Talk:Nupedia

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 This article is part of the WikiProject Wikipedia, an attempt to improve and organize Wikipedia's coverage of itself. If you would like to participate, visit the project page.

Please remember to avoid self-references and maintain a neutral point of view on topics relating to Wikipedia.
B This article has been rated as B-Class on the quality scale.
Mid This article has been rated as Mid-importance on the importance scale.

Contents

[edit] Old discussion

Nupedia is a failure. Since Jan 2001, 10 (ten) new articles appeared, 9 of them being `brief versions', and one `medium-lenght'.

Policy says that you have to be PhD to contribute, but maybe, as an exception, they'll allow you to write even though you aren't PhD. How many contributors do they expect ?

We should forget about Nupedia and add some quality assurance features to Wikipedia. It's much better to have 50k good articles and 50k reasonable-quality ones instead of 1k excelent articles.

It's just another Cathedral vs. Bazaar issue. -- Taw

The reason Nupedia is having trouble right now is that we've had trouble convincing academics that it is indeed a bona fide cathedral. If we were to convince them of that--which I think we will, eventually--you'll see just how wrong you really are (that Nupedia is a failure).

I am 100% opposed to adding "quality assurance features" to Wikipedia that involve making it harder for people to edit articles. Wikipedia's freedom is its quality assurance. --LMS

I agree that calling Nupedia a "failure" at this point in the game is incredibly short-sighted. It's actually quite remarkable what it has already accomplished, and it gives every indication that it will accomplish much more. The existence of Wikipedia and the Chalkboard will help a lot; I think one more thing that would help a lot is to drop the focus on short articles--it's much easier for authors to produce longer articles, and they will get more reward out of doing so. Shortening them can (and should) be done by proficient editors with expert consultation, not by the authors themselves. --LDC

one thing to check when counting nupedia articles is the "in progress" bin - I think there were more than 50 in there when I counted the other day. Speed-to-completion is an issue, but it looks like it's moving rather than standing still --MichaelTinkler

Maybe Chalkboard will change things, but if Nupedia were going to continue to work the way it's working now, it would fail. Examples of QA features that can be added now to wiki:

  • Button mail me all changes to this article
  • Make adding References more popular than it is now.

Wikipedia freedom is the most important QA, but it needs some help to scale up. Most important problem now is that if someone screws existing article on niche subject, chances are high that nobody will even notice for a long time. --Taw

I think there are ways to prevent this last point. You can search for two things:
1) articles which haven't been accessed in a LONG time. This will catch articles that have never been peer reviewed.
2) articles which have been only ever edited by less than N number of people. This will catch POV articles written by one person which were never peer reviewed.

dave 17:51, 5 Nov 2003 (UTC)

I feel the same that we judge quality of articles that we're knowledgable about thinking that in other areas is the same.
As for Nupedia, maybe they are just waiting for us to finish ;-)
Kpjas

This article has a lot of basic information missing:

  • What was the final article count in terms of what Nupedia produced?
  • What were the policies about signing up for Nupedia?
  • What were the requirements for being an approved author?

Fuzheado 09:49, 1 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Check the web site in its last archived state:
http://web.archive.org/web/20030620073342/www.nupedia.com/main.shtml
I count 68 articles in progress and 23 "complete" as of June 2003; the last "completed" article was posted in October 2001. --Brion 10:08, 1 Feb 2004 (UTC)
I recounted and came up with 74 in progress, 24 complete (27 actually, but three have both "brief" and "long" versions). Two completed articles finished the process after 2001. --Michael Snow 19:47, 17 Sep 2004 (UTC)
I'd like to see in the Wiki article the list of subjects Nupedia articles were written on, and if they have all been adopted into Wiki or not? Also, have they been improved afterwards? Do you think that would be a good addition to the current article? --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus 14:24, 21 Sep 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Ready for past tense yet?

So when do we start changing all the verbs to past tense? Anthony DiPierro 14:54, 4 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Nupedia has been offline for 160 days. Half a year offline time is enough for me to think that nupedia is history. — Sverdrup (talk) 15:01, 4 Mar 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Nupedia vs. Wikipedia

Nupedia is a former version of Wikipedia that became offline about a year ago. Any stories about Wikipedia?? I hope Wikipedia never becomes offline. Any time in history when it almost did?? 66.32.255.74 17:33, 25 Sep 2004 (UTC)

The closest we've come in the time I've been hear was around this March - before we got the squids. One of our database servers (Geoffrin) was dead, and the other (Ariel?) was running at 100% constantly. Page loads took a minute or more. Since then, we've bought *a lot* of squids (25 or 30) to ease the load. →Raul654 18:35, Sep 25, 2004 (UTC)

Shouldn't there be a redirect to Wikipedia from the old Nupedia URL on the web? Unless of course there are bigger issues, but right now it is link rot. Spalding 16:59, Oct 11, 2004 (UTC)

[edit] What happened to Nupedia?

Um, what happened to Nupedia? Why has it gone down? I just heard about it a few days ago, and was wondering why it's disappeared now.

Nupedia is dead because people lost interest in the project long ago. It's offline because the server it had been hosted on was not properly backed up, so the database was lost when it was cleaned and reinstalled after a compromise. (This was on a Bomis machine, not one of ours, in September 2003... well over a year after the project died for all intents and purposes.) If anyone had/has alternate backups, nobody's cared enough to dig them out and put it back online. --Brion 03:05, Feb 26, 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Is Nupedia getting started again?

I got an email saying that the Nupedia website is now available at a new URL: http://nupedia.8media.org/

This link seems to be dead. Consider removing it from the article. --Jeremy.Visser 2005-9-10
Is this legit, or is it some sort of scam/spam? --Flow 22:24, 31 Mar 2005 (UTC)
Seems to just be a historical mirror, to archive the site. The contact page doesn't work. -- user:zanimum
Looks like spam to me -- user:Cwg999

[edit] 3 Years

So in the span of three years, only 24 articles had been completed? I'm surprised Nupedia didn't die out or quit within the first year. Is there a list of articles that had been assimilated into Wikipedia but orginated from Nupedia?

Yes, see Wikipedia:Nupedia and Wikipedia, particularly Articles copied to Wikipedia. I know the answer is quite late, but it's there in case other editors want to know. Graham 09:26, 28 September 2005 (UTC)

Nupedia's limited content was assimilated into Wikipedia. Resistance is futile.13:33, 16 December 2005 (UTC)

24 articles in 3 years. That's one article in a month and a half. In the same time, Wikipedia gets almost 150 thousand articles. JIP | Talk 12:10, 25 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] What does this mean?

"Much of the missing functionality had been mocked using underlined blocks of text that appeared to be hyperlinks, but actually were not."

There were no hyperlinks so the editors pretended there were? —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 81.178.103.102 (talk • contribs) 03:43, 31 December 2005 (UTC).

Apparently so. We need to find a reliable source written by someone who actually saw a Nupedia article, though... all of about six people? – Qxz 00:43, 27 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Whois data

Is there a good reason for half of this article to be taken up by a copy-and-paste of the WHOIS data for the Nupedia.com domain? I removed it, but it seems to have been put back. I don't see the need for it, especially not in an encyclopedia article. The only things it gives you that aren't in the article already are the contact details for Bomis and Register.com, the names of Register.com's DNS servers, and when the registration expires, none of which should be in an article on Nupedia – Qxz 00:38, 27 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Nupedia articles

For the sake of those who are curious (such as myself) is there any objection to mentioning what the 24 Nupedia articles were? I think it's pretty interesting. In fact, from what I can tell, I'd consider it almost humorous just how esoteric those 2 dozen were. Also, from looking at the list on Wikipedia:Nupedia and Wikipedia, I count more than 24. Is there a mistake somewhere? -R. fiend 03:32, 19 February 2007 (UTC)

I don't know about the 24 articles. However, Sanger says "Nupedia had published approved versions of only about 25 articles, although there were many more (I vaguely recall over 150 drafts) at various stages in process.". If no one objects I am going to replace the actual "74 articles" (which is not referenced) with "about 150 articles", in the lead section. Poderi (talk) 14:16, 4 June 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Bomis, and Jimmy vs. Jimbo

In paragraph three of the history section, second sentence, "Due to the collapse of the internet economy at that time, Jimbo Wales decided to discontinue funding for a salaried editor-in-chief in December 2001[1], and Sanger resigned from both projects soon thereafter." I noticed the use of Jimbo, instead of Jimmy, whereas the previous and subsequent references were both to his proper name, Jimmy. I began reviewing the history, to see if this had been changed, and not noticed, to find that the previous reference was to Bomis. Can someone help verify whose name actually belongs there? Tzalumen 05:18, 20 February 2007 (UTC)

I'm fairly certain it's Jimmy Wales, and not some other member of Bomis. I made the change back to Jimmy a few edits ago, and hope that it stays that way--not that I don't like the nickname, but such an edit makes sense for consistency's sake. ACityInOhio 07:12, 26 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Was Nupedia a wiki?

It is not clear to me, based on the definition of "wiki" is Nupedia was a wiki or not. What would Ward Cunningham say? How should we state this now? -- 75.24.214.113 05:03, 10 July 2006 (UTC)

Hi. I dont think it is a Wiki tx.--Darrendeng 05:49, 30 November 2006 (UTC)
Indeed. Nupedia was not a wiki, because it worked through a peer review process, and didn't allow editing by anyone – Qxz 00:43, 27 January 2007 (UTC)
“ Nupedia was not a publicly editable wiki ”

. Then, could this be changed to "Nupedia was not based on wiki technology at all" or something like that? I am here because a friend of mine had the same confusion after reading the above sentence. It is not clear whether Nupedia used wiki technology where pages are editable only by trusted users. (like in wikimediafoundation.org) --Jacob.jose (talk) 13:30, 10 February 2008 (UTC)