Nupedia

From Encyc

Nupedia was the forerunner to Wikipedia and was funded by Bomis, as was Wikipedia initially. Like Wikipedia, Nupedia was run by Jimbo Wales, with Larry Sanger as the editor-in-chief. Wikipedia existed initially as a side project of Nupedia, an idea first thought of by Ben Kovitz in 2001, which was initially aimed to be a way to "create lots of articles quickly" to support Nupedia. Eventually, however, Bomis cut its funding for both projects, and only Wikipedia existed thereafter. The aim of Nupedia was to create an online encyclopaedia that anyone could access. Members of Nupedia were experts on the topics that they wrote about, or, at least, the greatest experts that could be found who agreed to be involved. Unfortunately, Nupedia was written very slowly, with very little written as it had such high standards for all of its articles. Whilst Wikipedia could have been used to support Nupedia, Wikipedia had such low standards that few of Wikipedia's articles were up to Nupedia's standards. Ultimately, Wikipedia decided to exist of its own as it had many more supporters. Critics of Wikipedia have suggested that, rather than close down Nupedia, they should have closed down Wikipedia. Later projects such as Digital Universe and Citizendium have tried to replicate Nupedia, although, to date, the pages hosted on those sites don't appear on the first result pages of the major search engines.