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 had met in online forums dedicated to philosophy and objectivism, that a policy of non-bias while assembling knowledge was important. The Ph.D. thesis Sanger was working on at the time, in fact, related to the nature of knowledge. His work encompassed the classic questions of epistemology: What is knowledge, how is knowledge acquired, and what do people know? His doctorate thesis was titled "Epistemic Circularity: An Essay on the Problem of Meta-Justification." In jargon only a philosopher could love, he described it simply as:
Everybody thinks they know stuff, but how do we show that we know that we know, without going around forever in circles? Or, suppose we wanted to show that what we see, hear, touch, etc., was real. How could we do it without using those same senses?
Compared to that, building an encyclopedia from scratch must have seemed a much easier task.
The three of them were attracted to objectivism for a reason. The objectivist stance is that there is a reality of objects and facts independent of the individual mind. By extension, a body of knowledge could be assembled that was considered representative of this single reality. Put simply, objectivity relates to what is true, rather than ruling whether something is true or false. And their encyclopedia could detail what is true in the world without judgments. Sanger would put it this way: "Neutrality, we agreed, required that articles should not represent any one point of view on controversial subjects, but instead fairly represent all sides."
They saw the Nupedia project as turning objectivist theory into practice; the theory would be the guiding principle to pull it together.
Sanger was determined that even with an open source spirit, Nupedia, like traditional encyclopedias, would require both "management by experts and an unusually rigorous process." Sanger and Wales both saw this as a logical step, as nothing so far in the history of the field informed them otherwise.
As work started in February 2000, Sanger started to draft the operating principles of Nupedia. It would use email correspondence to communicate with volunteers, and he would tap his years of connections in academia and the online world to find them. The idea was to attract a core set of Ph.D.s, professors, and highly experienced professionals to be contributors and editors.
