User:Sj/WQ3

Retro items

Chat w/Magnus

via email

Chat w/jwales

1) How did the initial transition to using a wiki work out?

There was some question as to whether the nupedia people would have taken to the idea of the new wikipedia or not. If we had (used the old domain name) on that fateful day when we were implementing the new wiki, I think it might have worked out, and the project could still be calle Nupedia.

2) Any thoughts spurred by sanger's memoir, pub via slashdot? http://features.slashdot.org/features/05/04/18/164213.shtml?tid=95&tid=149&tid=9

I remember Jeremy Rosenfeld was the first person who showed me wiki software, in mid-december. I tried to find Jeremy... was trying to find a lot of people to colelct early stories... emailed Larry, asked if he had old emails, etc; think it would be really itnersting to go back and look at some of the early debates on nupedia, about openness and things like that, based on what we know now. But I don't thnk those archives exist anywhere. [do they?]

3) how much dev time went into the early versions of wikipedia? when did people realize there would be a real fork of usemod, and that it wouldn't just be wikipedia as a motivating force to get usemod developed?

There was a time when magnus was starting to do work; jw said to the usemod guy, 'we want to turn this into a bigger package...' he didn't have the time, and wanted to keep usemod easy to install and lightweight, so he said "ok, that's fine" and magnus ended up rewriting the whole thing to use the database.

4) was there ever an early effort to publish individual articles from nupedia? from wikipedia? journals, etc.

No.

5) was there ever interest from the gnu project to help support the nupedia/wpedia development? did some of the contributors come from there?

Not directly... early on, when we had a dust-up about Nupedia, and the license -- we were sort of informal about the license, and we had a sort of home-grown license; but there were so few people working on it, we just knew we had to do something about the license. We adopted the FDL, b/c there were concerns from people, and a poentially competing project, GNUpedia. once we got going, the FSF made the link on their site to endorse us, more or less.

6) first memorable interview

There was a NYT interview, calling me on 9/11 2001... and it was not about the event... just a routine story for Circuits. the woman called; I said "gosh, isn't there other enws to cover?" and she said, "well, we still have to produce a paper." [But afterwards, it was exciting, because this was the first time the Times had written about us.]

7) Memorable events -- 9/11 - there were no articles on WTC, pentagon, the architect... people were just online all day, filing out all this information. That was a fantastic interaction in the community..

N) early suggestions: separating web server from db server.

3 machines; christmas crash... nobody was around for 3 days; fortunately traffic was low for the holidays.

there had been lots of tech problems before; as the project grew, the site would get slow. when we got our first dual athlon machine, and we were so excited...

Other sources

Try Hober (IRC) / Ted O'connor.   worked for jwales a loong time ago, and was There.   
Also Ruth Ifcher, of course.