by the end of its first year, Nupedia had only 21 articles approved under the aggressive vetting process; clearly, a better solution was needed.

It was Sanger, then, who synthesized emerging "wiki" technology with Nupedia's original vision. Sanger came up with the name "Wikipedia," wrote its founding documents

The one thing that these people all mostly had in common is libertarianism.

by the summer of 2000, it had become clear that the process we tested out [for making articles on Nupedia] was very slow. And the number of articles that had been finished were few.

Ben explained what he had been doing in his spare time, spending a lot of time on wikis [a website which can be edited directly from the web browser, by anyone].

I started inviting the first few people to go there and make their [contributions]. When the Nupedia advisory board mailing list [found out], they thought the idea was just absolutely ridiculous. They didn't want to have anything to do with anything called a "wiki."

One of the things that we did, that perhaps people don't give us much credit for, is that we changed the way that wikis are used.

Because [Wikipedia] was wide open, and anybody could participate, there were people who would spent a lot of their time wasting everyone else's time.

One thing that I would have done, could have done, and should have done right away would be to create a process whereby articles were approved by experts. Some sort of tagging system, something lightweight, something Web 2.0, that would enable experts to bless certain articles as credible.

some of the policy choices that we made were definitely the right ones. I think the neutrality policy is absolutely instrumental, for example. The changes that we made to the way that wikis work was instrumental.