Larry Sanger facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
Larry Sanger
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Sanger in 2006
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Lawrence Mark Sanger
July 16, 1968 Bellevue, Washington, U.S.
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| Occupation | Internet project developer Philosopher |
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Lawrence Mark Sanger (born July 16, 1968) is an American who develops projects for the Internet and is also a philosopher. He is best known for co-founding Wikipedia with Jimmy Wales. Larry Sanger also came up with the name "Wikipedia." He helped write many of its first rules, like the "Neutral point of view" policy.
Before Wikipedia, he was the main editor for Nupedia, which was another online encyclopedia. Nupedia was like an older version of Wikipedia. After Wikipedia, he worked on other encyclopedia projects, such as Encyclopedia of Earth, Citizendium, and Everipedia. He also gave advice to Ballotpedia, which is an online encyclopedia about American politics.
While he was in college, Sanger started using the Internet for learning. In 2000, he joined Nupedia as its main editor. Nupedia was very slow to grow. To make things faster, Sanger suggested using a "wiki" system. This idea led to the creation and launch of Wikipedia in 2001. Sanger continued to work on Nupedia and was very active on Wikipedia during its first year. He left both projects in March 2002. Even though Jimmy Wales has sometimes questioned it, most people agree that Sanger is a co-founder of Wikipedia.
Since leaving Wikipedia, Sanger has often said that the project has problems. He believes Wikipedia sometimes lacks accuracy because it doesn't always value expert knowledge enough.
In 2006, he started Citizendium to be a competitor to Wikipedia. He left Citizendium completely in 2020. In 2017, he joined Everipedia as its chief information officer (CIO). He left Everipedia in 2019 to start a group called the Knowledge Standards Foundation and work on something called the "encyclosphere." As of 2023, Sanger is the leader of the Knowledge Standards Foundation. Sanger is also very interested in philosophy, especially how we know things (called epistemology) and ideas about right and wrong (called ethics). He used to teach philosophy at Ohio State University, where he studied.
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Growing Up and Learning
Lawrence Mark Sanger was born in Bellevue, Washington, on July 16, 1968. His father, Gerry, was a marine biologist who studied seabirds. His mother stayed home to raise the children. When Larry was seven, his family moved to Anchorage, Alaska, where he grew up. He became interested in philosophy at a young age. By the time he was 16, he decided he wanted to study philosophy for his whole life.
In high school, he was part of the debate team. Sanger says this helped him understand the importance of being neutral. Debates showed him different sides of issues and arguments.
I would look up articles about those things, and I was always angry when an article didn't present one side fairly or at all. The worst times were when the author would just say what they believed. It just seemed really unfair to me.
Sanger finished high school in 1986 and went to Reed College. He studied philosophy there. In college, he became interested in the Internet and how it could be used to share information. Sanger set up an online group for students and tutors to connect. He also started a discussion group about libertarian philosophy. In 1994, Sanger wrote about his ideas for this group:
The history of philosophy is full of disagreement and confusion. Some philosophers doubt if the truth about philosophy can ever be known. But there is another way to think: one can try to think more carefully and logically than those before them.
Around 1994, Sanger met Jimmy Wales. Sanger had joined Wales's online group about Objectivist Philosophy. Sanger earned his first degree in philosophy from Reed College in 1991. He then got a Master's degree from Ohio State University in 1995 and a PhD in 2000. Starting in 1998, he and a friend ran a website called "Sanger and Shannon's Review of Y2K News Reports." This site helped people who were worried about the year 2000 problem with computers.
Nupedia and Wikipedia
Nupedia was an online encyclopedia. Its articles were written by volunteers who were experts in their fields. Editors then checked the articles before they were published. The articles were free to use. Jimmy Wales created Nupedia, and his company, Bomis, supported it. Wales and Sanger had talked online in mailing lists. In January 2000, Sanger emailed Wales about a new project he had in mind. Wales replied, "Instead of doing that, why don't you come and work on this idea that I've had?" He told Sanger about Nupedia and asked him to join. Sanger was hired as Nupedia's main editor. He started working on Nupedia in February 2000. He created a process for reviewing articles and found editors. Working on Nupedia, Sanger found it "fascinating to organize people online to create encyclopedias."
Nupedia was very slow. By the end of 2000, it had almost stopped. Sanger said that "by the summer of 2000, it had become clear that the process we tested out [for making articles on Nupedia] was very slow." In January 2001, Sanger suggested creating a wiki to make articles faster. This led to the launch of Wikipedia on January 15, 2001. Wikipedia was first meant to be a place where the public could write articles. These articles would then go through Nupedia's review process. However, most of Nupedia's experts and its advisory board didn't want to be involved with Wikipedia. They thought the idea of Wikipedia was silly.
The idea for using a wiki came when Sanger met his friend Ben Kovitz for dinner on January 2, 2001. Kovitz, a computer programmer, told Sanger about Ward Cunningham's Wiki. Sanger was very impressed with what wikis could do. He called Wales, who agreed to try it. Sanger came up with the name "Wikipedia." He later said it was "a silly name for what was at first a very silly project."
Sanger created Wikipedia's first pages and invited the first people to write for the website. It was then called the Nupedia Wiki. Within a few days, Wikipedia grew very quickly, and a small group of editors formed. Sanger was Wikipedia's "chief organizer." He invited new writers and helped write the first rules. These rules included "Ignore all rules" and "Neutral point of view." He also encouraged editors to be bold, telling users "not to worry about messing up." Sanger also created the idea of "Brilliant prose," which later became featured articles. These are Wikipedia's best articles.
Sanger soon became unhappy with Wikipedia. By mid-2001, he said its community was being "overrun" by people who were "opposed to the idea that anyone should have any kind of authority." While these issues weren't a big deal when Wikipedia was just a source for Nupedia, as it grew, Sanger became more concerned. Sanger had disagreements with Wikipedia editors who didn't like his way of organizing things or his authority. Sanger suggested that expert editors should have more power to solve disagreements and make sure rules were followed. He also asked for more respect from Wikipedians, but this made things worse.
Sanger was the only person paid to work on Wikipedia's editing. In early 2002, Bomis thought about putting ads on Wikipedia to pay Sanger. But the project was against ads, and there wasn't much money in Internet advertising at the time. Sanger was laid off in February 2002 after Bomis lost money during the Dot-com crash. He resigned as editor-in-chief of Nupedia and chief organizer of Wikipedia on March 1. Sanger said he stopped volunteering for Wikipedia and Nupedia because he couldn't do a good job part-time. He was also tired of constant arguments. He cared about the project, but it was "not something [he] would have chosen as a hobby." He wanted to spend more time with his family, reading and writing philosophy, and playing the fiddle.
Sanger tried to bring Nupedia back throughout 2002, but its activity slowed down. He tried to find an organization that would take over Nupedia because Bomis and Wales didn't seem interested in managing it. Sanger also asked about buying the website name and other materials from Bomis. He said Nupedia's end wasn't just because its review process was slow. The Nupedia server crashed in September 2003, and the site never came back online.
Who Co-Founded Wikipedia?
Sanger's role in co-founding Wikipedia has been discussed many times. In 2005, Jimmy Wales made changes to Wikipedia articles about Sanger. Sanger then said Wales was "rewriting history" by ignoring his involvement. Wales told Wired that he was only clarifying details about Sanger's contribution and fixing mistakes. Wales later said he first heard about the wiki idea from another Bomis employee, Jeremy Rosenfeld, not Sanger.
On his own website, Sanger has shared several links that support his role as a co-founder. As early as January 17, 2001, Sanger was called "Instigator of Nupedia's wiki" by an active volunteer. He was also identified as a co-founder of Wikipedia in September 2001. Sanger has said he organized Wikipedia while Wales mostly focused on his company, Bomis.com.
Later Work
Citizendium
In September 2006, Sanger announced a new wiki-based encyclopedia called Citizendium. The name is short for "citizens' compendium," which means a collection of information. It was created to fix problems Sanger saw in Wikipedia. For example, anonymous editing was not allowed, and all users had to use their real names. There was also a group of experts who had extra authority. Sanger wanted Citizendium to be a trustworthy online encyclopedia based on good research. He aimed to make articles more reliable and accurate. The site tried to have experts review articles and help solve disagreements that couldn't be settled by regular users.
Sanger thought Citizendium would grow quickly. However, after a lot of work at the beginning, the site slowed down, and most of the experts didn't stay. In 2011, a reporter said Citizendium was "dead in the water." He noted that Citizendium started too late and its growth was hurt by a difficult editing system. By 2014, Citizendium had fewer than 100 people writing for it. By August 2016, Citizendium had about 17,000 articles.
Sanger had said in early 2007 that he didn't plan to lead Citizendium forever. He mostly stopped editing it in early 2009. He officially stepped down as editor-in-chief of Citizendium on September 22, 2010. On July 2, 2020, Sanger wrote that he had given the legal ownership of the Citizendium website name to someone else. He said Citizendium "stopped being 'my' project a long time ago."
Other Projects
Larry Sanger has been involved with several other online encyclopedia projects. In 2005, he joined the Digital Universe Foundation. He helped organize the Digital Universe Encyclopedia web project, which started in early 2006. This encyclopedia asked recognized experts to write articles and check articles submitted by users for accuracy. The first part of this project was the Encyclopedia of Earth, written and edited by experts. Sanger later felt that content was being made too slowly. He suggested using open content to speed things up, but his idea was not accepted.
Sanger has also worked on the WatchKnowLearn project. This is a non-profit group that helps educate young children using videos and other media online. Sanger led the development of WatchKnowLearn from 2008 to 2010. It has a collection of educational videos for students from kindergarten to 12th grade. In 2010 and 2011, he also worked on a web-based reading program for young readers. This program, called Reading Bear, launched in 2012. It uses phonics and multimedia like videos to teach children how to pronounce words. It also helps them learn the meaning of words.
In February 2013, Sanger announced a new project: a news website called Infobitt. He said it would show how to get high-quality content from many people. The site, which aimed to collect news from crowds, went online in December 2014 but ran out of money in July 2015.
In December 2017, it was announced that Sanger had become the chief information officer of Everipedia. This is an open encyclopedia that uses blockchain technology. That month, Sanger told Inverse that Everipedia would "change the world in a dramatic way, more than Wikipedia did." He also told TechRepublic that "Everipedia is the encyclopedia of everything, where topics are unrestricted, unlike on Wikipedia."
On October 18, 2019, Sanger announced that he had left Everipedia. He gave back his stock in the company to start the Knowledge Standards Foundation and develop the website encyclosphere.org. He said, "We need to do for encyclopedias what blogging standards did for blogs: there needs to be an 'Encyclosphere'." He wants to build a completely decentralized network, like the Blogosphere or email. The Knowledge Standards Foundation was started in September 2019 by Sanger and others.
Personal Life
In February 2000, when Sanger was hired by Wales to work on Nupedia, he moved to San Diego. He got married in Las Vegas in December 2001. In 2005, he and his wife moved to Santa Cruz, California. As of 2015, Sanger lives near Columbus, Ohio. As of 2021, he lives with his wife and two sons, who are both homeschooled.
Sanger was raised in the Lutheran church and went to Sunday school. However, he became an agnostic when he was 16. In 2023, Sanger said he is a Christian. He describes his background as "a typical American cross-breed" with English, German, and French roots. Sanger supports the idea of "baby reading." He started teaching his son to read before his second birthday and shared videos online to show how he did it. He also enjoys Irish traditional music.
Images for kids
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Larry Sanger's signature
See also
In Spanish: Larry Sanger para niños
- List of Wikipedia people
