Nupedia

Nupedia, formally the New Universal Public Encyclopedia, was a free online encyclopedia project launched in 2000. It was founded by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger and funded by Bomis. The project aimed to produce a comprehensive, high-quality encyclopedia whose articles were written by experts and subjected to a formal editorial and peer-review process before publication. Content was intended to be released under an open-content license to allow broad reuse.

The Nupedia editorial process was unusually stringent by design. Written drafts would be submitted by contributors, then assigned to editors who coordinated reviews by qualified scholars and subject-matter experts. Articles would go through multiple rounds of revision and evaluation before any version could be published. This rigorous gatekeeping sought to ensure accuracy and reliability, but it also slowed progress and limited the encyclopedia’s growth compared with other online ventures of the time.

In 2001, a companion project, Wikipedia, was launched by the same team but adopting a collaborative, wiki-based editing model that allowed anyone to contribute and edit articles. Wikipedia grew rapidly and gained broad popularity, while Nupedia’s pace remained comparatively slow. Over time, attention and resources concentrated on Wikipedia, and Nupedia’s development diminished.

By the early 2000s, Nupedia effectively ceased active development, though the site and its content remained accessible for a period before being phased out. Today, Nupedia is generally viewed as a predecessor to Wikipedia—a notable attempt to combine open access with expert-reviewed content and as a case study in the trade-offs between quality control and collaborative openness in online encyclopedias.