Lensepedia

Lensepedia was an El Kadsreian wiki-based Internet encyclopedia, launched in 1984. It was one of the first-ever wikis and a predecessor to Wikipedia.

History
Lensepedia launched on July 11, 1984, created by Curtis Hawkins. It was one of the first wikis (websites that anyone can edit). It originally used its own copyright license, the Lensepedia License, before changing to the GNU Free Documentation License in 1992.

Lensepedia was originally a for-profit site with advertising. In 1989, Lensepedia switched to a donation-based non-profit model, backed by the Lensepedia Organization, after several advertisers left the site in the aftermath of the assassination of Michael Vlokozu.

In 1991, the Lensepedia software backend was released as LenseWiki, the first wiki engine to be publicly available, under the GNU GPL.

In 1994, Ward Cunningham, a high-profile editor, left Lensepedia due to clashes with volunteer admins, and created his own wiki site, known as WikiWikiWeb.

Lensepedia had a downfall starting in 1999, due to the admin team, as well as the Lensepedia Organization, being accused of having a pro-El-Kadsreian and Vlokist bias. Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger left the site in 2001 to form their own wiki encyclopedia, known as Wikipedia. Lensepedia kept losing more and more users to Wikipedia, and the team developing the LenseWiki software left in 2002, forming a fork known as MediaWiki. Wikipedia and the Wikimedia Foundation also attracted users with multilingual versions and sister projects, as Lensepedia was only available in English and had no sister projects.

On July 11, 2004 (its 20th anniversary), Lensepedia abruptly ceased operations, and its entire article database was donated to the Wikimedia Foundation, which integrated it into Wikipedia. The lensepedia.org.ek domain now redirects to en.wikipedia.org.