In early February 2000, Larry Sanger, a philosopher finishing his PhD, arrived in San Diego to build a free online encyclopedia. The idea was Jimmy Wales’s; the money came from Bomis, an internet company where Wales was a partner. The project was called Nupedia.
Sanger wanted it to be credible, and credibility, he believed, required experts. Nupedia’s Advisory Board, mostly professors with PhDs, agreed on what Sanger later called “an extremely rigorous seven-step system” for getting each article through review. The first article to make it all the way through, on atonality, was published in June or July 2000.
By the fall of 2000, Sanger and Wales agreed the process was too slow. Sanger wrote several proposals for a simpler, more open system. By his account, Wales turned them down because each needed more programming than Bomis could pay for.
On January 2, 2001, at a Mexican restaurant in Pacific Beach, an old internet friend, Ben Kovitz, explained Ward Cunningham’s WikiWikiWeb to him: web pages that anyone can start and edit. Sanger wrote up a proposal that night or the next morning. Setting up a wiki was very simple and needed no new programmer, so, as Sanger put it, “Jimmy could scarcely refuse.” As Sanger recalls it, Wales liked the idea but was skeptical at first. So was Sanger.
The plan was modest. The wiki would let the public develop content that could be fed into Nupedia’s review. It went live on January 10. Then it turned out that a clear majority of the Advisory Board wanted nothing to do with it. So the wiki got its own domain name, and on January 15, 2001, it relaunched as Wikipedia.
“Who could reasonably guess that it would work?” Sanger wrote later. By the end of January it had roughly 600 articles. There were 1,300 in March, 2,300 in April and 3,900 in May, and the rate of growth was rising. As Wikipedia succeeded, Wales asked Sanger to spend more and more of his time on it.
Nupedia got a probe of its own that summer: the Nupedia Chalkboard, a closely managed wiki meant as a simpler way to develop articles for Nupedia. It went largely unused. By the winter of 2001, Nupedia had published approved versions of only about 25 articles, with many more drafts in the pipeline. Wikipedia announced 20,000 articles just after its first anniversary.
Not everything that grew was what Sanger wanted. Early on, he and Wales had agreed not to throw anyone out except in extreme cases, a “hands off” policy he had meant as provisional. He later wrote that it hardened into “a difficult-to-change tradition” of tolerating disruptive contributors. Bomis was losing money in the tech recession. Sanger’s salary was cut that winter, and after a month without pay he resigned.