Larry Sanger

Cofounder of Wikipedia

• Born: July 16, 1968
• Place of Birth: Bellevue, Washington

Primary Company/Organization: Wikipedia

Introduction

Larry Sanger is an American internet project developer best known as the cofounder of Wikipedia. It was Sanger who gave the online, collaboratively written encyclopedia its name in 2001, combining the term wiki, which denoted the server software that allowed users to create and edit web page content on any browser, with pedia, a root of encyclopedia, meaning “education.” He was responsible for the day-to-day oversight of Wikipedia until he left the project in 2002 and became a vocal critic of the open source encyclopedia. Later, he founded Citizendium, another wiki encyclopedia project more strictly regulated and edited than Wikipedia. Sanger also served as executive director of WatchKnowLearn.org, a directory of free educational videos for students in grades 1 through 12, and has launched a number of other projects.

Early Life

Lawrence Mark Sanger was born July 16, 1968, in Bellevue, Washington, a suburb of Seattle. His parents, a marine biologist and a homemaker, moved the family to Anchorage, Alaska, when Sanger was seven. A bookish teen and an excellent student, he was also a debate champion. Other early interests included the piano, cross-country running, and skiing. He was also a Dungeons and Dragons player and enjoyed tinkering with computers. He coded a text-based adventure game in BASIC, the first popular programming language. A mild hearing loss from the age of eight heightened a tendency toward introspection. Growing up in the Lutheran Church, he wondered about the distinctions among body, soul, and spirit but found the orthodoxy of his parents' responses to his questions unsatisfactory. Pondering existence led him to the work of René Descartes, in which he found a model.

After graduating from high school in 1986, he enrolled in Reed College, a liberal arts college in Portland, Oregon, known for its rigorous academic program and its independent study. He graduated from Reed in 1991 with a bachelor's degree in philosophy. A fascination with epistemology led him to enroll in graduate school at Ohio State University, where he received his master's degree in philosophy in 1995 and a Ph.D. in the same field in 2000. In the late 1990s, Sanger developed an interest in the year 2000 (or Y2K) “millennium bug” and the pervasive fears concerning computer crashes (which some foresaw resulting from programming codes that stored dates using two digits for the year) as the twentieth century changed to the twenty-first. He created a digest of news reports relating to the issue, “Sanger's Review of Y2K News Reports,” that garnered attention among Y2K experts. His success with this project led him to consider careers beyond academia.

Life's Work

In January 2000, Sanger sent a business proposal for a cultural news blog to Jimmy Wales, the creator of Bomis, a dot-com company that created and hosted web rings designed to appeal to male users. Wales had for several months been considering an online encyclopedia created by volunteers. He even had a name for the project, Nupedia, and he was looking for someone who had both academic credentials and computer expertise to run it. Sanger's proposal was timely. With funding from Bomis, Wales started Nupedia and hired Sanger as editor in chief. In February, Sanger moved to San Diego, where Bomis was based. Sanger made clear that Nupedia was to be an open encyclopedia, welcoming all contributors and available to anyone, but he left the details to Sanger. Sanger drew from his academic experience to plan an encyclopedia shaped by experts, a few who would make up a guiding board and many others who would use their expertise to write articles that they submitted for peer review.

On March 9, Nupedia went online. Although there was no shortage of experts volunteering to write articles, the process made haste impossible. Nupedia had been operating for seven months by the time the first article, an entry on atonality by German music scholar Christoph Hust, was approved. Fortuitously, a couple of months before the encyclopedia's first anniversary, Sanger had dinner with an old friend, Ben Kovitz, who told him about a program called WikiWikiWeb, which simplified collaboration because it allowed anyone to edit any page at any time. Sanger saw the possibilities, especially the ability for many people to work on a page without the delays that were making it difficult to grow Nupedia. A few days later, Sanger invited Nupedia's volunteers to make a wiki. The group's first wiki went online on January 10, 2001. The intention was that the wiki be a means of collaborating on peer reviews for Nupedia, but some of the experts were skeptical about the value of the wiki. On January 15, the wiki was named Wikipedia and began operating under a separate domain. Within a few days, the number of articles on Wikipedia exceeded those on Nupedia, in quantity at least.

By October 2001, Wikipedia had thirteen thousand articles. Some were written by Nupedia's expert volunteers, but many were not. Vandalism and dogmatism were increasing. Sanger as Nupedia's editor in chief had the authority to settle disputes and enforce standards, but, by his own choice, he was head organizer for Wikipedia with none of chief's status. The vandalism could be dealt with, but Sanger was ill-equipped to manage contributors who posted erroneous information, who used the site to argue a point of view, or who delighted in acrimonious exchanges with other contributors or even Sanger himself. The larger the site grew, the larger the problems loomed from Sanger's perspective. The growth was undeniable. In its first year, Wikipedia included twenty thousand articles and eighteen languages. Nupedia had lost momentum, and Wales's attempt to calm troubled waters, by addressing the Wikipedia community via his role as moderator of the discussion list, indicated that he and Sanger were not in agreement regarding openness and authority. In December 2001, Wales, whose company had suffered when the dot-com bubble burst, used financial reverses as the reason for cutting staff and dismissed Sanger. Although Sanger continued as a Wikipedia volunteer for a few months longer, he soon despaired of finding support for his belief that articles should be approved by experts. In January 2003, he cut all ties with Wikipedia and returned to teaching philosophy.

His conviction that Wikipedia needed experts was undiminished, however. In December 2004, Sanger wrote an essay, “Why Wikipedia Must Jettison Its Anti-Elitism,” explaining why experts were necessary for Wikipedia to be perceived as a credible source by “librarians, teachers, and academics.” Sanger's argument gained force in September 2005 when seventy-eight-year-old John Seigenthaler, a retired journalist who founded the Freedom Forum First Amendment Center at Vanderbilt University, discovered that a false biography that identified him as a suspect in the assassinations of John and Robert Kennedy had been on Wikipedia since late May. A correct version of Seigenthaler's biography was posted on September 23, but the malicious biography was not deleted until October 7. Seigenthaler's account of the incident appeared on November 29 in an editorial he wrote for USA Today. Sanger, who was contacted by Seigenthaler, wrote and spoke about his hope that the incident would pressure Wikipedia to address its problems.

Also in 2005, Sanger joined another online encyclopedia project, the Digital Universe Foundation, where he helped launch the Encyclopedia of Earth. He left in 2006, however, to launch a new project, Citizendium, an alternative to Wikipedia that would disallow anonymous contributions and develop “expert-approved” articles by those who have credentials to act as editors. Citizendium began as a fork of Wikipedia, but in 2007 it deleted imported Wikipedia articles that had not yet been modified. By late January 2007, more than five hundred individually screened people had volunteered to work as authors and editors, and the site opened to public participation. The project had 16,270 articles by August 2012, but only 164 had passed the peer review process to earn the “approved” designation. Sanger discovered that academics were no less prone to disagreements than the larger, less credentialed population. Arguments over the charter resulted in a board half the size of the original, and clashes over esoteric points of diction and grammar sometimes delayed approval of articles indefinitely. The rate of new articles per day declined from a high of thirty in 2009 to two in 2011, by which time Sanger had stepped down as the site's editor-in-chief.

In 2009, Sanger was hired by the Community Foundation of Northwest Mississippi and its president, Tom Pittman, to plan a new, nonprofit educational video service, WatchKnowLearn, funded by a Tennessee philanthropist. Sanger served as executive director of the project, originally called WatchKnow. The website, which both aggregated and organized videos on the web and invited users to upload original content, launched in a beta version the fall of 2008. It was decided to defer the official launch for additional testing. In November 2009, after Sanger teamed with a web development firm and a graphic design company, the website launched with a new name, WatchKnowLearn, with more than ten thousand videos and more than two thousand categories. A year later, the directory included more than twenty thousand videos and added four part-time editors to its staff. Sanger left the project in the summer of 2010.

In 2013 Sanger started a short-lived news aggregator called Infobitt, and in 2017 he became the chief informartion officer of yet another online encyclopedia, Everipedia. In 2019, Sanger resigned from Everipedia and became one of the co-founders of the Knowledge Standards Foundation. The goal of the foundation was to create what Sanger called the encyclosphere, a decentralized universal network of online encyclopedias.

Personal Life

Sanger has worked as a philosophy instructor, notably at his alma mater, Ohio State University. He married in 2001 and lives in Ohio with his wife and two children.

Bibliography

"About the Knowledge Standards Foundation." Knowledge Standards Foundation, 2022, encyclosphere.org/about. Accessed 7 Mar. 2024.

Lapp, Alison. “Wikipedia's Opponent.” PC Magazine 22 May 2007: 19. Print.

Lih, Andrew. The Wikipedia Revolution: How a Bunch of Nobodies Created the World's Greatest Encyclopedia. New York: Hyperion, 2009. Print.

Poe, Marshall. “The Hive.” Atlantic Monthly Sept. 2006: 86–94. Print.

Reagle, Joseph Michael. Good Faith Collaboration: The Culture of Wikipedia. Cambridge: MIT, 2010. Print.

Roush, Wade. “Larry Sanger's Knowledge Free-for-All: Can One Balance Anarchy and Accuracy?” Technology Review Jan. 2005: 21. Print.