Lawrence Mark "Larry" Sanger (born July 16, 1968) is an American philosopher, co-founder of Wikipedia, and the creator of the encyclopedia Citizendium.

He grew up in Anchorage, Alaska. From an early age he has been interested in philosophy. Sanger holds a B.A. in philosophy from Reed College in 1991 and a Ph.D. in philosophy from Ohio State University in 2000. Most of his philosophical work has focused on epistemology, the theory of knowledge.

He has been involved with various online encyclopedia projects. He is the former editor-in-chief of Nupedia, chief organizer (2001–2002) of its successor, Wikipedia, and inactive editor-in-chief of Citizendium. From his position at Nupedia, he assembled the process for article development. Sanger conceived of Wikipedia. He proposed implementing a wiki, which directly led to the creation of Wikipedia. Initially Wikipedia was a complementary project for Nupedia. He was Wikipedia's early community leader and established many of its original policies. He spearheaded an alternative wiki-based project, Citizendium.

Sanger left Wikipedia in 2002, and has since been critical of the project. He articulated that despite its merits, Wikipedia lacks credibility due to, among other things, a lack of respect for expertise. After leaving the project, Sanger taught philosophy at Ohio State University and was an early strategist for the expert-authored Encyclopedia of Earth. On September 15, 2006 he publicly announced Citizendium, first envisioned as a fork of Wikipedia. It was launched on March 25, 2007. Citizendium represents an effort to create a credible encyclopedia. Sanger aims to bring more accountability to the internet encyclopedia model.

He presently spends most of his time at his WatchKnow project, in part to earn a living, and works part-time as a writer, speaker, and consultant on the topic of collaborative online communities.

Early life and education

Sanger was born in Bellevue, Washington, and raised in Anchorage, Alaska. When he was seven years old, the family moved to Anchorage, Alaska, where Sanger spent his formative years and excelled in the classroom. At an early age, he was interested in philosophical topics. In high school, Sanger was asked, "What are you ever going to do with philosophy?" He said, "Well, change the way the world thinks, for one thing." He graduated from high school in 1986 and went off to Reed College, majoring in philosophy. As a college student, he explored the understanding and sources of knowledge. He also became interested in the Internet and its publishing abilities. These interests helped him to realize the benefits of using a wiki for an online encyclopedia. He set up an early attempt with a listserver as a medium for students and tutors to meet up for "expert tutoring" and "to act as a forum for discussion of tutorials, tutorial methods, and the possibility and merits of a voluntary, free network of individual tutors and students finding each other via the Internet for education outside the traditional university setting." He started and moderated a philosophy discussion list. The Association for Systematic Philosophy, managed by Sanger, published a journal. Dated March 22, 1994, Sanger wrote in his opening manifesto:

"The history of philosophy is full of disagreement and confusion.

One reaction by philosophers to this state of things is to doubt whether the truth about philosophy can ever be known, or whether there is any such thing as the truth about philosophy.

But there is another reaction: one may set out to think more carefully and methodically than one's intellectual forebears."

He received a B.A. in philosophy from Reed College in 1991, an M.A. from Ohio State University in 1995, and a Ph.D. from Ohio State University in 2000. His bachelor thesis is titled Descartes' methods and their theoretical background and his doctoral thesis concerned Epistemic Circularity: An Essay on the Problem of Meta-Justification. From 1998 to 2000 he ran a website called "Sanger's Review of Y2K News Reports" (formerly at sangersreview.com), a resource for Y2K watchers.

Nupedia and Wikipedia

Nupedia was a Web-based encyclopedia whose articles were written by experts and licensed as free content. It was co-founded by Jimmy Wales and underwritten by Bomis, with Sanger hired as editor-in-chief. He developed a review process for articles and recruited editors. Articles were reviewed before being posted on the site. Frustrated at the slow progress of Nupedia, in January 2001, Sanger proposed a wiki be created to spur article development, and the result of this proposal was Wikipedia, officially launched on January 15, 2001. It was initially intended as a collaborative wiki for the public to write entries that would then be fed into the Nupedia review process of expertise. The majority of Nupedia's experts wanted little to do with this project, so Sanger initiated a separate site named Wikipedia.

To the surprise of Sanger and Wales, within a few days of launching, Wikipedia had outgrown Nupedia, and a small community of editors gathered. By virtue of his position with Nupedia, Sanger spearheaded and named the project, and formulated much of the original policy, including "Ignore all rules," "Neutral point of view", and "Verifiability". Wikipedia quickly took off, but just months after it was launched, things started to go off the rails and by the summer of 2001, Sanger says, the new online community was being overrun by what he described as "trolls" and "anarchist-types" people, who were "opposed to the idea that anyone should have any kind of authority that others do not". Sanger responded by proposing a stronger emphasis for expert editors, individuals with the authority to resolve disputes and enforce the rules.

Tired of endless content battles and feeling he had a lack of support from Wales, Sanger eventually left the project. Sanger was the only paid editor of Wikipedia, a status he held from January 15, 2001, until March 1, 2002. Sanger worked on and promoted both the Nupedia and Wikipedia projects until Bomis discontinued funding for his position in February 2002 after the collapse in Internet advertising spending; Sanger resigned as editor-in-chief of Nupedia and as chief organizer of Wikipedia on March 1. Sanger's stated reason for ending his participation in Wikipedia and Nupedia as a volunteer was that he could not do justice to the task as a part-time volunteer. Nupedia shut down in 2003, shortly after Wikipedia's two year anniversary.

Origins of Wikipedia

Wales, the de facto leader of Wikipedia, started to play down Sanger's role in the founding of the project in 2005, a few years after Sanger left Wikipedia. "I must say I am amused," Sanger wrote in a posting on Wikipedia on Monday. "Having seen edits like this, it does seem that Jimmy is attempting to rewrite history. But this is a futile process because in our brave new world of transparent activity and maximum communication, the truth will out." In light of Wales' view, Sanger posted on his personal webpage several links which appears to support the co-founder honorary appellation. The citations include earlier versions of selected Wikipedia pages,

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 press releases from Wikipedia in the years of 2002–2004, 
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 and early media coverage stories "I can start an article that will consist of one paragraph, and then a real expert will come along and add three paragraphs and clean up my one paragraph," said Larry Sanger of Las Vegas, who founded Wikipedia with Mr. Wales. 
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 describing Wikipedia as founded by Wales and Sanger. Sanger was identified as a co-founder of Wikipedia at least as early as September 2001. Jimmy Wales identified himself in August 2002 as "co-founder" of Wikipedia. During the time of Sanger's involvement in the project, he was routinely known as a co-founder. The Wikimedia Foundation's first press release in 2004 described Sanger as co-founder. Sanger is widely cited in the media as a co-founder. 
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 While Sanger organized the project Wales concentrated on Bomis.

The origins of Wikipedia began when Sanger met up with an old friend. Sanger was introduced to wikis at a January 2, 2001 dinner with Ben Kovitz, a computer programmer and regular on Ward Cunningham's wiki. Sanger thought a wiki would be a good platform to use and decided to present the idea to Jimmy Wales, at that time the head of Bomis. Sanger initially proposed the wiki concept to Wales and suggested it be applied to Nupedia and, after some initial skepticism, Wales agreed to try it. Sanger formally proposed a "feeder" project for Nupedia titled "Let's make a wiki" and created a new page on Ward's wiki named "WikiPedia." Over tacos that night, Sanger explained his concerns about Nupedia's lack of progress, the root cause of which was its serial editorial system. As Nupedia was then structured, no stage of the editorial process could proceed before the previous stage was completed. Kovitz brought up the wiki and sketched out "wiki magic," the mysterious process by which communities with common interests work to improve wiki pages by incremental contributions. If it worked for the rambunctious hacker culture of programming, Kovitz said, it could work for any online collaborative project. The wiki could break the Nupedia bottleneck by permitting volunteers to work simultaneously all over the project. With Kovitz in tow, Sanger rushed back to his apartment and called Wales to share the idea. Over the next few days he wrote a formal proposal for Wales and started a page on Cunningham's wiki called "WikiPedia." Wales ascribed the broader idea of an encyclopedia that "non-experts" could contribute to, i.e., the Nupedia. Wales mentioned that he heard of the wiki concept first from Jeremy Rosenfeld in 2005, though he said earlier, in October 2001, that "Larry had the idea to use Wiki software." Sanger "came up with the name 'Wikipedia', a silly name for what was at first a very silly project." Sanger conceived of the wiki-based encyclopedia as an idea to assist with Nupedia's growth inefficiency, and spearheaded and guided the community as its leader in its first year. —Larry Sanger.

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 Sanger is credited for the policies and strategy that made Wikipedia possible. Wikipedia became an accidental spin-off of Nupedia, originally to allow collaboration on articles prior to the editorial review process.

After Wikipedia

Since Sanger parted ways with Wikipedia in 2002 he has been critical of its accuracy, among other things. In December 2004, Sanger wrote a critical article for the website Kuro5hin, in which he admitted that there had existed "a certain poisonous social or political atmosphere in the project" that had also accounted for his departure. While stating "to appreciate the merits of Wikipedia fully" and to know and support "the mission and broad policy outlines of Wikipedia very well," Sanger maintained that there are serious problems with the project. There was, he wrote, a lack of public perception of credibility, and the project put "difficult people, trolls, and their enablers" into too much prominence; these problems, he maintained, were a feature of the project's "anti-elitism, or lack of respect for expertise." The article was the subject of much controversy in the blogosphere, and led to some reaction in the news media as well. In September 2009, Sanger stated as one reason for distancing himself from Wikipedia was "I thought that the project would never have the amount of credibility it could have if it were not somehow more open and welcoming to experts." He pointed out "The other problem was the community had essentially been taken over by trolls to a great extent. That was a real problem, and Jimmy Wales absolutely refused to do anything about it."

Sanger, a philosophy instructor, began work as a lecturer at Ohio State University, where he taught philosophy until June 2005. His professional interests are epistemology (in particular), early modern philosophy, and ethics. In his spare time, he plays and teaches Irish traditional music on the fiddle in Columbus and Dayton, Ohio, and also manages a site about the Donegal fiddle tradition.

In December 2005, Digital Universe Foundation announced that Sanger had been hired as Director of Distributed Content Programs. He would be a key organizer of the Digital Universe Encyclopedia web projects which was launched in early 2006. The Digital Universe encyclopedia plans to recruit recognized experts to write articles, and to check user-submitted articles for accuracy. The first step in this effort is the expert-authored and edited Encyclopedia of Earth, an electronic reference about the Earth.

In April 2006, Sanger published "Text and Collaboration: A personal manifesto for the Text Outline Project" arguing for the importance of what he called "strong collaboration" (that is, collaboration in which people work on the parts they're interested and nobody gets to claim control), the possibility that strong collaboration could be more effective with a less anarchistic set of ground rules than Wikipedia, and the creation of a new Text Outline Project to create The Book of the World, featuring summaries of the arguments of the great philosophers, organized by topic and time, along with summaries of their debates.

The question of accuracy over Wikipedia article content spurred Sanger to unvail plans for a new encyclopedia called Citizendium (a compendium created by citizens). At the Wizards of OS conference in September 2006, Sanger announced Citizendium, a fork of Wikipedia. The objectives of the fork are to address various perceived flaws in the Wikipedia system. The main differences will be no anonymous editing — every author/editor will have to be identified by his/her real name, no "top-down" hierarchy of editors, and to aspire to be a "real encyclopedia." More differences are discussed at the Citizendium website in the FAQ. The initial fork is of the English language Wikipedia. Prior to its March 2007 public launch, Citizendium favored an emphasis on its own original articles. On September 27, 2006 Sanger announced that he would take a leave of absence from Digital Universe "in order to set up a fully independent Citizendium Foundation." In 2007 Sanger examined the possibilities for education online. He explained, "Imagine that education were not delivered but organized and managed in a way that were fully digitized, decentralized, self-directed, asynchronous, and at-a-distance." He further stated, "There would be no bureaucracy to enforce anything beyond some very basic rules, and decision-making would be placed almost entirely in the hands of teachers and students." In 2008, Sanger was at Oxford University to debate the proposition that "the internet is the future of knowledge." Sanger agreed that today's wikis and blogs are fundamentally changing the way knowledge is created and distributed.

Citizendium

On March 25, 2007, Citizendium ended its pilot phase, entering a live and publicly readable beta phase. The launch coincided with a feature-length Associated Press article that ran widely, with a title in USA Today of "Citizendium aims to be better Wikipedia." Unlike Wales, who has compared his role in Wikipedia with that of a British monarch, "I'm sort of like a British monarch," Wales said, while smiling. Sanger said he would not head Citizendium indefinitely, and in 2007 announced his intention to step off the leadership team in two or three years.

Two weeks after the launch of Citizendium, Sanger criticized Wikipedia, stating the latter was "broken beyond repair," and had a range of problems "from serious management problems, to an often dysfunctional community, to frequently unreliable content, and to a whole series of scandals." Sanger stated in part:

"The work of the Wikipedians has astounded the world, but the amateur nature of Wikipedia's contributions, whose authors remain anonymous, is not for everyone.

Some experts are hostile toward the idea of Wikipedia and many avoid Wikipedia altogether.

We may take Wikipedia as an early prototype of the application of open source hacker principles to content rather than code.

I want to argue that it is just that, an early prototype, rather than a mature model of how such principles should be applied to reference, scholarly and educational content.

Where Wikipedia shares the culture of anonymity found in the broader Internet, the Citizendium will have a culture of real-world, personal responsibility."

Citizendium has a form of peer-review, in which the site's content is subject to "gentle expert oversight." In reference to creating a new encyclopedia project Sanger stated: "I think there is a need for a more reliable and free [online] encyclopedia. If we can create a more reliable and free encyclopedia, particularly if we adopt a different system than Wikipedia's, then we should." Citizendium's editor-in-chief Sanger commented in late October 2007 about Citizendium's one-year anniversary from its initial private launch date of October 30, 2006. According to Sanger, the Citizendium's readers have only just begun to see the power of the project's model:

"Simply put, we've pioneered a new and better way to use wikis, and an interesting, dynamic way to build an online knowledge base.

Increasingly, the Citizendium is looking like the next step in the evolution of the collaborative Internet. It has been one year since the private launch of the Citizendium (http://www.citizendium.org/) wiki, an online reference source aiming to create "the world's most trusted knowledge base." The innovative non-profit project combines free-wheeling, open wiki collaboration with real names and guidance by expert editors.

The project's fundamentals are solid and growing stronger through motivated, diligent effort.

Given enough time and enough people, the results would surely be amazing.

If this possibility is amazing, it is even more amazing that it's within our grasp.

What I do know is that if we do have a good chance to create something so stupefyingly useful for humanity, we must try."

When asked in an interview with The Minnesota Daily: Do you see a role for Citizendium anywhere in academia? He responded: "Of course. The idea is it will be good enough for professors to be able to send their students and students to get reliable information from. I know a lot of students use Wikipedia as a place to start to learn about a subject. For that purpose it's fine. I actually think, as a place to start to get some information, it's a fine resource. Approved articles on Citizendium hopefully will be more reliable than articles on Wikipedia."

Citizendium v. Wikipedia

Building on Sanger's experience from other collaborative encyclopedias, Citizendium represents an effort to establish a scholarly and credible online encyclopedia. Sanger aims to improve upon the wiki-based encyclopedia model by bringing more accountability and academic quality to articles. In an interview with CNET News in 2007 Sanger explained the reasons for starting a Wikipedia alternative:

"I think we absolutely need another wiki--first of all, simply because Wikipedia lacks credibility, unfortunately.

It's a good starting place, as people say--on some subjects anyway--but it isn't really what we want out of a reliable reference resource.

And frankly, I don't think that the Wikipedia community is prepared to make the changes that I think need to be made in order to transform Wikipedia into something that's really reliable."

While Citizendium is wiki-based, several aspects set it apart from Wikipedia. Prospective contributors on Citizendium are required to sign in using real names. In contrast, users to Wikipedia may contribute anonymously, or choose one or a series of user names that have no connection to their true names. Experts in their field of expertise have a role in the Citizendium community to approve articles on the basis of accuracy, as opposed to the Good Article and the Featured Article systems on Wikipedia that employs a review by editors. While Wikipedia is perceived to promote consensus and not truth, and verifiability is the inclusion criteria - reporting on what other sources have to say, Citizendium experts have the final say for article content and it is not necessary to cite a source for a content decision on Citizendium. Finally, while vandalization of articles takes up time and effort on the part of Wikipedia's editors to uncover and revert, Citizendium apparently aims to prevent vandalism.

After Citizendium

In early 2009, Sanger effectively ceased to edit Citizendium, although an announcement confirming this was not made until July 30, 2009 on the Citizendium-l mailinglist.

Selected writings

A partial list of academic work, essays, and presentations Sanger has written include:

Academic work

• Descartes' methods and their theoretical background - bachelor thesis.
• Epistemic Circularity: An Essay on the Problem of Meta-Justification - doctoral thesis.

Essays

• The Fate of Expertise after Wikipedia (160k PDF). Episteme - Edinburgh University Press, February 2009.
• Who Says We Know: On The New Politics of Knowledge. Edge Foundation - Edge Reality Club, April 2007.
• Education 2.0. The Focus Online, June 2007.
• Why the Citizendium Will (Probably) Succeed. Citizendium, March 2007.
• Toward a New Compendium of Knowledge. Citizendium, September 2006.
• Humanity's Coming Enlightenment. Edge Foundation - World Question Center, 2007.
• The Future of Free Information. The Digital Universe Journal, 2006.

Presentations

• What Strong Collaboration Means for Scholarly Publishing. Keynote at the Annual Meeting of Society for Scholarly Publishing, San Francisco, CA, June 7, 2007.
• How to Think about Strong Collaboration among Professionals. Keynote at the Handelsblatt IT Congress, Bonn, Germany, January 30, 2007.
• Why Make Room for Experts in Web 2.0?. Opening keynote at the SDForum, The Business of New Media, Santa Clara, CA, October 25, 2006.

References

External links

• Larry Sanger - Sanger's personal website.
• - Sanger's account on the English Wikipedia.
• User:Larry Sanger/Origins of Wikipedia - An essay discussing the origins of Wikipedia.
• User:Larry Sanger - Meta-Wikimedia - "Possibly outdated," he says.
• Epistemic Circularity: An Essay on the Problem of Meta-Justification - index.
• - From Sanger's 1998 course at Ohio State University which have been greatly edited.
• Video interview: Larry Sanger talks about Wikipedia and his plans with Citizendium - Mostly in English, with a German introduction and subtitles.