Nupedia: The Encyclopedia That Nobody Wanted

Nupedia was an online encyclopedia that nobody wanted. It was created in 2000 by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger, who thought it would be a good idea to have an online encyclopedia that was written by experts and peer-reviewed by other experts.

The problem was that nobody wanted to write for Nupedia. The process of submitting an article was so complicated that only a few articles were ever published. It was like trying to get into a secret society, but without any of the benefits.

Even those who did manage to submit an article had to wait for a long time for it to be peer-reviewed. In some cases, it took up to a year for an article to be reviewed and published.

To make matters worse, Nupedia was only available in English. This meant that it was not accessible to people from non-English speaking countries. The whole point of an encyclopedia is to provide information to everyone, but Nupedia failed miserably in this regard.

After a year of struggling, Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger came up with a new idea. They decided to create a wiki-based encyclopedia called Wikipedia. This time, they wanted to make it accessible to everyone, not just experts.

The idea was a hit. Wikipedia became the most popular encyclopedia in the world, with millions of articles in hundreds of languages. Meanwhile, Nupedia was forgotten, buried deep in the annals of internet history.

Today, Nupedia remains a cautionary tale of what happens when you try to create something that nobody wants. It was a noble experiment, but ultimately, it failed to deliver what people wanted: easy access to information.

So if you ever find yourself thinking of creating a new online encyclopedia, remember the story of Nupedia. And then do the opposite of everything they did.