Larry Sanger

Larry Sanger

Birth Name	Lawrence Mark Sanger
Birth Date	July 16, 1968
Birth Place	Bellevue, Washington, U.S.
Occupation(s)	Internet project developer Philosopher
Education	Reed College (BA), Ohio State University (MA, PhD)
Children	2
Website	larrysanger.org

Lawrence Mark Sanger (born July 16, 1968) is an American Internet project developer and philosopher who co-founded Wikipedia along with [[wikipedia:Jimmy Wales]|Jimmy Wales]. Sanger coined Wikipedia's name, and provided initial drafts for many of its early guidelines, including the "Neutral point of view" and "Ignore all rules" policies. Prior to Wikipedia, he was the editor-in-chief of Nupedia, another online encyclopedia and the predecessor of Wikipedia. He later worked on other encyclopedic projects, including Encyclopedia of Earth, Citizendium, and Everipedia, and advised the nonprofit American political encyclopedia Ballotpedia.

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

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

In 2006, he founded Citizendium to compete with Wikipedia. In 2010, he stepped down as editor-in-chief. In 2020, he left Citizendium entirely. In 2017, he joined Everipedia as chief information officer (CIO). 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 one of his alma maters, Ohio State University.

Early life and education

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.

Sanger in 1986

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. 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). 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. 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.

Philosophy

Larry Sanger has a doctorate in Philosophy from Ohio State University. His professional interests are wikipedia:epistemology, early modern philosophy, and ethics. Most of Sanger's philosophical work focuses on epistemology. In 2008, he visited Balliol College of the University of Oxford to debate the proposal "the Internet is the future of knowledge", arguing wikis and blogs are changing the way knowledge is created and distributed. Sanger has frequently written and spoken about collaborative content. Sanger has argued that liberal and left-leaning views dominate in academia, science, the media and tech companies such as Facebook and Twitter.

In January 2002, Sanger returned to Columbus, Ohio to teach philosophy at Ohio State University.Template:Sfn In December 2010, Sanger said he considered WikiLeaks to be "enemies of the U.S.—not just the government, but the people". In September 2021, in response to U.S. President Joe Biden announcing a COVID-19 vaccine mandate, Sanger tweeted "Nor I.#IWillNotComply" in agreement with political commentator Tim Pool. In an earlier tweet, Sanger claimed that COVID-19 vaccines are "not a vaccine". In March 2022, Sanger said that "Decentralization is a necessary but not sufficient condition of internet freedom", arguing that both federated and peer-to-peer decentralized networks "can still be captured and controlled in various ways and rendered un-free".

Personal life

In February 2000, when Sanger was hired by Wales to develop Nupedia, he moved to San Diego. He was married in Las Vegas in December 2001. In 2005, he and his wife moved to Santa Cruz, California, to work for Digital Universe. As of 2015, Sanger lives in the outskirts of Columbus, Ohio. As of 2021, he lives with his wife and two sons, who are both homeschooled.

Sanger was raised as a Lutheran and went to a Sunday school, but became an agnostic when he was 16 after his family stopped regularly going to church. In 2023, Sanger described himself as a Christian. Ethnically, he described himself in 2016 as "a typical American cross-breed (lots of English, German, and French)". Sanger supports the concept of "baby reading". He started teaching his son to read before his second birthday and posted videos online to demonstrate this. He is fond of Irish traditional music.

Selected writings

Academic work

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

Essays

• Why Neutrality?. Ballotpedia, December 2015.
• How and Why I Taught My Toddler to Read (PDF). LarrySanger.org, December 2010.
• Individual Knowledge in the Internet Age. Educause Review, April 2010.
• The Fate of Expertise after Wikipedia (PDF). Episteme – Edinburgh University Press, February 2009.
• Who Says We Know: On The New Politics of Knowledge. Edge Foundation – Edge Reality Club, April 2007.
• Humanity's Coming Enlightenment. (Archived) Edge Foundation – World Question Center, 2007.

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 SVForum, The Business of New Media, Santa Clara, CA, October 25, 2006.

Books

• Essays on Free Knowledge: The Origins of Wikipedia and the New Politics of Knowledge. September 8, 2020

See also

• List of Wikipedia people

External links

• Larry Sanger – Sanger's personal website.
• Encyclosphere