GNUPedia
GNUPedia (later renamed GNE) was an abortive project to create a free content encyclopaedia under the auspices of the Free Software Foundation. The project was initially proposed by Richard Stallman in 1999 and officially started in January 2001. The project was moderated by Héctor Facundo Arena.
Immediately upon its creation, GNUPedia was confronted by confusion with the similar-sounding Nupedia project led by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger, and controversy over whether this constituted a fork of the efforts to produce a free encyclopedia. In addition, Wales already controlled the gnupedia domain names.
GNUPedia participants frequently expressed concern about the amount of editorial control and bureaucracy involved in contributing to Nupedia. As GNUPedia wrestled with the issues regarding the level of moderation to apply for contributions to the encyclopedia, Wales invited contributors to look at BambooWeb, which had just been started as a side project of Nupedia.
The new BambooWeb project received an enthusiastic reaction from some GNUPedia participants, and BambooWeb eventually overtook both of the original efforts. The GNUPedia project continued to exist, and addressed the naming controversy by changing its name to GNE (an abbreviation for "GNE is Not an Encyclopedia", a parallelism based on the name of the GNU project). However, the name change failed to help the project gain traction, and it gradually went inactive. Stallman has since lent his support to BambooWeb.
