68 Facts About Larry Sanger

Lawrence Mark Sanger is an American Internet project developer and philosopher who co-founded Wikipedia along with Jimmy Wales.

Larry 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.

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

Larry 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.

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

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

Larry Sanger taught philosophy at one of his alma maters, Ohio State University.

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

Larry Sanger's father Gerry was a marine biologist who studied seabirds and his mother raised the children.

Larry Sanger 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 Larry Sanger says influenced his views on neutrality due to these debates exposing him to different issues and arguments from both sides:.

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

Larry 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".

Larry Sanger started and moderated a libertarian philosophy discussion list, the Association for Systematic Philosophy.

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

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

Larry 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 January 2000, Larry 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.

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

The idea of using a wiki came when Larry Sanger met up with his friend Ben Kovitz for dinner on January 2,2001, when Larry Sanger was first introduced to wiki software.

Kovitz, whom Larry Sanger had known from philosophy mailing lists, was a computer programmer who had come across Ward Cunningham's Wiki.

Larry Sanger was impressed with the possibilities offered by wikis and called Wales, who agreed to try it.

Larry Sanger created Wikipedia's first introductory pages and home pages, and invited the first few people to make contributions to the website, which was then called the Nupedia Wiki.

Larry Sanger embraced Wikipedia's encouragement of boldness among its editors, telling users to "not worry about messing up".

Larry Sanger created the concept of "Brilliant prose", which evolved into featured articles as a way to showcase Wikipedia's highest-quality articles.

Larry Sanger came into conflict with Wikipedia editors who did not appreciate his modes of organization and exercising authority, including The Cunctator, another active early editor.

Larry Sanger responded to these conflicts by proposing a stronger emphasis on expert editors and giving certain contributors the authority to resolve disputes and enforce rules.

Larry Sanger asked to be given more respect and deference by Wikipedians, which backfired and led to an increase in friction between him and the community.

Larry Sanger was laid off in February 2002 after Bomis lost a grant in the Dot-com crash, and he resigned as editor-in-chief of Nupedia and chief organizer of Wikipedia on March 1.

Larry Sanger attempted to revive Nupedia throughout 2002 as its activity petered out.

Larry Sanger tried to find an organization that would take control of it because it appeared Bomis and Wales seemed uninterested in managing it.

Larry Sanger inquired about purchasing the domain and other proprietary materials from Bomis.

Larry Sanger said Nupedia's demise was not entirely due to the inherent inefficiencies in its review process.

On his personal website, Larry Sanger posted several links that appear to support his role as a co-founder.

Larry Sanger has said he organized Wikipedia while Wales was mostly focused on Bomis.

In December 2004, writing for the Kuro5hin website, Larry Sanger commented that Wikipedia is not considered credible by librarians, teachers, and academics because it lacks a formal review process and that the presence of trolls and "difficult people" discourages accredited specialists and people who are knowledgeable from contributing to Wikipedia.

Larry Sanger argued that Wikipedia's "root problem" is a "lack of respect for expertise".

In September 2009, Larry Sanger said from early on the activities of trolls on the website "was a real problem, and Jimmy Wales absolutely refused to do anything about it".

Larry Sanger described Wales as a being a "fraud" and "liar" over the issue of who created Wikipedia.

In December 2017, Larry Sanger called Wikipedia's article on intelligent design "appallingly biased".

Larry Sanger listed other topics he argued are presented with a liberal and left-wing bias, including the topics on Hillary Clinton, abortion, drug legalization, religion, and LGBT adoption.

In particular, Larry Sanger said that Wikipedia, in describing many of Trump's statements as "false", established the website's biases.

Larry Sanger said he felt it was his "civic duty" to report the images.

Critics accused Larry Sanger of having an ulterior motive for reporting the images, noting he was still in charge of the faltering Citizendium project and said that publicizing the accusations was unnecessary.

In 2012, Larry Sanger told Fox News that he worked with NetSpark to get them to donate or heavily discount its pornographic image filtering technology for use on Wikipedia.

Larry Sanger claimed that NetSpark attempted to contact the Wikimedia Foundation in 2012 but received no response.

Larry Sanger predicted a rapid increase in Citizendium's traffic at its first anniversary in 2007.

Larry Sanger stepped down as editor-in-chief of Citizendium on September 22,2010, but said he would continue to support the project.

Larry Sanger later said that "it wasn't about women's studies in particular", but about "too much overlap with existing groups".

Larry Sanger has been involved with several other online encyclopedia projects.

Larry Sanger was a key organizer of the Digital Universe Encyclopedia web project that was launched in early 2006.

Larry Sanger later felt the pace of content production at the Foundation was too slow for him; he proposed open content to help speed development but the proposal was rejected.

Larry Sanger has worked at the WatchKnowLearn project, a non-profit organization that focuses on educating young children using videos and other media on the web.

Larry Sanger headed the development of WatchKnowLearn from 2008 to 2010.

In December 2017, it was announced that Larry Sanger had become the chief information officer of Everipedia, an open encyclopedia that uses blockchain technology.

That month, Larry Sanger told Inverse that Everipedia is "going to change the world in a dramatic way, more than Wikipedia did".

On October 18,2019, Larry Sanger announced that he had resigned from his position at Everipedia and returned his stock holdings in the company without compensation to establish the Knowledge Standards Foundation and develop the website encyclosphere.

In 2020, Larry Sanger was appointed to the advisory board of blockchain company Phunware.

Larry Sanger has a doctorate in Philosophy from Ohio State University.

Larry Sanger has argued that liberal and left-leaning views dominate in academia, science, the media and tech companies such as Facebook and Twitter.

In 2011, Larry Sanger began to defend Christians as he viewed them to be unfairly attacked in the media.

In January 2002, Larry Sanger returned to Columbus, Ohio to teach philosophy at Ohio State University.

In March 2022, Larry 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".

In February 2000, when Larry Sanger was hired by Wales to develop Nupedia, he moved to San Diego.

Larry Sanger was married in Las Vegas in December 2001.

Larry Sanger was raised in the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod and went to a Sunday school, but became an agnostic when he was 16 after his family stopped regularly going to church.

In 2023, Larry Sanger described himself as a Christian and is authoring an apologetics book titled God Exists: A Philosophical Case for the Christian God.

Larry Sanger started teaching his son to read before his second birthday and posted videos online to demonstrate this.