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Larry Sanger was one of the moving forces behind the pioneering Nupedia project. That makes him one of the people to thank for Wikipedia, which has been enjoying more and more visibility of late. Sanger has prepared a lengthy, informative account of the early history of Nupedia and Wikipedia, including some cogent observations on project management, online legitimacy, dealing with trolls, and other hazards of running a large, collaborative project over the Internet. As Sanger writes, "A virtually identical version of this memoir is due to appear this summer in Open Sources 2.0, published by O'Reilly and edited by Chris DiBona, Danese Cooper, and Mark Stone. The volume is to be a successor to Open Sources: Voices from the Open Source Revolution (1999)." Read on below for the story (continued tomorrow). Update: 04/20 19:19 GMT by T : Here's a link to the continuation of Sanger's memoir.

Contents:
Preface
Some recent press reports
Nupedia
The origins of Wikipedia
Wikipedia's first few months

Preface

An impassioned debate has been raging, particularly since about the summer of 2004, about the merits of Wikipedia and the future of free online encyclopedias. This discussion has not benefitted by much detailed, accurate consideration of the origins of Wikipedia and of its parent project, Nupedia. But it seems to me that those origins are very important -- crucial, even -- to forming a proper judgment of the current state and best future direction of free encyclopedias.

Wikipedia as it stands is a fantastic project; it has produced enormous amounts of content, thousands of excellent articles, and now, after just four years, is getting high-profile, international recognition as a new way of obtaining at least a rough and ready idea about very many topics. Its surprising success may be attributed, briefly, to its free, open, and collaborative nature.

This has been my attitude toward Wikipedia practically since its founding. But a few months ago I wrote an article critical of certain aspects of the Wikipedia project, 'Why Wikipedia Must Jettison Its Anti-Elitism', which occasioned much debate. I have also been quoted, as co-founder of Wikipedia, in many recent news articles about the project, making various other critical remarks. I am afraid I am getting an undeserved reputation as someone who is opposed to everything Wikipedia stands for. This is completely incorrect. In fact, I am one of Wikipedia's strongest supporters. I am partly responsible for bringing it into the world (as I will explain), and I still love it and want only the best for it. But if a better job can be done, a better job should be done. Wikipedia has shown fantastic potential, and it is open content--and so if the project has problems (or features) which will keep it from being the maximally authoritative, broad, and deep reference that I believe could exist, I firmly believe that the world has the right to, and should, improve upon it.

Wikipedia's predecessor, which I was also employed to organize, was Nupedia. Nupedia was to be a highly reliable, peer-reviewed resource that fully appreciated and employed the efforts of subject area experts, as well as the general public. When the more free-wheeling Wikipedia took off, Nupedia was left to wither. It might appear to have died of its own weight and complexity. But, as I will explain, it could have been redesigned and adapted--it could have, as it were, "learned from its mistakes" and from Wikipedia's successes. Thousands of people who had signed up and who wanted to contribute to the Nupedia system were left disappointed. I believe this was unfortunate and unnecessary; I always wanted Nupedia and Wikipedia working together to be not only the world's largest but also the world's most reliable encyclopedia. I hope that this memoir will help to justify this stance. Hopefully, too, I will manage to persuade some people that collaboration between an expert project and a public project is the correct approach to the overall project of creating open content encyclopedias.

I am not writing to request that Nupedia be resuscitated now, as nice as that would be. But I would like to tell the story of Nupedia and the first couple years of Wikipedia, as I remember it. A more complete history of the projects, as opposed to a memoir, must await a careful study of the Nupedia and Wikipedia archives--if early archives of them still exist (I have no idea if they do)--or else these entries from the "Wayback Machine." Interviews with many of those heavily involved in the projects would also help a great deal, so long as interviews were done of people on different side of the disputes that helped to shape the project.

By the way, the "overall project of creating open content encyclopedias" is something of which I have been writing since at least 2001. For example, in July of 2001, while still working on both Wikipedia and Nupedia, I wrote, "if some other open source project proves to be more competitive, then it should and will take the lead in creating a body of free encyclopedic knowledge." Since Wikipedia is open content and hence may be reproduced and improved upon by anyone, I have always been cognizant that it might not end up being the only or best version. My personal devotion has always been to the ideal project as I have envisioned it, not necessarily to particular incarnations of Nupedia or Wikipedia; and I think this attitude is fully consistent with the (very positive) spirit of open source collaboration generally.

This being said, let me also emphasize strongly that, throughout this discussion, I am not suggesting that Wikipedia needs to be replaced with something better. I do, however, think that it needs to be supplemented by a broader, more ambitious, and more inclusive vision of the overall project.

Some recent press reports

The following memoir seems all the more important to publish now because the early history of Nupedia and Wikipedia has been mischaracterized in the press recently. If there were only a few inaccuracies, which made no difference, I would be happy to leave well enough alone. But some of the mischaracterizations I've seen do make a difference, because they give the public the impression that Nupedia failed because it was run by snobbish experts whose standards were too high. As the following should make clear, that is not quite correct. One might also gather from some reports that the idea for Wikipedia sprang fully grown from Jimmy Wales' head. Jimmy, of course, deserves enormous credit for investing in and guiding Wikipedia. But a more refined idea of how Wikipedia originated and evolved is crucial to have, if one wants to appreciate fully why it works now, and why it has the policies that it does have.

For example, in the Nov. 1, 2004 issue of Newsweek, in "It's Like a Blog, But It's a Wiki," reporter Brad Stone writes:

[Jimmy] Wales first tried to rewrite the rules of the reference-book business five years ago with a free online encyclopedia called Nupedia. Anyone could submit articles, but they were vetted in a seven-step review process. After investing thousands of his own dollars and publishing only 24 articles, Wales reconsidered. He scrapped the review process and began using a popular kind of online Web site called a "wiki," which allows its readers to change the content.

This capsule history is, of course, very brief and so should be expected not to have every relevant detail. But some of the claims made here are not just vague, they are actually misleading, and so several clarifications are in order (all of this is elaborated below):

• The article makes it sound as if Jimmy were the only person making the relevant decisions. That is incorrect; the Nupedia system (indeed, seven steps) was established via negotiation with Nupedia's volunteer Advisory Board, mostly Ph.D. volunteers, who served as editors and peer reviewers. I articulated our decisions in Nupedia's "Editorial Policy Guidelines." Jimmy started and broadly authorized it all, but as to the details, he really had little to do with them.
• Nupedia's Advisory Board might be surprised to learn that Jimmy (alone!) "scrapped the review process." Jimmy was certainly disappointed with the process (as were many people), and he did not actively support it after 2001 or so. But in fairness to the people actually working on Nupedia, the fact is that work on Nupedia gradually petered out in 2001-2. I in particular was stretched thin--in 2001, I was both chief organizer of Wikipedia and editor-in-chief of Nupedia--and my own slowing work on Nupedia was obvious to all active Nupedia contributors. It might be better to say that Nupedia withered due to neglect--which was largely due to a lack of sufficient funds for paid organizers--which was as much due to the bursting of the Internet bubble as anything else.
• Also, to the best of my knowledge, the "thousands of his own dollars" invested in these projects were, if I am not very mistaken, the dollars of Bomis.com, which is jointly owned by three partners, Jimmy, Tim Shell, and Michael Davis. (The money for Wikipedia now comes from donations.) But again, Jimmy was the prime motivating force within Bomis.
• Moreover, Nupedia had fewer than 24 articles when Wikipedia launched, being not quite a year old at that time. The idea of adapting wiki technology to the task of building an encyclopedia was mine, and my main job in 2001 was managing and developing the community and the rules according to which Wikipedia was run. Jimmy's role, at first, was one of broad vision and oversight; this was the management style he preferred, at least as long as I was involved. But, again, credit goes to Jimmy alone for getting Bomis to invest in the project, and for providing broad oversight of the fantastic and world-changing project of an open content, collaboratively-built encyclopedia. Credit also of course goes to him for overseeing its development after I left, and guiding it to the success that it is today.

A March 2005 Wired Magazine article by Daniel Pink also got a number of things wrong, despite being, in other respects, an excellent article:

With Sanger as editor in chief, Nupedia essentially replicated the One Best way model. He assembled a roster of academics to write articles. (Participants even had to fax in their degrees as proof of their expertise.) And he established a seven-stage process of editing, fact-checking, and peer review. "After 18 months and more than $250,000," Wales said, "we had 12 articles."

Then an employee told Wales about Wiki software. On January 15, 2001, they launched a Wiki-fied version and within a month, they had 200 articles. In a year, they had 18,000. ... Sanger left the project in 2002. "In the Nupedia mode, there was room for an editor in chief," Wales says. "The Wiki model is too distributed for that."

This too needs clarifications:

• The "roster of academics" (the aforementioned Nupedia Advisory Board) was not limited to academics; they were experts in their fields, in any case. Moreover, they were editors and peer reviewers; the general public was able to propose and write articles on subjects about which they had some knowledge. (Consult the old assignment policy if you are interested.)
• It is incorrect to say that participants had to fax their degrees as proof of their expertise; we did verify bona fides by matching the names and e-mail addresses of editors and reviewers with a web page--often, but not always, an academic web page. Indeed there was one (but only one) case that I recall in which I asked someone, who had no web page or any other easy way to prove who he was, to fax a degree. Verifying bona fides seemed like a good idea especially when initially building what was to be an academically-respectable project.
• Again, I did not establish the editorial process alone; I had considerable assistance (for which I am still grateful) from Nupedia's excellent Advisory Board.
• And as I wrote on July 25, 2001 for Kuro5hin, "Britannica or Nupedia? The Future of Free Encyclopedias," Nupedia had "just over 20" articles--not 12--after 18 months. We always suspected that we would wind up scrapping our first attempts to design an editorial system, and that we would learn a great deal from those first attempts; and that's essentially what happened. But Nupedia could have evolved, and would have, had we continued working on it.
• The second paragraph begins, "Then an employee told Wales about Wiki software." I don't know how Jimmy first learned about wikis, but as I will explain below, I proposed to him and to the Nupedia community at large that we start a wiki-based encyclopedia.
• The context of the line "Sanger left the project in 2002"--particularly with Jimmy quoted as saying, "In the Nupedia mode there was room for an editor in chief"--makes it sound as if I were let go specifically because I was working only on Nupedia and that I was no longer needed for that. In fact, I was working on Wikipedia far more at the time than Nupedia, and the reason for my departure from both projects was that Bomis was, like virtually all dot-coms, losing money. They could not afford to pay me; I was told that I was the last of several newer Bomis employees to be laid off on account of the tech recession. But Wikipedia indeed was able to continue on without me, and I agreed even at the time that Wikipedia could survive without me, and that it had become essentially "unmanageable" (as I put it--the following memoir should make it clear what I meant by that).

In view of problematic reporting such as the above, considering the rather good chance that Wikipedia will become historically important (if it isn't already), and considering that the planners of related projects might find some value in this, I want to tell my story as I remember it. This memoir covers only the first few years of the project. I personally would be very interested to read a memoir or history of the years that followed. But that is a job for someone else; I have followed the project fairly closely and with interest after my departure, but silently and from the sidelines.

Nupedia

I'm going to begin this memoir with several paragraphs about Nupedia, because the origin of Wikipedia cannot be explained except in that context. Moreover, the Nupedia project itself was very worthwhile, and I think it might have been able to survive, as I will explain. Finally, some errors regarding Nupedia have been passed around (a few examples are above), which are little better than unfounded rumors. It is unfortunate that the thousands of hours of excellent volunteer work done on Nupedia should be thus disrespected or grossly misunderstood. I personally will always be grateful to those initial contributors who believed in the project and our management, worked hard for a completely unproven idea, and laid the groundwork for the growing institution of open content projects.

In 1999, Jimmy Wales wanted to start a free, collaborative encyclopedia. I knew him from several mailing lists back in the mid-90s, and in fact we had already met in person a couple of times. In January 2000, I e-mailed Jimmy and several other Internet acquaintances to get feedback on an idea for what was to be, essentially, a blog. (It was to be a successor to "Sanger and Shannon's Review of Y2K News Reports," a Y2K news summary that I first wrote and then edited.) To my great surprise, Jimmy replied to my e-mail describing his idea of a free encyclopedia, and asking if I might be interested in leading the project. He was specifically interested in finding a philosopher to lead the project, he said. He made it a condition of my employment that I would finish my Ph.D. quickly (whereupon I would get a raise)--which I did, in June 2000. I am still grateful for the extra incentive. I thought he would be a great boss, and indeed he was.

To be clear, the idea of an open source, collaborative encyclopedia, open to contribution by ordinary people, was entirely JimmyÃââs, not mine, and the funding was entirely by Bomis. I was merely a grateful employee; I thought I was very lucky to have a job like that land in my lap. Of course, other people had had the idea; but it was Jimmy's fantastic foresight actually to invest in it. For this the world owes him a considerable debt. The actual development of this encyclopedia was the task he gave me to work on.

So I arrived in San Diego in early February, 2000, to get to work. One of the first things I asked Jimmy is how free a rein I had in designing the project. What were my constraints, and in what areas was I free to exercise my own creativity? He replied, as I clearly recall, that most of the decisions should be mine; and in most respects, as a manager, Jimmy was indeed very hands-off. Nevertheless, I always did consult with him about important decisions, and moreover, I wanted his advice. Now, Jimmy was quite clear that he wanted the project to be in principle open to everyone to develop, just as open source software is (to an extent). Beyond this, however, I believe I was given a pretty free rein. So I spent the first month or so thinking very broadly about different possibilities. I wrote quite a bit (that writing is now all lost--that will teach me not to back up my hard drives) and discussed quite a bit with both Jimmy and one of the other Bomis partners, Tim Shell.

I maintained from the start that something really could not be a credible encyclopedia without oversight by experts. I reasoned that, if the project is open to all, it would require both management by experts and an unusually rigorous process. I now think I was right about the former requirement, but wrong about the latter, which was redundant; I think that the subsequent development of Wikipedia has borne out this assessment. But I fully realize that all of this is a matter of debate. Some will claim that the experience of Wikipedia refuted my original judgment that expert oversight is necessary for a very credible encyclopedia; but I disagree with them. More on this below.

Also, I am fairly sure that one of the first policies that Jimmy and I agreed upon was a "nonbias" or neutrality policy. I know I was extremely insistent upon it from the beginning, because neutrality has been a hobby-horse of mine for a very long time, and one of my guiding principles in writing "Sanger's Review." Neutrality, we agreed, required that articles should not represent any one point of view on controversial subjects, but instead fairly represent all sides. We also agreed in rejecting an alternative that (for a time) Tim and some early Nupedians plugged for: the development, for each encyclopedia topic, of a series of different articles, each written from a different point of view.

I believed, moreover, that a strongly collaborative and open project could not survive if its contributors were not "personally invested" in the project, and that this required some input and management by its users. So I think it was very early on that I decided that Nupedia should have an Advisory Board--editors, and peer reviewers, who would together agree to project policy--and that the public should have a say in the formulation of policy.

An early incarnation of NupediaÃââs Advisory Board was in place by summer of 2000 or so. It was made up of the project's highly-qualified editors and reviewers, mostly Ph.D. professors but also a good many other highly-experienced professionals. Eventually the Advisory Board agreed to an extremely rigorous seven-step system. A lot of the details of the Nupedia policy and processes were, I think, proposed by me, but then tweaked and elaborated by others, and the policy was not published as project policy until we had a quorum of editors and peer reviewers who could fully discuss and approve of a policy statement. But I do not think that we discussed the proposal well enough, and further initial discussion could have made a difference, because, as it turned out, a clear mistake of mine and others was to assume that such a complicated system would be navigated patiently by many volunteers, even if they had clear-enough instructions. That is a mistake I doubt anyone designing volunteer content creation systems will make again; I certainly would not make it again.

I spent a huge amount of time recruiting people for Nupedia, e-mailing new arrivals, posting to mailing lists, giving interviews, etc. I had had some experience publicizing Internet projects when I worked on several philosophy discussion groups as a grad student in the 1990s (I had perpetrated an "Association for Systematic Philosophy" as well as a "Tutorial Manifesto"), and I knew that getting many willing and active participants was difficult but important. I even had an administrative assistant for six months in 2000 and 2001, Liz Campeau, whose sole job was to recruit people to work on Nupedia and then Wikipedia. I think a large part of the reason Wikipedia got off the ground so quickly and so well is that it was started by Nupedians, who were then a very large base of people who wanted to work on an encyclopedia, and who had many definite ideas about how it should be done. Maybe 2,000 Nupedia members were subscribed to the general announcement list in January of 2001, when Wikipedia launched--I forget how many but an old project news page indicates that 2,000 is about right.

We operated the system initially using e-mail and mailing lists, while planning and finalizing process details. That lasted from spring through fall 2000. I think our first article ("atonality" by Christoph Hust), that made it entirely through the system, was published in June or July of 2000. To move the system to a completely web-based one, there was, of course, a great deal of design and programming to do. So in fall of 2000 I worked a lot with a specifically-hired programmer (Toan Vo) and the Bomis sysadmin (Jason Richey) to transfer the system from a clunky mailing list system to the web. But by the time the web-based system was ready--I think December of 2000, just a month before Wikipedia got started--it had become obvious to Jimmy and me that the seven-step editorial process would move too slowly, even when managed on the web. But Magnus Manske later, in 2001, made some very nice additions to the Nupedia system.

Some institutional traditions begin easily but die hard. So, in 2001, it was only after many months and uncomfortable comparison of Nupedia with the thriving, younger Wikipedia, that Nupedia's Advisory Board was willing to consider a simpler system seriously. That was because Nupedia editors and peer reviewers had a very strong commitment to rigor and reliability, as did I. Moreover, as Wikipedia became increasingly successful in 2001, Jimmy asked me to spend more and more time on it, which I did; Nupedia suffered from neglect. But by the summer of 2001, I was able to propose, get accepted (with very lukewarm support), and install something we called the Nupedia Chalkboard, a wiki which was to be closely managed by Nupedia's staff. It was to be both a simpler way to develop encyclopedia articles for Nupedia, and a way to import articles from Wikipedia. No doubt due to lingering disdain for the wiki idea--which at the time was still very much unproven--the Chalkboard went largely unused. The general public simply used Wikipedia if they wanted to write articles in a wiki format, while perhaps most Nupedia editors and peer reviewers were not persuaded that the Chalkboard was necessary or useful.

By early winter, 2001, 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. I was finally able to persuade the Advisory Board to move the system to a much simpler two-step process, virtually identical to that used to run many academic journals: articles would be submitted to an editor; the editor would, if the article seemed good enough, forward it to a reviewer for acceptance or rejection; if accepted, the article would be posted. We also were thinking of various ways of allowing public comment on or moderated editing of posted articles. I believe this new, simpler system would have produced thousands of articles for Nupedia very quickly. The general public on Nupedia was certainly interested and motivated, and I think it was finally becoming generally accepted by the Advisory Board that the complexity of the system was the main reason that they were not starting articles and getting them through the system.

But, unfortunately, Nupedia's new system was never adopted when it should have been--the winter of 2001-2--because at the same time, Wikipedia was demanding as much attention as I could give it, and I had little time to implement the new Nupedia system. I am quite sure we could have started the new Nupedia system in early 2002, if we had made the time. But Bomis lost the ability to pay me and, newly unemployed, I did not have the time to lead Nupedia as a volunteer. I did not entirely lose hope on Nupedia, however, as I will explain below.

The origins of Wikipedia

In the fall of 2000, Jimmy and I were very well agreed that Nupedia's slow productivity was probably going to be an ongoing problem and that there needed to be a way, moreover, in which ordinary, uncredentialed people could participate more easily. Uncredentialed people could (and did) participate in Nupedia, particularly as writers and copyeditors, but it was pretty painful for most of them to get articles through the elaborate system. So there seemed to be a huge fund of talent, motivated to work on an encyclopedia but not motivated enough to work on Nupedia, going to waste.

It was my job to solve these problems. I wrote multiple detailed proposals for a simpler, more open editing system--two or three, at least--and I ran them by Jimmy, and I think his reply to all of them was that it would require too much programming and he couldn't afford to pay more high-priced programmers (they were very high-priced at the time, you will recall, and we already had Toan and Jason working quite a bit on Nupedia's new web-based system). Now, of course, I fully realize that we could have found a way to enlist volunteers to develop the system. Jimmy and I both probably knew that at the time; I'm not sure why we didn't pursue it.

So it was while I was thinking hard about how to create a more open system, that would require minimal programming to set up, that I had dinner with an old Internet friend of mine, Ben Kovitz. Ben had moved to town for a new job and we were out at a Pacific Beach Mexican restaurant on January 2, 2001, talking about jobs, techie stuff, and philosophy, no doubt. (Ben, Jimmy, and I were all active on those philosophy mailing lists in the mid-90s and we all knew each other.) So Ben explained the idea of Ward Cunningham's WikiWikiWeb to me. Instantly I was considering whether wiki would work as a more open and simple editorial system for a free, collaborative encyclopedia, and it seemed exactly right. And the more I thought about it, without even having seen a wiki, the more it seemed obviously right. So I'm sure it was that very evening or the following morning that I wrote a proposal--unfortunately, lost now--in which I said that this might solve the problem and that we ought to try it. After he had nixed my several earlier proposals, and given that setting up a wiki would be very simple and require hiring no programmer, Jimmy could scarcely refuse. I vaguely recall that he liked the idea but was initially skeptical--properly so, as I was, despite my excitement.

Wiki advocates often used to point out (and I'm sure some still do) that Wikipedia is nonstandard as a wiki. This is partly because we began just with the very basic wiki concept and not so much of the culture. Wiki culture is very distinctive. I cannot hope to explain even the highlights briefly, so I will not try; I will simply give a few notions. Wiki pages can be started and edited by anyone, but, in "Thread Mode" (as in "the thread of this discussion") the dialogue can become complex. In that case, or when consensus is reached, or when positions have hardened, it is considered a good idea to "refactor" pages (a term borrowed from programming), i.e., to rewrite them, but honestly, taking into account the highlights of the dialogue. Then the dialogue might be represented as in "Document Mode." Opinions are very welcome on a typical wiki. There are many other collective habits that make up typical wiki culture; these are only a few.

But I denied the necessity of organizing Wikipedia according to these precise principles. To be sure, a few other participants wanted Wikipedia to adopt wiki culture wholesale, so that it would be "just another wiki," and they had some small influence over the direction of the project; but speaking for myself, I viewed wiki software as simply a tool, a way to organize people who want to collaborate. I saw no necessity whatsoever of partaking in all aspects of the idiosyncratic culture that happened to be associated with the advent of this very generally-applicable tool, since we were engaged in a very specific sort of project, with very specific requirements. This caused some consternation among some wiki advocates, who appeared to think that Wikipedia should, or inevitably would, become just another wiki, somehow necessarily partaking of typical wiki culture. Ward Cunningham's prediction, when Jimmy asked him whether wiki software "could successfully generate a useful encyclopedia," was: "Yes, but in the end it wouldn't be an encyclopedia. It would be a wiki." As I said in reply: "Wikipedia has a totally different culture from this wiki, because it's pretty singlemindedly aimed at creating an encyclopedia. It's already rather useful as an encyclopedia, and we expect it will only get better."

Typical wiki culture aside, wiki software does encourage, but does not strictly require, extreme openness and de-centralization: openness, since (as the software is typically designed) page changes are logged and publicly viewable, and (again, only typically) pages may be further changed by anyone; de-centralization, because in order for work to be done, there is no need for a person or body to assign work, but rather, work can proceed as and when people want to do it. Wiki software also discourages (or at least does not facilitate) the exercise of authority, since work proceeds at will on any page, and on any large, active wiki it would be too much work for any single overseer or limited group of overseers to keep up. These all became features of Wikipedia.

My initial idea was that the wiki would be set up as part of Nupedia; it was to be a way for the public to develop a stream of content that could be fed into the Nupedia process. I think I got some of the basic pages written--how wikis work, what our general plan was, and so forth--over the next few days. I wrote a general proposal for the Nupedia community, and the Nupedia wiki went live January 10. The first encyclopedia articles for what was to become Wikipedia were written then. It turned out, however, that a clear majority of the Nupedia Advisory Board wanted to have nothing to do with a wiki. Again, their commitment was to rigor and reliability, a concern I shared with them and continue to have. Still, perhaps some of those people are kicking themselves now. They (some of them) evidently thought that a wiki could not resemble an encyclopedia at all, that it would be too informal and unstructured, as the original WikiWikiWeb was (and is), to be associated with Nupedia. They of course were perfectly reasonable to doubt that it would turn into the fantastic source of content that it did. Who could reasonably guess that it would work? But it did work, and now the world knows better.

Wikipedia's first few months

So we decided to relaunch the wiki under its own domain name. I came up with the name "Wikipedia," a silly name for what was at first a very silly project, and the newly independent project was launched at Wikipedia.com on January 15, 2001. It was a ".com" at first because, at the time, we were contemplating selling ads to pay for me, programmers, and servers. It was easy to deprecate ".com" in favor of ".org" in 2002, after Jimmy was able to assure users that Wikipedia would never (at least I think he said, or clearly implied, "never") run ads to support the project.

I took it to be one of my main jobs to promote Wikipedia, and this resulted in a steady influx of new participants. I wrote on the Wikipedia announcement page January 24, "Wikipedia has definitely taken [on] a life of its own; new people are arriving every day and the project seems to be getting only more popular. Long live Wikipedia!" By the end of January we reportedly and approximately had 600 articles; there were 1300 in March, 2300 in April, and 3900 in May. Not only was the project growing steadily, the rate of growth was increasing.

Wikipedia started with a handful of people, many from Nupedia. The influence of Nupedians was, I think, pretty important early on; I think, especially, of the tireless Magnus Manske (who worked on the software for both projects), our resident stickler Ruth Ifcher, and the very smart poker-playing programmer Lee Daniel Crocker--to name a few. All of these people, and several other Nupedia borrowings, had a good understanding of the requirements of good encyclopedia articles, and they were good writers and very smart. The direction that Wikipedia ought to go in was pretty obvious to myself and them, in terms of what sort of content we wanted. But what we did not have worked out in advance was how the community should be organized, and (not surprisingly) that turned out to be the thorniest problem. But the facts that the project started with these good people, and that we were able to adopt, explain, and promote good habits and policies to newer people, partly accounts for why the project was able to develop a robust, functional community and eventually to succeed. As to project leadership or management, we began with me, Jimmy, and Tim Shell; but Tim stopped participating so much after the first few months.

But the many rank-and-file users did the heavy lifting, and if there had not been a reasonable consensus among them about what the project should look like, it just wouldn't have happened. In any collaborative project, it is the contributors who are responsible for the outcome. Those early adopters should feel proud of themselves, because they were absolutely instrumental in shaping a thing of beauty and usefulness.

I recall saying casually, but repeatedly, in the project's first nine months or so, that experts and specialists should be given some particular respect when writing in their areas of expertise. They should be deferred to, I thought, unless there were some clear evidence of bias. (I recall an interesting discussion with a Polish scientist, Piotr Wozniak, about this issue when we came to a small disagreement about the "sleep" article.) So, in those first months, deference to expertise was a policy that at least I usually insisted upon, but not strongly or clearly enough. It was nearly a year after the project began that I finally articulated this view reasonably clearly as a policy to consider. Perhaps this was because, indeed, most users did make a practice of deferring to experts up to that time. "This is just common sense," as I wrote, "but sometimes common sense needs to be spelled out!" What I now think is that that point of common sense needed to be spelled out quite a bit sooner and more forcefully, because in the long run, it was not adopted as official project policy, as it could have been.

Some questions have been raised about the origin of Wikipedia policies. The tale is interesting and instructive, and one of the main themes of this memoir. We began with no (or few) policies in particular and said that the community would determine--through a sort of vague consensus, based on its experience working together--what the policies would be. The very first entry on a "rules to consider" page was the "Ignore All Rules" rule (to wit: "If rules make you nervous and depressed, and not desirous of participating in the wiki, then ignore them entirely and go about your business"). This is a "rule" that, current Wikipedians might be surprised to learn, I personally proposed. The reason was that I thought we needed experience with how wikis should work, and even more importantly at that point we needed participants more than we needed rules. As the project grew and the requirements of its success became increasingly obvious, I became ambivalent about this particular "rule" and then rejected it altogether. As one participant later commented, "this rule is the essence of Wikipedia." That was certainly never my view; I always thought of the rule as being a temporary and humorous injunction to participants to add content rather than be distracted by (then) relatively inconsequential issues about how exactly articles should be formatted, etc. In a similar spirit, I proposed that contributors be bold in updating pages (the current version is much expanded, as it should be).

I also, for similar reasons, specifically disavowed any title; I was organizing the project but I did not want to present myself as editor-in-chief. I wanted people to feel comfortable adding information without having to consult anything like an editor. Participation was more important, I felt. (Others referred to me, later, as Wikipedia's editor.)

As we set it up, Wikipedia did have some minimal wiki cultural features: it was wide open, extremely decentralized, and (provisionally anyway) featured very little attempt to exercise authority. Insofar as I was able to organize it at all, I guided the project through force of personality and what "moral authority" I had as co-founder of the project. Jimmy and I agreed early on that, at least in the beginning, we should not eject anyone from the project except perhaps in the most extreme cases. Our first forcible expulsion (which Jimmy performed) did not occur for many months, despite the presence of difficult characters from nearly the beginning of the project. Again, we were learning: we wished to tolerate all sorts of contributors in order to be well-situated to adopt the wisest policies. But--and in hindsight this should have seemed perfectly predictable--this provisional "hands off" management policy had the effect of creating a difficult-to-change tradition, the tradition of making the project extremely tolerant of disruptive (uncooperative, "trolling") behavior. And as it turned out, particularly with the large waves of new contributors from the summer and fall of 2001, the project became very resistant to any changes in this policy. I suspect that the cultures of online communities generally are established pretty quickly and then very resistant to change, because they are self-selecting; that was certainly the case with Wikipedia, anyway.

So I could only attempt to shame any troublemakers into compliance; without recourse to any genuine punitive action, that was the most I could do. In about the first eight months of the project, this was usually sufficient for me to do my job. After that, however, my job got increasingly difficult, as I will explain.

So Wikipedia began as a good-natured anarchy, a sort of Rousseauian state of digital nature. I always took Wikipedia's anarchy to be provisional and purely for purposes of determining what the best rules, and the nature of its authority, should be. What I, and other Wikipedians, failed to realize is that our initial anarchy would be taken by the next wave of contributors as the very essence of the project--how Wikipedia was "meant" to be--even though Wikipedia could have become anything we the contributors chose to make it.

This point bears some emphasis: Wikipedia became what it is today because, having been seeded with great people with a fairly clear idea of what they wanted to achieve, we proceeded to make a series of free decisions that determined the policy of the project and culture of its supporting community. Wikipedia's system is neither the only way to run a wiki, nor the only way to run an open content encyclopedia. Its particular conjunction of policies is in no way natural, "organic," or necessary. It is instead artificial, a result of a series of free choices, and we could have chosen differently in many cases; and choosing differently on some issues might have led to a project better than the one that exists today.

Though it began as an anarchy, there were quite a few policies that were settled upon, more or less, within the first six months or so. This required some struggle, especially on my part, particularly because, since the project was a wiki, some participants thought that there should be no rules at all. (Enforceable rules were regarded as "anti-wiki," which was supposed to be a bad thing.) But it was made clear from the beginning that we intended Wikipedia to be an encyclopedia, and so we were able to plug for at least those rules that would help define and sustain the project as an encyclopedia.

For instance, throughout the early months, people added various content that seemed less than encyclopedic in various ways. Many people seemed to confuse encyclopedia articles with dictionary entries, and eventually I wrote a page called "Wikipedia is not a dictionary." (I am surprised to discover that this page still exists as of this writing, with a good deal of its original content.) As people found new ways not to write encyclopedia articles, I started "What Wikipedia is not": I and others would note on an article's discussion page that some certain content did not belong in an encyclopedia, and then underscored the point by adding an entry to the "What Wikipedia is not" page. To take another example, Wikipedia was not to be a place for publishing original research. In fact, this is a policy that had been settled upon and even enforced in Nupedia days; enforcing it actually led to the departure of Nupedia's erstwhile Classics editor sometime in 2001.

Many of our first controversies were over these restrictions. At the time, I had enough influence within the community to get these policies generally accepted. And if we had not decided on these restrictions, Wikipedia might well have ended up, like many wikis, as nothing in particular. But since we insisted that it was an encyclopedia, even though it was just a blank wiki and a group of people to begin with, it became an encyclopedia. There is something very profound about that. I also like to think that we helped to show the world the potential that wikis have.

Another policy that was instituted early on was the nonbias or neutrality policy. This was borrowed from the Nupedia project and made a Rule to Consider--in a very early version, the policy was put this way:

Avoid bias: Since this is an encyclopedia, after a fashion, it would be best if you represented your controversial views either (1) not at all, (2) on *Debate, *Talk, or *Discussion pages linked from the bottom of the page that you're tempted to grace, or (3) represented in a fact-stating fashion, i.e., which attributes a particular opinion to a particular person or group, rather than asserting the opinion as fact. (3) is strongly preferred.

Jimmy then started a specialized policy page he called "Neutral Point of View" (here is the current version). I confess I don't much like this name as a name for the policy, because it implies that to write neutrally, or without bias, is actually to express a point of view, and, as the definite article is used, a single point of view at that. "Neutrality", "neutral", and "neutrally" are better to use for the noun, adjective, and adverb. But the acronym "NPOV" came to be used for all three, by Wikipedians wanting to seem hip, and then the unfortunate "POV" came to be used when the perfectly good English word "biased" would do.

In addition to these, I recall suggesting a number of other rules--no doubt most matters of historical fact, along these lines, can be verified in archives. I believe I am responsible for the original formulations of a lot of the article naming conventions, as well as the conventions of bolding the title of the article, starting articles with full sentences, making article titles uncapitalized, and much else. I think these policies were just a matter of common sense for anyone who understood what a good encyclopedia should be like. And of course I was not the only person proposing conventions. Moreover, actual project policy, or community habits, succeeded in being established only by being followed and supported by a majority of participants. It was then, we said, that there was a "rough consensus" in favor of the policy. And consensus, we said, is required for a policy actually to be considered project policy. For our purposes, a "consensus" appeared to consist of (1) widespread common practice, (2) many vocal defenders, and (3) virtually no detractors.

But that way of settling upon policy proposals--viz., by alleged consensus--did not scale, in my opinion. After about nine months or so, there were so many contributors, and especially brand new contributors, that nothing like a consensus could be reached, for the simple reason that condition (3) above was never achievable: there would after that always be somebody who insisted on expressing disagreement. There was, then, a non-scaling policy adoption procedure, and a crying need to continue to adopt sensible policies. This led to some pretty serious problems in the community, which I will relate below. But first, something more positive.

It's a cliff-hanger; you'll have to wait until tomorrow to read about what made Wikipedia start to work.

mycro writes "A new article on Wikipedia shows the longest chemical name, reaching 64,060 letters. Methionylalanylthreonyl...leucine is a chemical name for enaptin, a nuclear envelope protein found in human myocytes and synapses, which is made up of 8,797 amino acids. It is involved in the maintenance of nuclear organization and structural integrity, tethering the cell nucleus to the cytoskeleton by interacting with the nuclear envelope and with F-actin in the cytoplasm."

MrByte420 writes "The New York Times today has a story (stupid reg required) about the particpants of Wikipedia editing Bush and Kerry's entries in the days leading up to the U.S. Elections. With admins locked in philosophical debate over whether to lock the page down, others asked, "Could someone get rid of the middle-finger screen cap that's replaced the image above 'The Bush family watches tee-ball on the White House lawn'?""

Spirited Away, or Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi, is a made-for-Japan animated film that has now made it across the Pacific. Famed director Hayao Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli are well-known for producing exceptional films, and this one is outstanding. It made some vast amount of money in Japan, and U.S. critics are raving about it, but it probably isn't showing in your neighborhood: it's opening in ten large cities this week, a few more next week, and perhaps still more the week after that. There's a proprietary-format trailer available.

Let's get a few things out of the way first. There's both a subtitled version with Japanese audio, and an English-dubbed version. The dubbed version appears to be showing in more theaters, with the subtitled version only showing in a very few locations. I saw the subtitled one, not because I'm a purist (I usually prefer the dubbed versions so my eyes can concentrate on the animation rather than having to read), but just because it was showing at a convenient time, so I can't comment on the quality of the English dub.

The film might be too intense for very young viewers in a few places. One theater nearby has a note saying they won't allow kids under six to attend - I have no idea how they came up with that age, but there's definitely a few scenes that could be frightening to very young kids. You might want to watch it ahead of time, or at least be prepared to hold them tight.

And on to the film. It is excellent. Several of Miyazaki's other films have had themes involving the spirits of nature, and this is a continuation of those. Other tales it made me think of: Princess Mononoke, My Neighbor Totoro, Alice in Wonderland, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (Narnia in general), The Neverending Story, and the tale of Circe the Enchantress in the Odyssey. You remember Circe, don't you, the sorceress who turned Odysseus' men into pigs? No doubt if I knew more about Japanese legends I would see lots of places that Miyazaki drew from there as well.

The basic plot is simple: Chihiro's parents stumble into a place they shouldn't be, and get turned into pigs, and she must save them. I'm not going to elaborate on it because I really enjoyed discovering what was going on throughout the movie and I'd rather not spoil it for you. There's a happy ending - this isn't a Grave of the Fireflies - so you don't have to worry about your kids being permanently traumatized.

Everything about the film says that a great deal of effort was put into it. Tiny details are included in every frame of the animation. There's a pretty extensive use of CGI for rendering background man-made objects (nature backgrounds are mostly drawn), but it fits in very well with the hand-drawn art and adds rather than detracts from the movie. I don't know how I can really convey the difference between this and a typical Disney animated film... Maybe this: think about how, in the Lion King or a similar movie, there are often large swatches of a similar color taking up large parts of the screen. Oh, here's a lion, and it has three square feet of an absolutely pure tan color (which, incidentally, takes very little effort to draw). An equivalent lion in a Miyazaki film would have a hundred shades of color and streaks and details and highlights and lowlights, and it would have that in every frame that it appeared in. The colors are brighter, the whites are whiter. (Note that apparently the subtitled version I saw is being shown in a digital projection, while the dubbed version is traditional film.)

You don't have to like anime to like this movie - it will be fun for nearly all ages. It's not quite as endearing as Totoro, not quite as mystical as Mononoke (well, maybe it is, at that). But it's definitely as good as either of these. Well worth seeing in the theaters.

jwales writes: "Larry Sanger, editor-in-chief of the Nupedia and Wikipedia sister projects, has written a fabulous response on k5 to Britannica's decision to start charging fees for access. It's all about freedom (in the sense of free speech), but there are implications for freedom (in the sense of free beer)."

jwales writes: "Larry Sanger, editor-in-chief of the Nupedia and Wikipedia sister projects, has written a fabulous response on k5 to Britannica's decision to start charging fees for access. It's all about freedom (in the sense of free speech), but there are implications for freedom (in the sense of free beer)."

What started as something that looked simple -- a "double" interview with Michael Hart of the huge and venerable Project Gutenberg and Jimmy Wales of the brand-new Nupedia open content encyclopedia project -- turned into a series of interesting dissertations on the nature of copyright and online publishing, among other things. You may want to bookmark the page below and return to it a few times to grasp all that both gentlemen (especially Michael Hart) had to say.

Q1) For Mr. Hart by ContinuousPark
(cp@strangedomainname.com)

I've noticed that the Project Gutenberg site has a rather straightforward interface, you get the database queries you need but I've noticed that's not very friendly for some users; computer illiterate users that I've recommended your website to and children, for instance.

Hart:

We started so long ago that at that time all our readers were incredibly computer literate. . .so we are working from the wrong end toward the right end of the user spectrum. . .what we really need are brand new users to tell us how to make things easiest. . .our people are way too experienced to be able to see how things look to new users. This is why we request that our readers send us messages on how to improve both the sites and the Etexts.

This sort of thing has always been a problem for "new" computer users, even back 20 years ago. . .the manuals NEVER MAKE ANY SENSE until you already know what they are trying to tell you. . .and then, and only then, can you understand what they were trying to tell you in the first place.

I have been [in]famous for saying over the decades that anyone who could write a manual even HALF the people could understand would make millions. I think the DUMMIES people are at least trying in that direction. . . .

SO. . .PLEASE BE *ENCOURAGED* TO SEND US SUGGESTIONS FOR OUR INTERFACES, as well as suggestions and corrections for our Etexts and Web pages.

More of Q1)

I've also noticed that all texts are available as text-only and I understand your decision behind this.

Hart:

Actually, more and more of our Etexts are available in more formats, it's just that very often those who reformat them want the be the ONLY places to get those formats, and thus don't share back with us.

It's a little sad that way, but we have tried to honor the requests from other Etext sites that want to be the ONLY source for our Etexts in various formats. . .though we disagree with that philosophy. Some day, when I am older and crankier, perhaps I will just raid their sites against their wills for conversions that are non-copyrightable: though these days people even claim copyrights on the most trivial conversions. Someday that older and crankier me may even take them [some are major universities] to court for "misuse of copyright."

But that's hopefully a decade down the road. . .I want to concentrate on the more positive for now.

More More Q1)

So, my question has two sides: Are there any plans to build a front-end for PG that is more user-friendly; by this I mean, for instance, profiles of major authors and new acquisitions,

Hart:

My own personal goals are just to try to do two books per day, and the copyright research, and go through 100+ emails, write the Newsletters, train new volunteers, and things like that. . .I have never been very directly involved with the front-ends. . .those are all handled pretty much by the various volunteers who create and run them. I make some suggestions, and only once in a great while actually insist that the Project Gutenberg philosophy requires that certain things actually be done. . .or not done.

Some of the volunteers don't think I am bossy enough. . . .

However, we have 1700 volunteers, and some of them are ALWAYS working on new front ends, indexes, catalogues, etc. We did try doing profiles and/or synopses, but the response was pretty grim, so we probably won't try that again for a while.

More of Q1)

...featured writings each week, a section for children, personalization features so that the site recommends books for me, and so on. Are there any plans to, while always having text-only versions, also have automatically generated versions in other formats (pdf, postscript, and especially some of the new formats for eBooks or PDAs)??

Hart:

I would be happy to forward your suggestions to our volunteers, if you would like. . .we do plan on more formats, that can be automated, but the rest of your suggestions would take real human beings. . . .

Please send me anything you would like them to consider.

Yet More of Q1

I think some of these changes, just having a front page that changes everyday with new reading suggestions and lures the visitors to go and read (in the same fashion that makes people go to BN or Amazon to buy books) could make your site much more popular than it already is but how high is this on your list of priorities, if at all?

Hart:

Well, I've never been into the flashy changing front pages that require you to log in every day. . .even though we do post two new books on the average day. . .do you think we should try to announce things every day instead of every month?

We have actually been considering making a kind of electronic billboard that shows the latest handful of books, what day they were posted, etc. and eventually trying to put up similar physical billboards, if we ever get some real funding to get some real public relations going.

Until then, we're really still just a basement operation, and can only do what we can do with no money. . .which is still quite a lot. . .just not as flashy as those with billions of dollars of PR budgets. . . .

Q2) Project Gutenberg file format
by rodentia
(possum@UNSPAM.haarman.net)

I have been an avid fan of the project for as long as I've been aware of it.

Hart:

I will pass on your kind words, too!

More Q2)

My question has several parts pertaining to presentation technologies.

We're a long way from 1970 when ASCII was the only viable lingua franca for a network; is there any discussion of updating the file format for the project?

Specifically, something *ML-ish which would allow for presentation in multiple output formats. I am thinking of the spread of e-book readers and the like and increasing the potential readership. With a proper infrastructure, project texts could even be rendered to adaptive browsers with VoxML or other technologies.

Hart:

As I mentioned above, many, perhaps even most, of our titles are available in multiple formats around the world, but those who create them have not been willing for us to post them on our own sites, and I won't post them without their express permission. . .at least not yet.

More Q2)

Secondly, if the project doesn't choose to modify its longstanding ASCII formatting standards, are there efforts afoot to programmatically apply some structured tagging on-the-fly to allow for easy translation by other tools? Is this an itch I'll have scratch for myself?

Hart:

Yes, I figure we can create something like an XML file that will create other formats on the fly. . .but we try not to help create format standards, so XML might not be the one, but I plan to encourage XML experiments, and then see how our readers like it. If we get good responses, we will do even more.

I hope we can eventually support virtually all formats, though we recently tried the new .lit format [Microsoft Open Book Reader] and were pretty soundly thrashed for even posting the files one of our volunteers made without us even asking.

You should be aware that our volunteers choose 99% of what they do, totally on their own, and that they actually have to pester me to get me to give them anything like an assignment or even suggestions.

I am not so egotistical as to present this as "Michael Hart's List of the Great Books in the Formats You Should Read Them In. . .."

But I am will to try nearly all formats to see how they fly.

Wales:

At Nupedia, we are using the TEI-Lite XML dtd (or, we try to, although we need technical help) to markup the articles in a fashion that will make it easy for people to reuse our articles in all kinds of formats, from plaintext ascii to paper publishing, to hypertext, etc.

Q3) Appropriate Copyright Length?
by coldmist

Originally, copyright length was 12 years, with the option to extend it on the last year for another 12 years.

Currently, it's up to 95 years (if memory serves).

Hart:

Something like that, it might have been 14 and 14, and since they count to the end of the last year, it might have gotten close to an extra year. Now closer to 96 years. . .as per the 1998 [Sonny Bono] US Copyright Act, and no renewal is required under the new laws, so even copyright holders who have NO interest in perpetuating their monopolies still do, without cost and without effort. I think we need more "sunset laws". . .those that require things to be renewed. . .to keep us from drowning in a sea of unrequited paperwork.

More of Q3)

According to the Constitution, it was supposed to be for "limited times," but 95 years is longer than most people's average lifespan. To me, it seems that the copyright protection is effectively "forever" since odds are an average American would never (legally) get the chance to apply creative talent to make a derivative work from the Star Wars universe, for example.

Hart:

If this weren't so serious, I would be laughing [rotflol] because you could be using my own exact words here!. . .I nearly listed YOUR words as part of MY reply because they look so much like what _I_ would have said in reply!

So. . .I couldn't agree more!!!

I am inserting the quote from the US Constitution here, on copyright & patent:

"to promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries" (U.S. Constitution, Article I, Section 8).

Hmm, do you notice it doesn't say to publisher or manufacturers. . .I wonder if there would be a possible lawsuit for the cases in which the publishers get the first copyright. . .even on "works for hire". . . ?

Sadly to say, the US Supreme Court just ruled against the case I was supposed to be in [Eldred vs Reno]. . .but at least it was mostly on technical grounds. . .which leaves me possibly to still bring another totally separate case. . .but the lawyers would never let me get a single word into my own case [Hart vs Reno] so I made them take my name off of that case, which then became Eldred vs Reno].

More of Q3)

What do you consider to be an appropriate copyright length, balancing the need to pay content creators, versus the Public Domain and society's claim on it? And, if you think it should be considerably less than it is now, how does the US's Berne Convention agreement effect/influence what can be done?

Hart:

According to the librarians I know, the average book they choose to put in their libraries is out of print in only five years. Thus a five year term of copyright would be of use to only half of the materials deemed to be of great enough value to be put in a library, not counting the infinitudes of materials that never get that far.

If you continue this equation for another five years, you would protect only 1/4 of all those materials chosen for libraries, not to mention the vast majority of works NOT purchased by libraries.

After 15 years it would be 1/8.

After 20 years it would be 1/16.

This would mean that almost 95% of the materials being protected by a 20 year copyright wouldn't derive any benefit from it, while only those who had already made the most profits would benefit, at the cost of removing those 93.75% from the public domain.

This is NOT a great "cost/benefit ratio" for the public domain.

In 1900 half of all previously copyrighted information was public domain, since the copyrights had expired in about 15 years, and hardly any were ever renewed, because they were out of print.

In 2000 the rule is that there is no longer any requirement to renew copyrights, even if they went out of print six weeks after publication [which happens far more often than one might think].

If you get out a calculator, as I am doing here, you will see that 95 years gives 19 of these 5 year periods, and if every 5 years half of the remaining books in print go OUT of print. . .that would leave. . .

99.9998% of those books once selected for inclusion in libraries being out of print before their copyrights expire.

This is FAR too much copyright protection, even for Hollywood.

Do you really think even the best selling movies of this year are going to be making any real money in 2097, when their copyrights would expire even if not further extended?

Under this kind of copyright term, the Wright Brothers' plans for the first airplane would only just have become public domain, even though the patents expired around 1920....

We have laws that encourage the copying of inventions but not the copying of ideas, artwork, music, or movies.

Why is it so much more important that we have supersonic toasters than supersonic minds???

I think we should choose a copyright term that expires when mathematics tells us that 90% of the profit has been made. . .and I do NOT think that copyright terms should have been changed in mid-term.

The date a copyright expires should be set the day it is issued by the government. . .that is the ONLY way contracts can be properly made as to what authors are selling when they sell their copyrights.

All the people who made "Gone With The Wind" were paid off in 1939 based on a 28 year copyright, with a possible 28 year extension. . .and yet that copyright, which was supposedly going to expire no later than 1996, is now making untold millions of dollars more every time it is on TV, or released in a new medium, such as DVD.

Without the extra copyright extensions of 1976 and 1998, anyone could be making DVDs of "Gone With The Wind". . . and the price would be negligible. . .and so would the "windfall profits" caused by lobbying the government to void a contract with the public and replace it with one that adds another four decades to every copyright in existence in the US, and two decades in many of the other countries of the world.

I have lots more to say about copyright, if you would like me to continue in a later session.

The main thing is that four times we have had "Information Ages"

1455 Johannes Gutenberg
1900 Steam and Electric Presses
1970 Xerox
1995 Internet/World Wide Web

And each time the response has been to KILL THE "INFORMATION AGE" FOR THE MASSES by telling them that NOW THAT THEY *CAN* MAKE CHEAP COPIES. . .

WE WILL MAKE IT ILLEGAL. . . !

So, the fact that you have your own personal computer and desktop publishing system, complete with CDROM and/or DVD burner does NOT mean you can republish "Gone With The Wind". . .as anyone should have predicted in 1939. . .other than perhaps George Orwell and Aldous Huxley for the Brave New World of 1984 or the "Handicapper General" of Harrison Bergeron.

Wales:

First, I think it is fairly clear that the current situation is absurd. No one (other than some powerful publishers) is going to argue that. What's the exact right number of years? I don't know. But let's say 12-20 years, or life of the author plus 12, for starters.

As for the Berne Convention and how that might constrain the US -- well, I don't want to sound too flippant, but we're the US and we can do whatever the hell we want. We should negotiate with other countries for a sensible reduction in the length of copyrights.

Q4) Project Gutenberg acceptance in schools
by Mendenhall

I ran across a very interesting phenomenon recently with Project Gutenberg and the local public school district. My son needed a copy of "Plunkitt of Tammany Hall" for school, and it was not available without a long lead time from bookstores. I looked at Gutenberg, and found it, and printed him up a neat copy. I also printed an extra for him to give to his teacher, so students could copy it and not have to buy the book. I made it quite clear to the teacher that this was a legal operation, etc. However, my son says the teacher shelved the copy, and indicated little interest in providing it to students to copy.

Hart:

Yes, there are still many places that have a "not invented here" attitude, I have had the same thing happen when I tried to give Project Gutenberg Etexts to libraries in person. Some won't even take them, while others do as yours did, accept them, and then just take them out of circulation. However, I am happy to report that more and more libraries are just fine handing out Project Gutenberg Etexts, and other kinds, as well.

More of Q4)

It seems that free texts such as this would be the perfect thing to use in history courses, where students often buy a book, read it once, and never use it again. School systems could save the students a _lot_ of money this way, and with very little effort on the part of the teacher. Many copy places (such as Kinko's) even will handle distribution and sale of such copies to students, with no effort on the part of the teacher, and a lot more cheaply than buying a book for one use.

Hart:

It's kind of funny how many people think something is of value only if you actually paid over the counter for it.

Even the media thinks this way. . .there are many who would interview me if I had made as much as AOL or Amazon.com [hee hee], but they won't, just because I don't deal with money.

Sheesh. . . !

Just because we have given away nearly a third of a trillion Etexts is the same kind of reason to give Project Gutenberg publicity as it would be if we had made just one penny for each one we handed out. . . and had thus made $3.33 billion and were scheduled to move past The Donald in the coming decade and past Bill Gates in the next decade.

No. . .THAT would be REAL NEWS. . . .

But doing this free of charge is not the same kind of news.

More of Q4)

Do you have any idea how to convince school systems of the value of this approach? Given the large number of historical texts available, it seems that it would open the doors to teachers use of a lot more original material in classes without much effort or expense.

Hart:

Sorry, I have given up trying to "convince" anyone of anything. . . .

Unless I am asked to. . . .

The fact is that those of you who use Etexts will take a cosmic leap ahead, and leave the rest behind like Neanderthals.

Any school, city, county, state or nation that adopts the "Unlimited Distribution" model for school and other media is likely to far outstrip those of us who lag behind. . .their books will surpass all others in a matter of a few editions. . .as all the readers correct mistakes and make suggestions for improvements. . .and then write new books based on the materials in what will then be listed as the "old, first generation" Etexts they first used in schools.

The papers written in these schools will be either 10 times better, or 10 times more prolific, since it will only take 1/11th the time to do the library research. . .leaving 10 times as much time and energy to actually use in the grey matter between the ears.

Of course, the fact that the masses could get a REAL education. . . without it being spoon fed to them by bureaucracies is one of the real fears "the system" has about such free flowing information.

I mean, do we REALLY want a "well-educated population of poor people?"

Do we REALLY want a "Third World" who can defeat us at debating tables?

Or even stand on their own???

I wish I could say, or do, more on this question....

Wales:

At Nupedia, one of the things we hope to do is to make sure that we can make our information available in _many_ formats for schools. CD-Roms? Paper books? It's easy to transform XML into any of those, and so surely someone will do it, and cheap.

Q5) Commercial offshoots
by CarrotLord
(richardrussell at mail dot com)

A question for both gentlemen: Is there likely to be commercial offshoots of the Nupedia and Gutenberg Projects, similar to the way the various Linux Distributions have grown from

Linux and GNU? Are there any ways planned or envisaged for companies or individuals to profit from these open projects?

PS: note that I consider profit a good thing in general, and this is not a troll or trick question. I would like to see profitable businesses built on the free exchange of knowledge.

Wales:

One of our fondest hopes at Nupedia is that Yahoo, Google, and other major websites will license our encyclopedia and redistribute it on a massive scale. If they make money off of it, that's fine. It's the freedom that matters.

Hart:

My apologies for not giving a more detailed answer, but the truth is, if I had waited either for approval or money. . .you would never have heard of me. . . or of Project Gutenberg.

I find it VERY hard to just stop doing what I am doing right now, to try to do something that involved paperwork and money. . .just not my thing. . . .

I hope/think/believe that the world will take care of me for doing my work, but I have had little or no reason to feel the commercial world will ever make me any but the same kind of offers they always have. . .offers that overall have not been worth the time to read and reply to them.

I don't mind profit either, as you may glean from my reply to the question below about my favorite books, etc., but it is much more important, and. . . "profitable" to me in the coin of my own realm, to change/save the world, rather than spend my efforts trying to fur line my nest. . . .

So, the answer is. . .No. . .I won't be spending a lot of time trying to make a profit from Project Gutenberg. . .as I said before. . .I would be pretty happy just to make enough to pretend I had received the average salary for the past 30 years. . . .

Someone is probably going to make a billion dollars from my work, but I doubt if it's going to be me. . . .

Q6) using text in other works
by po_boy
(amoore at openschedule dot org)

It is often claimed that GPL'd code is not used in some projects because it would force the authors of the project to be more open with their code then they would like.

In short, I would like to know how you two believe this concept carries over into the content world. Is their an analogous effect, and is this type of work better or worse off than software in overcoming this effect?

More specifically, I see that the works in Project Gutenberg are primarily (all?) public domain, so they may be referenced, altered, and distributed in quite a few ways with few problems. The content in Nupedia, however, is held under a licence more like the GPL. Do you feel that this restriction will cause that content to be used less by people since it would place restrictions on the way in which they could release and distribute derivative works? As the amount of content released under the Gnu Free Documentation Licence increases, do you think that it will have as easy of a time becoming accepted and used as software released under the GPL, or do you think that the restrictive nature of the license will have a more deleterious effect on the works released under it?

Wales:

Well, I don't think there is much to be gained by giving people the opportunity to take our articles and make the proprietary. Indeed, one of the most powerful incentives that high quality academic authors have for participating in Nupedia is _precisely_ that no one can take the content and make it proprietary. It's free, and variations on it will be free.

At some point in the very near future, Britannica is going to face a whopper of a build versus buy decision. On the one hand, they can write new articles from scratch, in the old-fashioned proprietary way, which costs a lot of money. Or, on the other hand, they can use Nupedia articles _for free_. The only price is that they will have to keep in the invariant sections (crediting the Nupedia project) and that they will have to make any modifications/improvements free too.

This may cause them to not adopt as quickly. But eventually, the price becomes so high that they'd be foolish (and unprofitable) if they didn't accept our content.

Hart:

I don't get into fine print and licenses. . .I think that what we have at the top of Project Gutenberg files is way too much, but lawyers would say it is just barely enough. . .I am not a lawyer. . . .

Again, I'm sorry it's such a short answer, just not my cuppa tea. . . .

As above:

I am out to change/save the world much more than to profit from it.

If I get the median or average salary for where I live, I will be happy. . .of course. . .the back pay for that would be about a million dollars, even without interest. . . .

But I don't see how licensing our products rather than just giving them away is going to help things rather than hurt them. . . .

For NEW works one wants to share under copyright [and a few dozen of our Project Gutenberg titles ARE done this way] we have our own header. . .which is must more palatable to me than the GNU license, which is so legalese I can hardly stand to read it.

So I try to keep it as simple as possible. . . .

7) Top-10 Copyrighted works you want if you could.
by DG
(trog@SPAM-ME-NOT.wincom.net)

For Mr Hart:

If you could pick any 10 currently copyrighted works, and have them placed in the public domain (specifically for inclusion in Project Gutenberg) what would they be?

Hart:

Ooof!!!

I have avoided questions like that for 30 years. . .but since my previous few replies were so short. . .here goes. . .probably won't be 10, though.

The top three would be:

Atlas Shrugged, by Ayn Rand [Probably with Anthem and The Fountainhead] [We have already done Anthem, with the permission of the publisher.]

Dandelion Wine, by Ray Bradbury [but he told me, face to face, that he HATES Etexts, as he signed my copy of Fahrenheit 451 after I chased him down after one of his great speeches, so don't get your hopes up.]

The Man in the White Suit [Movie, 1951, Ealing Studios/BBC, starring Alec [Obi-Wan or Old Ben Kenobi] Guiness. I would PAY to get the rights to put that on the Net, if ANYONE will help me!!! Pleeeeeeeze!!!]

Well. . .anything else I would add to that list would probably be a diminution of the quality of that list. . .so I will stop there, having given away so much I have kept secret for all these years.

I never thought _I_ should choose the books for Project Gutenberg, I have always STRONGLY encouraged our 1700 volunteers to choose their own.

Wales:

Clearly, at Nupedia, we would love to see *more recent* encyclopedias hit the public domain. Some old versions of Britannica are out there -- but they are *so old* that they are practically useless as starting points for new articles.

But imagine if we could start from a "merely" 30 year old encyclopedia, and update it. It would surely make our work a lot easier.

Q8) Integration of the two projects?
by Squirrel Killer

To Jimmy Wales: How tightly to you see integrating Project Gutenberg's materials? Will you cut-and-paste sections from PG into Nupedia? Will the entry on Shakespeare link straight to PG's texts of his work?

To Michael Hart: I'm well aware of your desire to keep PG e-texts as clean ASCII with nothing linking to other projects and the like, but would you link from the PG website (not the text themselves) to the Nupedia project?

Wales:

Well, most of PG is classic books. Classic books don't really belong directly *inside* an encyclopedia. An encyclopedia is not a library. But, yes, we will certainly seek to link to as many free texts as makes sense. We might even host them on our site at some point.

Hart:

The trouble with linking is link-rot. . . .

There are hundreds, perhaps even thousands of people who have asked us to link to them, but the trouble is that most links don't last a year.

I don't know if the readers here know, but Project Gutenberg is the biggest and longest "shoestring project" in all history. . . . We just don't have anyone to monitor the links and keep them up to date. The truth is that I am sitting here in my basement, after blowing $2 on lunch for the latest Hardee's special, and answering this on a keyboard and monitor that are about 20 years old. Of the seven drives I had on this system, three are still working. . .they are all still here physically. . .it's a funny looking homebrew machine that I have to tinker with.

I have become what I always wanted to be. . .a basement inventor.

hee hee.

So. . .back to the answer. . .I don't have ANY secretary, assistant, etc., here, though our Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation has hired a 1/4 time assistant for our Trustee. I do have people who just help me when I ask, but I still answer all the phones, emails, do 99% of the copyright research, put the books online, fix the errors, and all that stuff. . . .

They will never realize how much I am doing until they have to get a dozen people to replace me. . .hee hee!

More of Q8)

As in the previous example, while browsing the various Shakespeare works, will I see a link to his biography on Nupedia?

Hart:

Nope. . .not until we have real money. . .just too much work to keep the links in working order.

More of Q8)

Personally, I think that this kind of integration is what will really add to Nupedia, as well as giving PG more value in that you can easily find out more about an author. I had been thinking about doing something like this, but just haven't had the time to do it right or the self-confidence to release what crap I did have to the outside world.

Hart:

I have the kind of self-confidence that allows me to release all sorts of mistakes to the outside world. . .I am dyslexic, but if you think I am going to run this through a spellchecker, sorry. . .I would rather work more with that time and energy on the books. . .that's my REAL goal. . . .

Well, due to the way this worked out, now three weeks later, I might run this through the spellchecker, since I had to download it to play with some of the formatting problem. . .I originally just wrote all these replies "on the fly" as I do with virtually all my email.

More Q8)

Without biasing your answers, I really think that this kind of integration would really be a boon to both projects, and show the benefits of open projects working together to create something greater than the sum of their parts.

Hart:

I LOVE interdisciplinary stuff, and would encourage this for someone who is into cross-linking things. . .it would be great.

We are making some new experimental web pages, and if I can encourage YOU. . .and anyone who would like to help you. . .I would be ***PROUD*** to give you the space to try it out. . .all you have to do is put:

***UNDER CONSTRUCTION***

and then no one can complain that it's not perfect.

I learned a LONG time ago to stop trying to be perfect.

Most of the academic world never seems to learn this.

When I was a perfectionist, my grades were just a low B+, A's in math and science, B's in nearly everything else, a few C's in Latin and German, one in art. . .I love art, but it was years before I had the patience to be good at it.

Before then my best semester in school was half A's and half B's, and that was only because half my classes then were math/science, where I could PROVE I was right. . .hee hee.

Once I decided to just BARELY get the A's, I not only got straight A's, but graduated from one of the great universities in only two years, and since I learned this before I got any grades there. . .I was #1.

Hmmm. . .it's important to know that trying for perfection is not very efficient. . .so I have to leave this in, but it's another thing I have kept out of the public eye for nearly 30 years.

I wonder if you realize how open I am being with my answers?

I have never put any of the personal things in ANY of my interviews before.

Q9) problems?
by Xeo2

are either of you worried about possibly erroneous submissions, whether it be a made up encyclopedia article, or badly translated public domain texts?In addition, what will the final forms of both of your products be? CD/DVD or internet? If internet will there be some kind of registration required?

Wales:

Nupedia is an open community. We welcome anyone to join our mailing lists and to pitch in to help out. We have an open review process in which _anyone_ can engage in the process of forming a community consensus about an article. This process really works well -- we're very proud of the articles that we've produced so far. It is certainly more rigorous than that applied by any conventional proprietary encyclopedia.

Hart:

We get error messages all the time that help us create better products, and we LOVE getting them. Most of the time only one person has to spot an error and it's fixed before another runs into it.

THAT's one of the GREAT things about Etexts.

And with comparison programs, you can EASILY see the differences between two Etexts, so you know something is going on, and exactly where it is. . .even if only a period is changed to a comma.

I'm sorry, but I'm a "seat of the pants" kind of professor. . .a "street" professor. . .as I often call myself. . .my only real goal is to get the most books to the most people. . .I'm not going to be the one arguing about whether Hamlet is saying:

"To be or not to be."
"To be, or not to be."
"To be; or not to be."
or
"To be: or not to be."

To me that is just arguing about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. . .or was it on a pinhead?

You'd be surprised how many great thinkers were tricked into years of speculation on that question. . . .

Q10) Opposition from the 'For Pay' industry?
by Bonker

Have you had any overt opposition from the 'For Pay' publishing industries? If so, what is it like. Do you expect legal challenges?

Hart:

We have had several legal challenges, from some famous publishers, but since we do our copyright research VERY carefully, we were able to send them packing without much effort.

Some of them, including Merriam-Webster, were VERY kind, as was Caxton, about Ayn Rand's "Anthem," as mentioned above.

We have had several hostile takeover attempts, but since we don't legally exist as an entity, it's hard to take us over. We are all volunteers. It's equally hard to take over our non-profit foundation that hopefully will be supporting us soon.

Presently, contributions are only being solicited from people in: Texas, Nevada, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, South Dakota, Iowa, Indiana, and Vermont. As the requirements for other states are met, additions to this list will be made and fund raising will begin in the additional states. These donations should be made to the "Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation" and mailed to:

Project Gutenberg Literary Archive
Foundation
PMB 113
1739 University Ave.
Oxford, MS 38655-4109

International donations are accepted, but we don't know ANYTHING about how to make them tax-deductible, or even if they CAN be made deductible, and don't have the staff to handle it even if there are ways.

Wales:

We think they are ignoring us, hoping we'll go away. We won't. :-)

11) Encyclopaedias are obsolete
by JCCyC
(j[CUBAN-DICTATOR'S-SURNAME]@ap[3.141592].com.br)

What do you think of the idea of Open Textbooks? For example, books on World History, Biology, Math, Physics etc. that can be used in high schools and for which no copy restrictions are in place? Schools and/or parents and/or students would be able to print the book themselves at a fraction of the cost. Maybe the result wouldn't be so nice-looking, but it would be effective.

Hart:

_I_, personally, think all textbooks should be contracted as "works for hire" so they would be government documents free of copyright. I am not a lawyer, so I don't know if I used exactly the right term. . .but I think textbooks should be contracted to become public domain when they are written. . . . This would stop all that silliness about changing the page numbers and a few words here and there so the old editions are hard to use alongside the new ones. . . . I'm sure you know what I mean, but if not, let me know, and I will try a few examples.

This would also eliminate the need for millions of students to sit down at the start of every year and put in the same corrections as millions have done for years before, when the answers in the back are wrong. . .which they seem to be. . .all too often.

Etextbooks can be corrected all at once, you just put in your disk and get the corrected copy. . .saving the old one as insurance against 1984ism.

More of Q11)

Think schools in poor neighborhoods, or in the Third World. Think cheap, fast inkjet printers. Think a central repository (or a number thereof) whose contents is certified as "Good For Schools" by some reputable academic body, govt-ran or not.

Hart:

Actually, inkjet printing is still way to slow and way too expensive, I prefer the $13.88 reader I described above. . .why bother with "dead tree editions" at all. . .the new generations will think that flipping through thousands of paper sheets per year is silly when you could just search them ALL in one single minute. . .and then quote them perfectly in one second. . .leaving all the time and energy for the REAL WORK. . .WHICH GOES ON BETWEEN THE EARS!!!

However, I do recognize that many people still find paper easier, but just as with cellphones enabling Third World countries to start a GREAT phone system without the billions spent on wires, I think they could also start GREAT publishing empires without the millions spent on paper printing.

Why not Etext readers as ubiquitous as cellphones?!?!?!?!?!?!?

Wales:

I'm all for it. Indeed, the Nupedia encyclopedia might be viewed as one cornerstone of a more global Universal Encyclopedia, which would include textbooks, etc.

At Nupedia, we've decided to _not_ be idle visionaries and dreamers. We view what we are doing as being similar (in the content side) to what the FSF did many years ago with the beginnings of GNU software. We tackle just what we can actually accomplish _today_. You don't start out writing an operating system from scratch. First you write an editor. You write the 'ls' command. You write a mail program. And so on like that.

We're starting with a goal that can actually be accomplished and have a major impact in just 3-5 years time! After that, we surely expect that the energy of the project, and the lessons we have learned about software, etc., to generate dozens of spinoffs in all directions.

------

[Jimmy Wales also "asked and answered" two questions of his own about Nupedia - ed.]

-1) "What's the deal with Nupedia and 'Gnupedia'?"

Hector, who started the 'gnupedia' project recently wrote this on his mailing list:

"Now, the FSF's plans are give all the support to the Nupedia project. So Nupedia will become the official GNU encyclopedia."

-0) "Nupedia seems to be too centralized and slow moving for me. I understand the need for quality control, but wouldn't it make more sense to have a more bazaar-type free encyclopedia project?"

Maybe so! People who want to get started _today_ on contributing free texts to the world can do so at Wikipedia. All the content is released under the GNU FDL, and it already has over 1000 articles. Short, and maybe not the high quality of Nupedia, but with time? Who knows...

------

Michael Hart's answers are (C)2000 by Michael S. Hart