The nLab was originally conceived to provide a repository for ideas (and even new research) generated in the comments on posts at the n-Category Café, a group blog run (at the time) by John C. Baez, David Corfield and Urs Schreiber.
[3] An experimental sub-project of the nLab is the Publications of the nLab, intended as a journal for refereed research articles that are published online and cross-hyperlinked with the main wiki: this sub-project appears to be inactive as of 2014.
[4] The nLab was set up on November 28, 2008 by Urs Schreiber using the Instiki software provided and maintained by Jacques Distler.
Since May 2015 it runs on a server at Carnegie Mellon University that is funded in the context of Steve Awodey's Homotopy Type Theory MURI grant.
The nLab is listed on MathOverflow as a standard online mathematics reference to check before asking questions.