The greatest defunct Web sites and dotcom disasters

Nupedia (2000-2003; precursor to Wikipedia)

We're all familiar with Wikipedia -- one of the world's most visited Web sites. But it wasn't the first iteration of a free, open-source, collaborative online encyclopaedia.

Jimmy Wales initiated the pre-Wikipedia project, dubbed Nupedia, by assigning Larry Sanger -- now an ex-Wikipedian and founder of Wikipedia competitor Citizendium -- as site leader, as Wales "was specifically interested in finding a philosopher to lead the project," reminisces Sanger in an article on Slashdot.

Nupedia's first article concerned 'atonality', and was the first to pass through the early Nupedian system of submitting articles through mailing lists, as the site itself was not live at this point. When it eventually was, it looked nothing like Wikipedia but functioned in a similar fashion. Except for one key difference: articles had to be reviewed by editors before being posted.

Editorial control
This is the fundamental difference between Nupedia and what is now Wikipedia: the latter allows anyone to edit articles without so much as registering an email address, or create entirely new articles after a simple registration.

It was this difference that provoked Sanger to leave Wikipedia and start the aforementioned rival -- Citizendium -- for which articles go through a screening process and are written by certified academics and similar individuals. It's this difference that helped Wikipedia generate a total of over 6.5 million articles when counting just the 10 most popular languages on the site, whereas Citizendium offers around 6,500 (and only in English).

Nupedia closed in 2003, soon after Wikipedia passed its two-year anniversary, and is now dormant.