Q & A about Nupedia

Originally I wrote this interview for the benefit of journalists.  But, after answering a number of questions members and others had about the project, I thought it would be best to post the "interview" on the website.  I hope you find it useful.

Q. On the front page of the Nupedia website, you ask this question: "Suppose scholars the world over learned of a serious online encyclopedia effort in which the results were not proprietary to the encyclopedists, but were freely distributable under an open content license in virtually any desired medium.  How quickly would the encyclopedia grow?"  What is your answer?

A. I think our basic idea is extremely exciting, and I think many people will share this excitement once they have understood it.  Once a critical mass is achieved, I think the encyclopedia will grow quickly.

Our proposal is to organize a worldwide group of scholars who have agreed to create encyclopedia articles on virtually everything, and their efforts will be freely distributable under an "open content" license.  This means that, with competent direction and adequate publicity and marketing (though we expect word-of-mouth to go far), Nupedia has a good chance of growing quickly and to enormous proportions.

Q. Can you explain what you mean by this "open content" stuff?  What does "open content" mean?  Does it mean the encyclopedia is free?

A. First of all, Nupedia.com will always be free for readers.  And the content will be open to use, free of charge, by other websites, books, and other media, so long as they abide by certain simple rules.  If you want a really clear understanding of what "open content" means, I'd encourage you to read our actual open content license.  The license allows anyone to take our content and do whatever they please with it; they simply have to credit us as the source and not attempt to alter it and make the resulting material proprietary themselves.  In other words, we want to be known as the source of Nupedia material, and we don't want anyone to start charging people for versions of material that we ourselves never charged people for in the first place.

In practice what this means is that the editor (or, one of the editors) of our anthropology material might simply republish the entire contents of that section as a cheap $25 hardcover print encyclopedia of anthropology.  Or webmistress Jill can swipe what our writers have produced on the topics of rugby, lemming cliff-diving, and Caligula, cleverly alter the contents of the articles, and build a humorous website around that.  Or Yahoo! or Infoseek might want to add an encyclopedia feature, using Nupedia articles without paying us for them.  We wouldn't mind; in fact, we would be delighted if they did.  They would simply have to link to Nupedia.com on each page on which they used Nupedia material.

Q. That's all very interesting, but can you seriously expect to get many people interested on a purely volunteer basis?

A. We won't know until we try, but really I believe we can expect this.  What's important to understand is that this is an open content endeavor.  Within five days after our initial press release, Nupedia gained 500 members, and a significant minority of those have Ph.D.'s or are bona fide experts in their fields.

The history of "open source" projects is very important to observe in this connection.  The Linux operating system is a good example.  Linus Torvalds, the "creator" of Linux, posted a message on the Internet saying that he was making the source code for a Unix-like kernel available to programmers to comment on, further develop, etc.  Linux came to be developed and supported by thousands of programmers, and their numbers are still growing.

Bear in mind that programmers are busy, extremely well-paid professionals; nonetheless, thousands of them have spent countless hours doing difficult programming and documentation without being paid for it.  What on earth induced them to work without compensation?  The fact that Linus Torvalds had made the source code for Linux available on an "open source" basis; anyone could take it, use it, alter it, etc., so long as they did not attempt to make it proprietary (i.e., so long as they didn't try to stop other people from taking it, using it, altering it, etc.).

So the Linux programmers rightly felt themselves to be important participants in a public effort.  The results would be available free of charge, the participants were able to enter and exit the development project at will, and what they were creating was of superlative usefulness; so they had no trouble about contributing their effort without compensation.

I think that there are, potentially, more scholars and experts, the world over, qualified and interested in contributing to Nupedia than there are programmers who are interested in developing Linux.  But there are many thousands of Linux developers.  So it seems reasonable to suppose there will be many thousands of Nupedia contributors.

For another example, have a look at www.dmoz.org, the Open Directory Project, which has developed an enormous web directory along the lines of Yahoo!.  They have enlisted the help of tens of thousands of volunteer links-gatherers, whose annotated links are picked up, free of charge, by some major web portals.

Q. How is Nupedia going to make money to support the project, anyway?

A. Primarily by selling banner ads, eventually. Not right away; we want to drive traffic up to the point where it makes sense to sell ads.

Q. Well, what's stopping me from taking every bit of Nupedia content and putting it up on a website that doesn't have any banner ads?

A. Nothing whatsoever.  We'd be delighted if you would.  It ultimately means more traffic, prestige, etc., for us, as well as a better encyclopedia.  We might do that ourselves on nupedia.org.

Q. You say you want to make this an "unbiased" encyclopedia.  Aren't you being naive?

A. I don't think so.  I think that, given the way we're planning to edit the encyclopedia, a relative lack of bias is actually a natural outcome.  You see, we want to have our writers post articles to subject area review groups -- which will be set up as e-mail discussion groups -- which then evaluate the articles for accuracy, completeness, style, and of course bias.  Naturally, if the proponent of a controversial view slants an article in such a way as to make his view look better than the others, representatives of the other views will be on hand to ask him to tone it down, to include arguments in favor of other views, etc.  We will also have a strong system in place in which the public may comment on entries, including on any perceived bias.  In addition to the balancing effects of this overall process, it will be Nupedia policy, which we will expect area editors and peer reviewers to help enforce, not to favor any one of several controversial views in articles.

Of course, we may not be able to satisfy everyone as regards the representation of their lovely pet views and of nasty evil opposing views.  But at least everyone can be equally dissatisfied!

Q. But what does it mean to be "unbiased," anyway?

A. The concept relevant to an encyclopedia seems perfectly non-mysterious.  When on a given topic there are several different views worth mentioning (and, eventually anyway, we will aim for inclusiveness in this regard), one presents each as clearly and sympathetically as possible.  The article author states that adherents of view A believe such-and-such, while those taking view B believe so-and-so; the author does not state such-and-such or so-and-so except by way of referring to others' views.  Eventually, arguments and objections regarding each view are supplied, stated clearly, politely, and with a minimum of fallacy (as much as the arguments themselves allow).

There are other opportunities for bias to rear its ugly head.  For instance, an author might conveniently exclude a particularly distasteful minority view on a subject, or word the description of the view in a particularly unflattering light, which makes certain damning objections patently obvious.  In all such cases the principle to follow is not to include or exclude or describe views in such a way as to imply that the author accepts or rejects the view in question.

Of course, it is usually important to state which views are now (or were at some time) in favor or no longer in favor.  But even this information can be imparted in such a fashion as not to imply that the majority view is correct, or even that it has any more presumption in its favor than is implied by the plain fact of its popularity.

Q. How are you going to choose area editors?

A. We intend first to amass a body of experts in an area and consult them for nominations and recommendations.  We will ourselves make the final choice for any of our top-level editors, but we intend to listen very closely to the experts' recommendations.

Q. Can you really expect to get top-flight editors for this work, if they're volunteers?

A. We'll see, but I think there's a decent chance of it.  For better or worse, very much of academic work is essentially unpaid.  It bears pointing out that the editors will not be responsible for much difficult copyediting, fact checking, etc., which can be left to the review groups.  The editors, theoretically anyway, might simply have the responsibility of accepting or rejecting (with recommendations for revision) submitted articles.  The articles could then be inputted into the Nupedia database.

Q. How will articles be assigned?

A. This will be ultimately left to editors, but what I suspect will eventually happen is that, if a person evidently has adequate credentials to write on a given topic, and volunteers to write an article, the topic will be assigned to that person forthwith.  The author will receive a byline and a biographical page on Nupedia.  If, however, to our delight, we amass many hundreds of experts in each category, so that on any given topic there is more than one person both willing and able to write an article, the editor's job will be that much more difficult, it seems.  If a group grows too large, of course, it will be spawn subgroups.

Q. The general concept behind Nupedia is intriguing, but there remains one question that should keep anyone from getting too excited about it: why is there a need for another encyclopedia?  Aren't there already quite enough excellent encyclopedias?

A. There are a number of ways in which Nupedia has the potential of becoming unique.

Nupedia may well end up with a broader base of contributors than any encyclopedia in history.  Moreover, it is hypertext, and online.  Hence it is in principle infinitely expandable.  So, our ambition for Nupedia is for it to become the largest -- broadest, deepest, and most up-to-date -- encyclopedia in history.  Where Britannica might have 1000 words on a given relatively obscure subject in the history of science, Nupedia might, in the fullness of time, have a treatise.

In addition to this, the mere fact of its being a public endeavor, and the results of publicly-accessible discussions among experts online, has, as I said, the potential for distinguishing Nupedia for its lack of bias.

Finally, we at Nupedia are probing the viability of a system (dependent on useful features of the XML markup language) whereby content from one article can be automatically placed into another article.  For instance, suppose we had written articles on most major figures throughout the history of philosophy.  Then an ethicist might be able to construct a history of ethics by drawing from the ethics parts of each of those articles; an introduction, conclusion, and comparative material would be added, but the bulk of the article would already be written.  Moreover, whenever material was updated in one area of the encyclopedia, that same material would be automatically updated wherever it occurred in the other articles.

If we do manage to implement this feature (it's by no means certain we will), it will obviate the necessity of deciding whether, for instance, to file the history of European theater under European history or under the performing arts.  The same material can be placed in both headings, surrounded by material appropriate to put it into the desired context.