Wikipedia

Nupedia’s Rules (Wikipedia)

The first issue they tackled was the question of "bias" in the encyclopedia. If the project welcomed volunteers from the Internet, they were going to have a variety of viewpoints and opinions. The encyclopedia would have to find a way to integrate those differing points of view. It was immediately clear to the three, who […]

The Nupedians (Wikipedia)

Ruth Ifcher cannot remember exactly when she first learned of Nupedia, but one thing she does remember—it was Sanger’s infectious enthusiasm that hooked her on the project. A computer programmer by day, and a former copy editor and holder of several higher degrees, Ifcher was someone Sanger depended on in his early editorial team. While […]

WIKI ORIGINS (Wikipedia)

Nupedia was at a standstill at the end of 2000, even though it had gathered a sizeable set of volunteers. Larry and Jimmy knew their concept was not working, because after a year’s worth of work, all the finished articles bound together would have produced only a booklet. Still believing the project had to be […]

Ward’s Start (Wikipedia)

How do people become smart? It’s a strange question, but it’s driven Ward Cunningham his whole life. He’s always been interested in smart people, and finding how they become that way has defined his career. The congenial Indiana native with a laid-back Midwestern manner grew up in an era before the Internet, but remembers the […]

HyperCard’s Inspirations (Wikipedia)

The Internet had been around since the early 1980s, as the TCP/IP networking standard had made it easy to patch together separate networks run by various research corporations and universities. But utilizing the Internet in the early days was not a user-friendly experience. You had to know how to use a "command line" interface to […]

A Web Browser (Wikipedia)

If we look under the hood of a Web browser, we see that it’s a pretty simple piece of software—it transfers a Web page from a computer on the Internet, known as a server; reads through the contents for images, sound, or other components; and downloads each of those elements. Those parts are then assembled […]

Viola (Wikipedia)

Shipping HyperCard for free on Macs inspired a whole generation of programmers with the power of hypermedia, even if it didn’t generate any significant revenue for Apple. In 1989, University of California at Berkeley student Pei-Yan Wei played around with HyperCard and was impressed with Apple’s giveaway tool. "HyperCard was very compelling back then, you […]

HyperCard Revisited (Wikipedia)

In September 1987, HyperCard intrigued Cunningham, but his work at Tektronix would lead him to study how people design software, and he started to write about something called "pattern languages." Until then, developing software was still considered a complicated and cumbersome task—lots of complexities and intricacies that relied on a guru programmer to work out. […]

WIKI INTRODUCED (Wikipedia)

After both Larry Sanger and Jimmy Wales found out about WikiWikiWeb software and its use for collaboration, both were keen on it helping kick-start Nupedia’s lackluster pace. Nupedia was simply not working, because people were not collaborating efficiently and articles were not being generated fast enough. The wiki software might just get existing Nupedians to […]

Slashdotting (Wikipedia)

If there was ever a salon for the technical elite and a grand senate of the computing community, it was Slashdot.org. Started originally as a user-contributed news site, Slashdot boldly proclaims as its pedigree: "News for nerds. Stuff that matters." It lists significant technology stories in a blog format to foster discussion, but it started […]

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