Larry Sanger

Lawrence Mark Sanger (born July 16, 1968) is an American Internet project developer and philosopher who was the editor-in-chief of the online encyclopedia Nupedia and co-founded its successor Wikipedia along with Jimmy Wales.

Sanger coined the name 'Wikipedia', and wrote many of Wikipedia's early guidelines, including the "Neutral point of view" and "Ignore all rules" policies.

Sanger later worked on other encyclopedic projects, including Encyclopedia of Earth, Citizendium, and Everipedia, and advised the nonprofit American political encyclopedia Ballotpedia.

Lawrence Mark Sanger was born in Bellevue, Washington, on July 16, 1968.

His father Gerry was a marine biologist who studied seabirds and his mother raised the children.

When he was seven years old, his family moved to Anchorage, Alaska, where he grew up.

He was interested in philosophical topics at an early age and decided "to study philosophy and make it my life's work" at the age of 16.

In high school, he participated in debate, which Sanger says influenced his views on neutrality due to these debates exposing him to different issues and arguments from both sides":

"And so I'd look up articles about those things, and I was always furious when I came across an article that failed to present one side fairly or at all. The worst instances were when [the author] would just come out and say what their position is. It just struck me as being really unfair."

Sanger graduated from high school in 1986 and attended Reed College, majoring in philosophy.

In college he became interested in the Internet and its potential as a publishing outlet.

Sanger set up a listserver as a medium for students and tutors to meet for 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 libertarian philosophy discussion list, the Association for Systematic Philosophy.

Sanger received a Bachelor of Arts degree in philosophy from Reed in 1991, a Master of Arts from Ohio State University in 1995, and a Doctor of Philosophy from Ohio State University in 2000.

In 1994, Sanger wrote a manifesto for the discussion group:"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."

Around 1994, Sanger met Jimmy Wales after subscribing to Wales' mailing list titled Moderated Discussion of Objectivist Philosophy (MDOP).

Beginning in 1998, he and a friend ran a website called "Sanger and Shannon's Review of Y2K News Reports", a resource for people such as managers of computer systems who were concerned about the year 2000 problem.

Nupedia was a web-based encyclopedia whose articles were written by volunteer contributors possessing relevant subject matter expertise and reviewed by editors prior to publication, and were licensed as free content.

It was conceived by Jimmy Wales and underwritten by his company Bomis.

Wales had interacted with Sanger on mailing lists.

While in college, Sanger developed an interest in using the Internet for educational purposes and joined the online encyclopedia Nupedia as editor-in-chief in 2000.

In January 2000, Sanger had e-mailed Wales and others about a potential "cultural news blog" project that would cover social and political issues that he had in mind after January 1, 2000, had passed and rendered his Y2K site obsolete.

Wales replied with "Instead of doing that, why don't you come and work on this idea that I've had?", presented the idea of Nupedia to Sanger, and invited him to join the project.

Sanger was hired as Nupedia's editor-in-chief.

He began to oversee Nupedia in February 2000, developing a review process for articles and recruiting editors.

Through working on Nupedia, Sanger "found that it was a fascinating problem to organize people online to create encyclopedias".

Disappointed with the slow progress of Nupedia, Sanger proposed using a wiki to solicit and receive articles to put through Nupedia's peer-review process; this change led to the development and launch of Wikipedia in 2001.

Sanger continued to serve as Nupedia's editor-in-chief and as an active contributor to Wikipedia in its first year, but he was laid off and left the projects in March 2002.

Sanger's status as a co-founder of Wikipedia has been questioned by Wales but is generally accepted.

In 2006, he founded Citizendium to compete with Wikipedia.

Since Sanger's departure from Wikipedia, he has been critical of the project, describing it in 2007 as being "broken beyond repair".

He has argued that, despite its merits, Wikipedia lacks credibility and accuracy due to a lack of respect for expertise and authority.

In 2010, he stepped down as editor-in-chief.

In 2017, he joined Everipedia as chief information officer (CTO).

He resigned in 2019, to establish a Knowledge Standards Foundation and the "encyclosphere".

, Sanger was serving as the Executive Director of the Knowledge Standards Foundation.

Sanger's other interests include a focus on philosophy–in particular epistemology, early modern philosophy, and ethics.

He taught philosophy at his alma mater, Ohio State University.

Since 2020, he has criticized Wikipedia for what he perceives as a left-wing and liberal ideological bias in its articles.

In 2020, he left Citizendium entirely.