Larry Sanger

Larry Sanger

Lawrence Mark ("Larry") Sanger, born July 16, 1968 in Bellevue, Washington, was the editor-in-chief of Nupedia, co-founder and chief organizer of Wikipedia, and is the founder and current editor-in-chief 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 of 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 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.

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.