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Highlights of Larry Sanger's Wiki-career

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By Smallbones

Optional: note that this is an incomplete draft and should not be linked to or quoted, as stated above.

Larry Sanger, known to many as the co-founder of Wikipedia, was the "chief organizer" of Wikipedia starting in January 2001, when Wikipedia first published, until February 2002, when Jimmy Wales decided that the encyclopedia could no longer afford his services. Despite his limited editing since then (about 1,500 edits), Sanger has remained a person of interest to Wikipedians, at least until his indefinite banning on June 23, 2026 for canvassing.

The Signpost has reported on Sanger’s writings and activities since January 10, 2005, our very first issue, after Sanger published a criticism of Wikipedia’s purported anti-elitism off-Wiki and inspired a round of debate about Wikipedia's credibility in the press. This article follows Sanger's Wiki-career as documented in The Signpost from that time until early this year. For the current news on Sanger's block see [[]].

Early writings

[edit]

Three weeks after the first Signpost coverage of Sanger, he appeared again as one of several Wikipedia critics in an article on the encyclopedia’s credibility.

The article The Sanger memoirs appeared on April 25, 2005 and should be of interest to anybody interested in the minutiae of the founding of Nupedia and Wikipedia.

It appeared soon after Sanger published a 14,000+ word Memoirs off-Wiki [1] (more accessible preprints available at [2] and [3])


In 1999, Jimmy Wales wanted to start a free, collaborative encyclopedia.

To my great surprise, Jimmy replied to my e-mail describing his idea of a free encyclopedia, and asking if I might be interested in leading the project. He was specifically interested in finding a philosopher to lead the project, he said. He made it a condition of my employment [at Nupedia] that I would finish my Ph.D. quickly (whereupon I would get a raise)--which I did, in June 2000. I am still grateful for the extra incentive. I thought he would be a great boss, and indeed he was.

To be clear, the idea of an open source, collaborative encyclopedia, open to contribution by ordinary people, was entirely Jimmy’s, not mine, and the funding was entirely by Bomis. I was merely a grateful employee; I thought I was very lucky to have a job like that land in my lap. Of course, other people had had the idea; but it was Jimmy's fantastic foresight actually to invest in it. For this the world owes him a considerable debt. The actual development of this encyclopedia was the task he gave me to work on.


— Larry Sanger, Memoirs

Any inconsistency between being a "merely a grateful employee" and being a "co-founder" - a word he used twice in the Memoirs - was not mentioned by Sanger.

Sanger commented at great length on many Nupedia and Wikipedia topics. He preferred the management style and culture of Nupedia to that of Wikipedia. He refused the title of editor-in-chief at Wikipedia, despite keeping that title at Nupedia until he was laid off. His title at Wikipedia was "chief organizer" which he performed by soliciting Nupedians and others to edit the new wiki, suggesting rules for Wikipedians to follow, and similar duties.

Sanger's new ideas for online encyclopedias continued through 2006-2008. An article in The Guardian about the Digital Universe, another encyclopedia website, inspired by Sanger’s work appeared in July 2006.

A week later The New Yorker ran a long piece on Wikipedia on how the rules and admin corps had proliferated and comparing and contrasting Sanger's views with those of Encyclopædia Britannica president Jorge Cauz. Check!

A few weeks later we reported that Marshall Poe in The Atlantic Monthly took a deep dive into the early history of Wikipedia. Quote? Check!

New ideas

[edit]

In September 2006 Citizendium - another Wiki alternative was announced. A Signpost reader commented that Sanger has "been trying different ideas based on this for a while, all fail because of no editing in them…. Funding problem perhaps."

A week later we reviewed the media's early reactions to Citizendium.

"Sanger said he was pleased that Wikipedia was accepting of his new project. 'We will take the best of their articles and edit them and hopefully make them better,' he said. 'And they are free to take from our articles. We're in a partnership to a certain extent, two parallel-thinking projects.'"
— San Diego Union-Tribune

By April 2007, Citizendium still hadn’t fully opened and was getting more controversial, including


  • This section really needs work - they published the same AP article giving 2 different stories

Green boxes???

on the rivalry between Wikipedia's Jimbo Wales and Citizendium's Larry Sanger. The significance of Sanger's part in the creation of Wikipedia was played up by him to be an equal co-partner and played down by Wales, to be one of 20 others involved. See

Wikipedia competitor seeks to cut out errors (archive) in the Boston Globe. Citizendium Head's Role in Founding Wikipedia Unclear (archive) at Fox News. }}

Note that both of the articles cited above are based on an Associated Press article published March 28, 2007. Citizendium appears to have been opened for editing by the general public on March 25, 2007. By 2011, its continuing existence seemed questionable, but the site is still open with 16,477 articles and 24 edits made in the month ended July 5.

end of section that really needs work

Section heading for editing convenience only 2

[edit]

In April 2007 a passing mention raised the heat, as Sanger mentioned that Wikipedia governance was "beyond repair".

By February 2008, the gloves were off. Sanger while promoting Citizendium at Eastern Michigan University, according to the Detroit Free Press said "I sort of separated myself from that organization and that crowd…We can actually do better."

On April 8, 2009 Sanger posted an Open letter to Wales at User talk:Jimbo Wales and republishing it in the Citizendium blog and elsewhere. It’s a long, impassioned call to right a great wrong, demanding that Wales admit that Sanger was a co-founder of Wikipedia and that the Wikimedia Foundation officially endorse Sanger’s claim.

The Signpost followed up and quoted Wales's reply to Sanger, "As I have said many times, I think the entire 'controversy' is silly....Larry didn't make Wikipedia, and neither did I. It was made by the community, and lots of people played interesting roles. If other people feel a burning need to discuss this, please do so elsewhere other than my talk page; I'm not interested in discussing it at this time."

In October 2009 the "Sanger controversy reignited" according to the Signpost headline. This reporter cannot find any archives of the off-Wiki articles referenced, so we just use the the quotations from the Signpost article.

Jason Calacanis and Sanger alleged that Jimbo Wales has downplayed Sanger's role on Wikipedia for financial motives. Calacanis in an interview then on youtube stated:

[Wales] just got a bunch of people to give him a bunch of money thinking, 'Oh, this is the guy who created Wikipedia.' Well guess what? He didn't create Wikipedia. Larry Sanger did.

In another forum Sanger stated:

In 2004, at just the time when he was leaving out any mention of me in discussing the history of Wikipedia, he was starting Wikia...That's also when the star of Wikipedia really began to rise and started to enter into public consciousness. Jimmy Wales had a real financial motive to portray himself as the brains behind Wikipedia.

More new wikis

[edit]

In October 2014 The story of Wikipedia} the Signpost reviewed extracts from the book The Innovators, Walter Isaacson's then new book, gives a sympathetic view of the two co-founders narrative, supporting Sanger's view. Isaacson's view gains further support since he was an early Wikipedian.

Isaacson "waxes enthusiastic about Wikipedia's mechanisms of collaboration and consensus as it applies to both the development of articles and the governance of the project. He particularly stresses the principle of neutral point of view in producing articles," according to the Signpost.

In December 2014 Sanger launches a "Wikipedia for news" on the Infobitt launch, citing Newsweek. Unfortunately Infobitt ran out of money by July 2015, as reported in the Signpost.

In November 2015 Sanger was interviewed by Vice about how Wikipedia started. One problem according to Sanger was that "trolls sort of took over. The inmates started running the asylum." The Independent reprinted much of the interview with its own interpretation. Sanger said "they got the thrust of the interview wrong."

In December 2017 Sanger joined Everipedia as CIO, promising to put that encyclopedia on the blockchain and give editors tokens that would give them a financial reward for their editing. A dozen other Signpost articles mentioned Everipedia, but Sanger resigned in 2019 and returned his digital wooden nickels after contributing an article to it about his left thumb.

Also in 2019, Sanger introduced his new encyclopedia project, the Encyclosphere writing that "Wikipedia has become an arrogant and controlling oligarchy."



The blocking of Sanger in June 2026 needs more space than this article can supply, but two mentions of of Sanger in the 2026 Signpost conveniently set the stage for Sanger's last act.

A Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2026-03-10/In the media § Video from Reason shows separate interviews with Wales, Sanger, and others, skillfully spliced so that it almost looks like they are debating one another. While this video might be taken as a slanted summary of Sanger's Wiki-career as it was viewed in early 2026, a more conventional text piece from India's The Economic Times repeats the now common co-editor story, taking us back to the start of Sanger's career.

later material

[edit]








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