Brion VIBBER wrote:
Nupedia may well be wonderful, but I have zero interest in it. I first heard of it a few months before I got involved in Wikipedia; I went to the site, browsed through the FAQs, and got the distinct impression that I wasn't welcome unless I had a PhD.
Let me tell you my story. :-)
I completed all the coursework, but no dissertation, in two different PhD programs in finance. (What happened was, I finished one program's coursework and then got accepted to a much more prestigious program and so left the first one with a master's degree.)
I specialized in option pricing theory, and published an academic paper in a real journal. This was not an important contribution to the literature, mind you, but it was a respectable enough publication for a grad student.
Then I worked for a few years as a futures and options trader in Chicago.
So at Nupedia, I volunteered to write a short biography of Robert Merton, a founder of option pricing theory and a winner of the Nobel prize. This is a simple sort of article, anyone could write it, even a complete nonexpert. For someone with my level of knowledge, it would be nothing at all.
When I sat down to write the article, though, I was seized with horrible writer's block. That's astounding, for a guy who does hardly anything but write 8 hours a day 5 days a week. If my collected email output were collected and published in book format, I hate to think of what it must weigh.
The fact is, I was intimidated by the sheer snobbery and credentialism of Nupedia.
And *I* had an inside track. The editor-in-chief worked for me. Everyone on the project knew who I was. I could expect to be given softball reviews and easy acceptance. Even so, I found the process just intimidating enough to find excuses not to write that simple article.
--Jimbo