Larry Sanger
Lawrence Mark Sanger (born July 16, 1968 in Bellevue, Washington) is the co-founder and was the chief organizer of Wikipedia. He was also the editor-in-chief of Nupedia, and most recently, was the founder and is the current editor-in-chief of the Citizendium. He is also an American philosopher.
Although having been born in Washington, Sanger was raised in Anchorage, Alaska. He received his B.A. in philosophy from Reed College in 1991 and Ph.D. in philosophy from Ohio State University in 2000.
Encyclopedias
Nupedia
The first online encyclopedia Sanger was involved in was web-based Nupedia, which he conceptually developed starting in January of 2000. The project lasted until September 2003, when it failed due to inadequate support. Sanger was its salaried editor-in-chief until March 1, 2002, but was a volunteer editor a month prior to his resignation.
Nupedia was written and reviewed by both subject matter experts and the public-at-large although final approval of content required the approval of an expert. It was not a wiki in the modern sense, in which anyone with access to the Internet could contribute content; although anyone could sign up for an account and comment on the articles. At the end of the project, it became a feeder for Wikipedia, and although the projects were intended to be cooperative, they were not.
Wikipedia
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. In the start of the project, Sanger had no "official title", but assumed the position of its salaried "chief organizer". Sanger left this position at Wikipedia at the same time he left Nupedia.
On December 31, 2004, a well-known and controversial online essay was published at Kuro5hin[1] 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.
Citizendium
Hoping to build upon his experience with the earlier encyclopedias and to avoid their pitfalls, Sanger publically launched the Citizendium in March of 2007, although it had been a private pilot project that began in September of 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 the Citizendium and Wikipedia are:
- all contributors must apply for membership in the project under their real names
- 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.
Major works
- Academic theses
- Descartes' methods and their theoretical background (bachelor thesis)
- Epistemic Circularity: An Essay on the Problem of Meta-Justification (doctoral thesis)
- Manifesto and background reading
- Toward a New Compendium of Knowledge (September 2006)
- Why the Citizendium Will (Probably) Succeed (March 2007)
- Related essays
- Who Says We Know: On the New Politics of Knowledge (Edge.org, April 2007)
- How to Think about Strong Collaboration among Professionals (text of keynote at Handelsblatt IT Congress from Jan. 30, 2007)
- Why Make Room for Experts in Web 2.0? (text of keynote at SDForum from Oct. 24, 2006)
- The Role of Content Brokers in the Era of Free Content (articulates one of the Citizendium Foundation's concepts for funding free content)
References
- ↑ "Wikipedia does have two big problems, and attention to them is long overdue. These problems could be eliminated by eliminating a single root problem." Sanger, Larry (31 Dec 2004). Why Wikipedia must Jettison Its Anti-Elitism. Kuro5hin.org. Retrieved on 2007-05-29.