[LINK] This time, it'll be a Wikipedia written by experts

[Kim Holburn]

http://technology.guardian.co.uk/weekly/story/0,,1818630,00.html

> Larry Sanger, co-founder of the free encyclopedia, is now launching  
> a web guide based on its first principles

...

> Sanger took up the idea immediately: "I wrote up a proposal and  
> sent it [to Wales] that evening, and the wiki was then set up for  
> me to work on." But this was not Wikipedia as we know it.  
> "Originally it was the Nupedia Wiki - our idea was to use it as an  
> article incubator for Nupedia. Articles could begin life on this  
> wiki, be developed collaboratively and, when they got to a certain  
> stage of development, be put it into the Nupedia system."
>
> Things didn't quite work out that way. "The editors and peer  
> reviewers of Nupedia, mostly professors and other professionals,  
> looked at the wiki tool and didn't want anything to do with it."  
> The idea was too revolutionary. As Sanger points out: "It actually  
> took the success of Wikipedia" - as Sanger later baptised it - to  
> make the idea plausible to a lot of people."
>
> Wikipedia grew quickly - perhaps too quickly. There was an influx  
> of visitors driven by two postings on the Slashdot news site who  
> were not clued in to the Wikipedia culture, recalls Sanger. "They  
> tended to be quite a bit more anarchist and egalitarian" than the  
> original Wikipedians. This led to vandalism of pages, and increased  
> bickering about issues such as control and quality. Then, in 2002,  
> Sanger left Wikipedia. In the wake of the dotcom crash, the company  
> that owned and ran Nupedia, Bomis, was suffering too, and Wales had  
> to lay off most of the staff, including Sanger. Wikipedia was  
> henceforth run by Wales and the Wikipedia community.

--
Kim Holburn
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