Larry Sanger

Larry Sanger

Lawrence Mark ("Larry") Sanger (born 16 July 1968 in Bellevue, Washington) has been prominently associated with the intital projects of several online encyclopedias, the most notable being Wikipedia and Citizendium. Born in Washington but raised in Alaska, Sanger received a PH.D. in philosophy from Ohio State University in 2000.

Sanger's first online encyclopedia project was Nupedia, which lasted from March of 2000 to September 2003. Sanger was its salaried editor-in-chief until it ran out of funding in 2001 and Sanger resigned. Nupedia was a Web-based effort that was supposed to be written and edited by experts in each field and although it was a free content encyclopedia it was not a wiki to which anyone with access to the Internet could contribute editorial content. Although the project failed, it was a forerunner of Wikipedia, which was begun as an offshoot of Nupedia.

Co-founded by Jimmy Wales and Sanger, Wikipedia was a wiki-based project in which content could be contributed and edited anyone at all. This time Sanger was characterized being as its salaried "chief organizer," although he had no official title. Sanger stated later that "I stopped participating in Wikipedia when funding for my position ran out."

In a well-known and controversial 31 December 2004 online essay at Kuro5hin Sanger explained "Why Wikipedia Must Jettison Its Anti-Elitism" and detailed why "Wikipedia does have 2 big problems." The problems he was referring to were

• "lack of public perception of credibility, particularly in areas of detail."
• "the dominance of difficult people, trolls, and their enablers."

As the root of these difficulties he identified "anti-elitism, or lack of respect for expertise."

Hoping to build upon his experience with the earlier encyclopedias and to avoid their pitfalls, Sanger launched Citizendium on 15 September 2006. Originally conceived to be an improved fork of Wikipedia, it quickly evolved to its present form. Its three main differences from Wikipedia are:

• that all contributors must apply for membership in the project under their real names, which are then visibly associated with all articles.
• that all articles are reviewed by experts in that particular field who offer suggestions and criticism as the articles evolve, with the goal for each article to be "approved", meaning that it becomes mostly off-limits to further editing.
• that vandals, trolls, and disruptive editors are quickly and permanently banned from further work on the project.

As of May, 2007, Sanger himself is an active contributor to several on-going articles in Citizendium.