The New Encyclopedia Salesmen

Industry Standard, The, Nov 27, 2000 by Mark Frauenfelder

Like other open-source projects, Nupedia's license lets anyone use its content for free -- as long as the licensee credits Nupedia as the source and allows the site to freely distribute the content. "Anybody will be able to offer Nupedia content on CDs for just the price of production," adds Sanger. Bomis hopes to make money by selling ad space on Nupedia.com. But even if Nupedia doesn't pan out financially, notes Sanger, its open-source roots will keep it going as a purely volunteer initiative.

Sanger hopes that Nupedia's unpaid writers, peer reviewers and editors will participate for the chance to be recognized. More than 80 editors and peer reviewers, most of whom hold doctorates, have been enlisted so far.

"It's an excellent addition to their resume because it's a peer-reviewed project," says Sanger. "The sort of cachet associated with being involved in this project is going to be very high." And if that's not enough, any one whose article is published gets a T-shirt or a coffee mug.

THE EVERYTHING ADVENTURE GAME

Recognition of a decidedly less-tweedy nature is what fuels Everything2. Started in November 1999 by the same folks who created Slashdot, the "news for nerds site," Everything2's mission is to "catalog all human knowledge and show the interconnections between all the people, places, things and ideas." The site receives about 1,000 new user-written articles each day -- how to blow up a building with a sack of flour and two rounds of ammunition, a family tree of the Greek gods and a review of the new Blair Witch movie are some examples.

Slashdot was built on an ingeniously simple idea: Build a Web site pointing to tech-related articles, and let readers talk about them in the message boards. Like talk radio -- where hearing callers' opinions inspires other listeners to chime in -- Slashdot has become something of a speakers' corner for all matters of geekly importance. The concept behind Everything2 is equally simple.

Nathan Oostendorp and his former college roommate Rob Malda got the idea for Everything2 after looking at deep databases like the Internet Movie Database (Imbd.com) and All Music Guide (Allmusic.com). They decided they could make a similar database that wasn't targeted to a specific subject. "Initially, we were thinking this would overtake Imdb and All Music Guide," says Oostendorp, "because it would be definitive for everything and exclude nothing." Indeed, the database filled up with entries that wouldn't make it in a standard encyclopedia, such as party invitations and musings on Razor-brand scooters.

Like H2g2, anybody who signs up on Everything2 can write articles on any subject. But on Everything2, the more you write, the more power you get. The site "operates like a Dungeons and Dragons game, except instead of slaying monsters you're writing little essays," adds Oostendorp in casting-call geekspeak. "As you ascend levels, you get experience points, you get new powers and you get access to features in the software."

Twenty-eight-year-old Jhasen Cooper, a telecommunications company employee who goes by the handle "Lawnjart" on Everything2, says the site was "the midwife of the rebirth of my desire to write." The positive feedback he gets from writing pieces for the site is more rewarding than the way he wrote before: jotting his "thoughts and poems in notebooks on sticky tables in all-night coffee joints and restaurants."