Larry Sanger

Larry Sanger

Lawrence Mark ("Larry") Sanger, born July 16, 1968 in Bellevue, Washington, was the editor-in-chief of Nupedia, and the co-founder and chief organizer of Wikipedia. Most recently, he is the current editor-in-chief and founder of Citizendium. Raised in Alaska, Sanger received a Ph.D. in philosophy from Ohio State University in 2000.

Sanger's first online encyclopedia project was web-based Nupedia, which lasted from March 2000 to September 2003. Sanger was its salaried editor-in-chief until March 1, 2002, but was a volunteer editor a month prior to his resignation. Effectively unfunded until that time, Nupedia was written by both subject matter experts and the public-at-large although it was edited and reviewed solely by those experts. Despite being 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 began as an offshoot of Nupedia.

Co-founded by Jimmy Wales and Sanger, Wikipedia is a wiki-based project in which content could be contributed and edited by anyone at all. At the founding of Wikipedia, Sanger was characterized being as its salaried "chief organizer," although he had no official title. Sanger left his official role at Wikipedia at the same time he left Nupedia.

On December 31, 2004, a well-known and controversial online essay was published at Kuro5hin in which Sanger detailed "Why Wikipedia Must Jettison Its Anti-Elitism", and that "Wikipedia does have two big problems." The problems he was referring to were the lack of public perception of credibility, particularly in areas of detail, and the dominance of difficult people, trolls, and their enablers. He identified "anti-elitism, or lack of respect for expertise" as the root of these problems.

Hoping to build upon his experience with the earlier encyclopedias and to avoid their pitfalls, Sanger launched Citizendium on September 15, 2006. Originally conceived to be an improved fork of Wikipedia, a consensus was reached to develop an individual sense of identity. This was accomplished by cleaning up or removing articles originally forked in an effort called "The Big Delete."

The three main differences between Citizendium and Wikipedia are:

• all contributors must apply for membership in the project under their real names, which are then visibly associated with all articles
• all articles are reviewed by experts in their particular fields, offering suggestions and criticism as the articles evolve with the goal for each article to be "approved"
• that vandals, trolls, and disruptive editors are quickly and permanently banned from further work on the project.