 250 thousand dollars, but it failed. Nothing helped - even the distribution of free T-shirts and the action “bring a friend” for a cash reward. It became clear that in such an old-fashioned academic way they could not write an encyclopedia.
On January 2, 2001, Larry Sanger dined at a Mexican restaurant on the Pacific coast with his old friend Ben Kovits (he was also familiar with Jimmy Wales) and once again complained about the lack of serious progress in working on Nupedia because of the burdensome editing process. Ben Kovits told Larry about the concept of "wiki" , invented in 1994-1995 by Ward Cannighem for software code. Sanger talked about Waiki Wiki, and he doubtingly decided to try Wiki. As a result, to replenish Nupedia on January 15, 2001, a site for drafts of future Nupedia articles was launched as a completely side project, for which Sanger came up with the stupid name Wikipedia. What happened next, everyone knows.
Already in the first months of Wikipedia, progress was simply amazing, not so much as with Nupedia. Wikipedia attracted both completely new participants and participants of Nupedia who switched to the new project. Soon, Wikipedia began to function completely independently of Nupedia, but Wikipedia had the same editor-in-chief (first and last) - Larry Sanger. In the early stages Larry did a lot for the strategic development and the formation of the foundations of both Nupedia and Wikipedia. But in early 2002, Wales stopped paying for the work of the editor-in-chief, and Larry Sanger left the projects of Bomis.
A few words about the engine. Nupedia worked in the free and open (under the GNU GPL) NupeCode engine , which was terribly non-functional. The work on the article and the correction of errors had to be done on the mailing list, and in Nupedia it was to post a ready-made version. It was obvious that it was necessary to transfer all work to the web, but for this it was necessary to do a lot of work on the engine. This has not been done.
Nupedia was closed on September 26, 2003, its articles were moved to Wikipedia . By the time of closing, 2.5 years after the start of work, there were only 24 finished articles and more than 74 unfinished articles in Nupedia.
Almost simultaneously with the start of Wikipedia in January 2001, the launch of the GNUPedia project ( see the Internet Archive ) and the transfer of Nupedia to the GNU FDL license was announced. According to other information, GNUPedia was launched two days after the license was changed. According to other information, GNUPedia has never been launched. Here everything is somehow incomprehensible.
By the way, the Russian media wrote about GNUPedia:
Linux fans decided to write an encyclopedia together
Free Software Foundation calls for starting work on the free encyclopedia GNUPedia
old.computerra.ru/news/2001/1/18/7897/index.html
It is known that after the change of the Nupedia license on GFDL, a text appeared on gnu.org/encyclopedia/encyclopedia.html about the decision to combine the GNUpedia and Nupedia projects and urging visitors of the GNU.org site to contribute to the free encyclopedia.
Since those glorious and momentous times, thanks to the Background of SPO Nupedia, the slogan was “free encyclopedia” (instead of open content encyclopaedia), which was inherited by Wikipedia.
Some time after the discovery of Wikipedia, a text appeared on www.gnu.org/encyclopedia/encyclopedia.html stating that Wikipedia adopted the Nupedia philosophy and GNU calls for its contribution to Wikipedia. This text is still there.
Wikipedia was liked by supporters of GNUPedia and the Free Software Foundation, who were against checking articles and were very worried about bureaucracy. As a result, GNUPedia itself was never fully launched and potential competition between free projects was prevented, and supporters of open source software joined Wikipedia.
A descendant of Nupedia called “Wikipedia” eventually became (well, almost became, together with, say, Creative Commons Search ) the very free encyclopedia Richard Stallman dreamed of and joined the efforts of the freedom-loving Internet developers who are satisfied with the Wiki technology the efforts and efforts of more conservative Nupedia scientists. After a few years, Wikipedia, having become a very popular project, will thank the open source movement and tell so many people around the world about freedom of information, about free formats and the ideas that Richard Stallman formulated in the 1980s. Thousands of people learned about so many aspects of the ACT movement from Wikipedia. By tradition, almost every Wikipedia article on software begins with the words free or non-free.
Nupedia and Wikipedia marked the beginning of a whole series of free encyclopedias, for example, Citizendium and Google Knol (partially).
And it is no secret that Wikipedia has become the core of the struggle for free content and one of the largest collections of free information in the world. Every kilobyte of text, every picture, video or sound on Wikipedia is a step towards increasing competition between traditional copyright and a new approach of free culture, which will benefit the entire cultural and information space of the world.
I urge everyone from March 6 to January 15 to write articles about Wikipedia, marking the anniversary of Nupedia and the forthcoming decade of Wikipedia and telling, for example, about the processes taking place in Wikipedia, about how you learned about Wikipedia, about unusual ways of using Wikipedia and about how Wikipedia has influenced your life. Type "Wikipedia Year". =))
Many people know that Larry Sanger founded his wiki encyclopedia, which many view as a continuation of Nupedia in terms of the reliability of information. If any of you area Ph.D. specialist in your field and you want to waste all your time in creating a reliable free encyclopedia, then I ask you to contribute to Citizende in English or sign up for a possible future opening of Citizende in Russian language .
If anyone is interested, you can read these English-language (and not only) articles (new - from above):
Freies Mega-Lexikon im Netz
Will The Real Nupedia Please Stand Up?
Konflikt mellan Nupedia och Gnupedia
Who and What Behind the Open Content Model
Akademisk dugnad for verdens nettleksikon
Making an encyclopedia for the Web
The New Encyclopedia Salesmen ( The Next Generation Of Online Encyclopedias )
Upstart Open Content Encyclopedia Threatens to Displace Britannica, Encarta
Culltura online: esce l'Oxford English Dictionary e Nupedia, l'enciclopedia "fai da te"
New Open Content Encyclopedia
Building the World's Biggest Encyclopedia ( Building the world's biggest encyclopedia )
In addition to the article on osp.ru , there are other Russian-language articles about Nupedia that can be found through Yandex .
This text (with the exception of the PCWorld text) is based on the works of the authors listed on the links Nupedia , Larry Sanger , Jimmy Wales , History of Wikipedia , Bomis , GNUPedia . Also used are the facts set out at features.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/04/18/164213&tid=95&tid=149&tid=9 .
This text (with the exception of PCWorld) is distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license .
You can copy, edit (modify-process) and use this text for commercial purposes if 1) the authorship is mandatory, 2) distributed under the same conditions (ie copyleft).
Absolute truth of the article is not guaranteed. Errors are accepted in Habrapochta.
The philosophy of the open-source movement is distributed throughout the industry. Now the creator of the web encyclopedia wants to apply its principles to spread knowledge in general. According to editor-in-chief Larry Sanger (pictured), Nupedia’s website , which officially opened on Thursday, aims to become “the biggest encyclopedia in the world”
PCWorld , early March 2000.
There is also a concise translation into Russian from Computerworld Russia , also 2000.
I’ll say right away that nothing happened with this Nupedia. She failed.
The same two people, Wales and Sanger, managed to create the largest “open source” encyclopedia only the second time, and it became Wikipedia.
But Moscow was also not immediately built up and it’s still going to talk about Nupedia created exactly 10 years ago, because without this site there would be neither Wikipedia, nor many other sites (OpenStreetMap, Wikimapia, etc.), nor an entire wiki philosophy, neither the new copyright- "revolution", nor many other things. Due to all this, she was nevertheless recognized as one of the greatest non-working sites in history .
So ... Long ago, when Shuttleworths had not yet flown into space, the world was ruled by the evil blue letter “E” and neither Firefox, nor “BitTorrent” , nor YouTube, nor Facebook existed yet , humanity did not have such relevant and modern reference books that could be freely used. At the end of the 20th century, all existing at least some useful encyclopedias were either released about a century ago and much outdated (but only they could be reused because their copyright expired), or were owned by commercial companies (published since 1993). on Encarta - Microsoft, Britannica - Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. ), which prohibited any use of them except reading and quoting. Many of them were available only for money in print, on disks or on the Internet, but for a paid subscription.
')
Since the advent of the web, many people have thought about developing a network encyclopedia and have tried to create it many times. In 1993, Rick Gates proposed the Interpedia project, but he died before anything appeared in it. We also launched projects such as Everything2 and Open Site , but we have heard little about them.
In 1999, the founder of the free software movement, Richard Stallman, formulated the idea of ​​a free universal encyclopedia opposing proprietary encyclopedias. Perhaps it seemed that his project was too ambitious and unrealizable. However, the next 10 years have shown that this is not the case. In one decade, the greatest encyclopedia in the world was created - people had a choice and an alternative. And this whole huge free encyclopedia was created absolutely legally, did not violate any copyrights, and no one ever asked for permissions, did not pay and did not bow to RAO, Mikhalkov, Ernst, etc. The inhabitants of the Earth were exempt from the obligatory use of commercial proprietary encyclopedias, while the proprietary encyclopedias themselves, such as the Britons, were forced to change under the pressure of Wikipedia and its community.Nupedia history
In early 2000, Jimmy Wales , co-founder and CEO of the Larry Sanger and Jimmy had known each other since the mid-90s (they seem to have been chatting on the Internet) and it was him who in January 2000 Wales wrote an email and hired him to work as editor-in-chief. In February, Larry arrived in San Diego , where Bomis is located and began work, which originally consisted of recruiting scientists for the project. The whole project seems to have been fully occupied by Larry, and the Wales himself seems to be not involved at all.
The nupedia, financed and owned by Bomis, was officially launched on March 9, 2000. The owner was counting on a profit from advertising on the site Nupedia.com. Nevertheless, Larry Sanger immediately assumed that when the encyclopedia was created, everyone could reprint it (by the way, Nupedia could also be downloaded with one file), and the reality of the plan’s implementation was explained by the success of Linux from Linus Torvalds and the Open Directory Project (dmoz.org ) . Thus, from the very beginning, Nupedia was a free encyclopedia, using the Nupedia Open Content License first , and then transferred to the GNU FDL at the request of Richard Stallman and the Free Software Foundation . But in spite of the “ freedom ”, Nupedia was not a wiki site , and only specialists (ideally, doctors of science) were allowed to write texts.
Depending on the qualifications of the future participant, he was asked to become an editor, writer, reviewer, copywriter or observer. To do this, the future participant had to register, join one of the groups, subscribe to the mailing list, maybe buy reference books, and so on, and so on, and so on.
Nupedia was a peer-reviewed project - after the article was written it went through seven (!!!) complex bureaucratic stages:
- Assignment
- Finding a lead reviewer
- Lead review
- Open review
- Lead copyediting
- Open copyediting
- Final approval and markup
Despite the fact that the press wrote about Nupedia, many experts responded, versions in German, Spanish, French, Portuguese and Italian opened, by November 2000, only two full articles were published since March. If you believe Computerra , the project was spent 250 thousand dollars, but it failed. Nothing helped - even the distribution of free T-shirts and the action “bring a friend” for a cash reward. It became clear that in such an old-fashioned academic way they could not write an encyclopedia.
On January 2, 2001, Larry Sanger dined at a Mexican restaurant on the Pacific coast with his old friend Ben Kovits (he was also familiar with Jimmy Wales) and once again complained about the lack of serious progress in working on Nupedia because of the burdensome editing process. Ben Kovits told Larry about the concept of "wiki" , invented in 1994-1995 by Ward Cannighem for software code. Sanger talked about Waiki Wiki, and he doubtingly decided to try Wiki. As a result, to replenish Nupedia on January 15, 2001, a site for drafts of future Nupedia articles was launched as a completely side project, for which Sanger came up with the stupid name Wikipedia. What happened next, everyone knows.
Already in the first months of Wikipedia, progress was simply amazing, not so much as with Nupedia. Wikipedia attracted both completely new participants and participants of Nupedia who switched to the new project. Soon, Wikipedia began to function completely independently of Nupedia, but Wikipedia had the same editor-in-chief (first and last) - Larry Sanger. In the early stages Larry did a lot for the strategic development and the formation of the foundations of both Nupedia and Wikipedia. But in early 2002, Wales stopped paying for the work of the editor-in-chief, and Larry Sanger left the projects of Bomis.
A few words about the engine. Nupedia worked in the free and open (under the GNU GPL) NupeCode engine , which was terribly non-functional. The work on the article and the correction of errors had to be done on the mailing list, and in Nupedia it was to post a ready-made version. It was obvious that it was necessary to transfer all work to the web, but for this it was necessary to do a lot of work on the engine. This has not been done.
Nupedia was closed on September 26, 2003, its articles were moved to Wikipedia . By the time of closing, 2.5 years after the start of work, there were only 24 finished articles and more than 74 unfinished articles in Nupedia.
GNE is Not an Encyclopedia
Almost simultaneously with the start of Wikipedia in January 2001, the launch of the GNUPedia project ( see the Internet Archive ) and the transfer of Nupedia to the GNU FDL license was announced. According to other information, GNUPedia was launched two days after the license was changed. According to other information, GNUPedia has never been launched. Here everything is somehow incomprehensible.
By the way, the Russian media wrote about GNUPedia:
Linux fans decided to write an encyclopedia together
Free Software Foundation calls for starting work on the free encyclopedia GNUPedia
old.computerra.ru/news/2001/1/18/7897/index.html
It is known that after the change of the Nupedia license on GFDL, a text appeared on gnu.org/encyclopedia/encyclopedia.html about the decision to combine the GNUpedia and Nupedia projects and urging visitors of the GNU.org site to contribute to the free encyclopedia.
Since those glorious and momentous times, thanks to the Background of SPO Nupedia, the slogan was “free encyclopedia” (instead of open content encyclopaedia), which was inherited by Wikipedia.
Some time after the discovery of Wikipedia, a text appeared on www.gnu.org/encyclopedia/encyclopedia.html stating that Wikipedia adopted the Nupedia philosophy and GNU calls for its contribution to Wikipedia. This text is still there.
Wikipedia was liked by supporters of GNUPedia and the Free Software Foundation, who were against checking articles and were very worried about bureaucracy. As a result, GNUPedia itself was never fully launched and potential competition between free projects was prevented, and supporters of open source software joined Wikipedia.
Total
A descendant of Nupedia called “Wikipedia” eventually became (well, almost became, together with, say, Creative Commons Search ) the very free encyclopedia Richard Stallman dreamed of and joined the efforts of the freedom-loving Internet developers who are satisfied with the Wiki technology the efforts and efforts of more conservative Nupedia scientists. After a few years, Wikipedia, having become a very popular project, will thank the open source movement and tell so many people around the world about freedom of information, about free formats and the ideas that Richard Stallman formulated in the 1980s. Thousands of people learned about so many aspects of the ACT movement from Wikipedia. By tradition, almost every Wikipedia article on software begins with the words free or non-free.
Nupedia and Wikipedia marked the beginning of a whole series of free encyclopedias, for example, Citizendium and Google Knol (partially).
And it is no secret that Wikipedia has become the core of the struggle for free content and one of the largest collections of free information in the world. Every kilobyte of text, every picture, video or sound on Wikipedia is a step towards increasing competition between traditional copyright and a new approach of free culture, which will benefit the entire cultural and information space of the world.
Wikipedia Year
I urge everyone from March 6 to January 15 to write articles about Wikipedia, marking the anniversary of Nupedia and the forthcoming decade of Wikipedia and telling, for example, about the processes taking place in Wikipedia, about how you learned about Wikipedia, about unusual ways of using Wikipedia and about how Wikipedia has influenced your life. Type "Wikipedia Year". =))
New Nupediya
Many people know that Larry Sanger founded his wiki encyclopedia, which many view as a continuation of Nupedia in terms of the reliability of information. If any of you are
Press
If anyone is interested, you can read these English-language (and not only) articles (new - from above):
Freies Mega-Lexikon im Netz
Will The Real Nupedia Please Stand Up?
Konflikt mellan Nupedia och Gnupedia
Who and What Behind the Open Content Model
Akademisk dugnad for verdens nettleksikon
Making an encyclopedia for the Web
The New Encyclopedia Salesmen ( The Next Generation Of Online Encyclopedias )
Upstart Open Content Encyclopedia Threatens to Displace Britannica, Encarta
Culltura online: esce l'Oxford English Dictionary e Nupedia, l'enciclopedia "fai da te"
New Open Content Encyclopedia
Building the World's Biggest Encyclopedia ( Building the world's biggest encyclopedia )
In addition to the article on osp.ru , there are other Russian-language articles about Nupedia that can be found through Yandex .
This text (with the exception of the PCWorld text) is based on the works of the authors listed on the links Nupedia , Larry Sanger , Jimmy Wales , History of Wikipedia , Bomis , GNUPedia . Also used are the facts set out at features.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/04/18/164213&tid=95&tid=149&tid=9 .
This text (with the exception of PCWorld) is distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license .
You can copy, edit (modify-process) and use this text for commercial purposes if 1) the authorship is mandatory, 2) distributed under the same conditions (ie copyleft).
Absolute truth of the article is not guaranteed. Errors are accepted in Habrapochta.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/86838/
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