Larry Sanger

Lawrence Mark Sanger was born in Bellevue, Washington, on July 16, 1968. His father Gerry was a marine biologist who studied seabirds and his mother raised the children. When he was seven years old, his family moved to Anchorage, Alaska, where he grew up. 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". He started and moderated a libertarian philosophy discussion list, the Association for Systematic Philosophy. Sanger earned 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. Beginning in 1998, he and a friend ran a website called "Sanger and Shannon's Review of Y2K News Reports", a resource for people such as managers of computer systems who were concerned about the year 2000 problem. ==Nupedia and Wikipedia==

Nupedia was a web-based encyclopedia whose articles were written by volunteer contributors possessing relevant subject matter expertise and reviewed by editors prior to publication, and were licensed as free content. It was conceived by Jimmy Wales and underwritten by his company Bomis. Wales had interacted with Sanger on mailing lists. In January 2000, 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. Wales replied with "Instead of doing that, why don't you come and work on this idea that I've had?", presented the idea of Nupedia to Sanger, and invited him to join the project. Kovitz, whom Sanger had known from philosophy mailing lists, was a computer programmer who had come across Ward Cunningham's Wiki. Sanger was impressed with the possibilities offered by wikis and called Wales, who agreed to try it. Sanger originated the name "Wikipedia", chosen from "a long list of names", which he later said was "a silly name for what was at first a very silly project". Sanger soon grew disillusioned with Wikipedia, saying by mid-2001 its community was being "overrun" by "trolls" and "anarchist-types", who were "opposed to the idea that anyone should have any kind of authority that others do not". While such issues were not important to Sanger when Wikipedia was a source of articles for Nupedia, as it grew into an independent project he started to become more concerned about the community. 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. 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. In early 2002, Bomis announced the possibility of placing advertisements on Wikipedia, in part to pay for Sanger's employment, but the project was opposed to any commercialization and the market for Internet advertising was small. Sanger was laid off in February 2002 after Bomis lost a grant in the Dot-com crash, Sanger said he ended his participation in Wikipedia and Nupedia as a volunteer because he could not do justice to the tasks as a part-timer, Sanger attempted to revive Nupedia throughout 2002 as its activity petered out. It was also the subject of edits by Wales to Wikipedia articles in 2005, after which Sanger accused Wales of "rewriting history" by disregarding his involvement; Wales told Wired he only clarified details about Sanger's contribution to the project and removed factual errors, adding that he should not have done so. Wales later stated he had initially heard of the wiki concept from Bomis employee Jeremy Rosenfeld rather than Sanger. He also characterized Sanger's claim to be a co-founder as "absurd" and stated, "I know of no one who was there at the company at the beginning who would think it anything other than laughable." On his personal website, Sanger posted several links to support his role as a co-founder. and he was identified as a co-founder of Wikipedia in September 2001. Sanger has said he organized Wikipedia while Wales was mostly focused on Bomis.com. ==Criticism of Wikipedia==

Since his departure in 2002, Sanger has been critical of Wikipedia, its policies and administrators, and the Wikimedia Foundation. In 2015, Vice referred to Sanger as "Wikipedia's Most Outspoken Critic". In April 2007, Sanger stated Wikipedia was "still quite useful and an amazing phenomenon" but he had "come to the view that it is also broken beyond repair" with a range of problems "from serious management problems, to an often dysfunctional community, to frequently unreliable content, and to a whole series of scandals". In September 2009, 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". Sanger described Wales as being a "fraud" and "liar" over the issue of who created Wikipedia. Wales responded to a query about the feud between the two men, stating: "I think very highly of Larry Sanger, and think that it is unfortunate that this silly debate has tended to overshadow his work." In a November 2015 interview with Zachary Schwartz for Vice, Sanger expanded on his experiences with trolls on Wikipedia during the site's initial growth: "It was kind of stressful. I think it stressed out my wife more than me. The idea that there were people who were abusing me online just bothered her greatly." Sanger equated the trolls with modern-day social justice warriors (SJWs). In March 2014, Sanger stated that "In some fields and some topics, there are groups who 'squat' on articles and insist on making them reflect their own specific biases. There is no credible mechanism to approve versions of articles." In December 2015, Sanger said that "Wikipedia itself might be thought to be committed to such a completely international neutrality, and in places, its policies have seemed to hold it to that utopian ambition. But of course it cannot be and it is not. The English Wikipedia's articles about science most clearly betray its Western and especially Anglo-American provenance, and articles about, for example, philosophy are mostly about Western philosophy. I see nothing really wrong with that." Sanger also said that "My teenage ire at shamefully biased writers and editors found expression in Nupedia's neutrality policy, which in turn became Wikipedia's", calling himself "a zealot for neutrality". In December 2017, Sanger called Wikipedia's article on intelligent design "appallingly biased". In a May 2019 interview with Sophie Foggin of 150Sec, regarding the website's neutrality, Sanger said: "Wikipedia has long since decided to turn the other cheek when influential editors make articles speak with one point of view, when they dismiss unpopular views, or when they utterly fail to do justice to alternative approaches to a topic." Sanger also stated that Wikipedia "never did come up with a good solution" for "how to rein in the bad actors so that they did not ruin the project for everyone else" and that "Wikipedia is a broken system as a result". In a blog post in May 2020, Sanger described Wikipedia as "badly biased" and as favoring left-wing and liberal politics. In his opinion, portions of the Donald Trump Wikipedia article are "unrelentingly negative", while the Barack Obama article "completely fails to mention many well-known scandals". He 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, Sanger said that Wikipedia, in describing many of Trump's statements as "false", established the website's biases. Sanger commented in the blog post: "It is time for Wikipedia to come clean and admit that it has abandoned NPOV (i.e., neutrality as a policy)." Regarding Wikipedia's current neutrality policy, Sanger said that "it endorses the utterly bankrupt canard of journalistic 'false balance', which is directly contradictory to the original neutrality policy. As a result, even as journalists turn to opinion and activism, Wikipedia now touts controversial points of view on politics, religion, and science". In a February 2021 interview with Fox News, Sanger stated that Wikipedia's "ideological and religious bias is real and troubling, particularly in a resource that continues to be treated by many as an unbiased reference work". In a February 2021 interview with Carrie Sheffield on Pluto TV, Sanger criticized Wikipedia's coverage of socialism, saying that "when schoolkids go, and they look up answers to questions about the meaning of 'socialism' ... they're going to find an explanation that completely ignores any conservative, libertarian, or critical treatment of the subject", "And that's really problematic. That's not education. That's propaganda." He argued that Wikipedia was originally "committed to neutrality" until "about 10 years ago" when "liberals or leftists made their march through the institutions ... and basically took [Wikipedia] over", adding that "They started getting rid of citations from conservative sources, even conservative sources that were cited in order to explain the conservative point of view. At least in some cases, that was the case, and more and more, certain points of view were castigated and labeled". When asked about Wikipedia's reaction to his criticism, Sanger said that "They ignore me" and that "They don't care what I say, and the feeling is mutual." In a July 2021 interview with Freddie Sayers of LockdownTV, Sanger opined that Wikipedia is not trustworthy and that its contributors have a left-leaning bias. He further adds that since Wikipedia encourages the use of secondary sources instead of primary sources, Wikipedia's content is heavily influenced by coverage from center-left-wing media outlets, saying that "You can't cite the Daily Mail at all. You can't cite Fox News on socio-political issues either. It's banned. So what does that mean? It means that if a controversy does not appear in the mainstream center-Left media, then it's not going to appear on Wikipedia." Despite having a neutrality policy, he says that the viewpoint of Wikipedia articles represent the consensus viewpoints and that users are prohibited from adding counter-arguments to established views, which would help create more neutral articles. He argued that Wikipedia can give a "reliably establishment point of view on pretty much everything" and that "if only one version of the facts is allowed then that gives a huge incentive to wealthy and powerful people to seize control of things like Wikipedia in order to shore up their power. And they do that." In an August 2021 interview with The Sunday Times of London, Sanger objected to Wikipedia's description of alternative medicines, such as homeopathy, as "pseudoscience". He believed such a definition lacked true neutrality. Sanger also argued that "If you don't kowtow to the right people, you won't even be allowed to participate." Of Wikipedia as a whole, he said: "I advise against using it, even to conscientious students." Sanger expressed support for a proposal by the conservative think tank Heritage Foundation to dox and "target" Wikipedia editors they consider to be anti-Semitic, saying, "There does, of course, need to be some accountability for Wikipedia editors. For one thing, admins and those with significant authority in the system should be as easily named and shamed as any ordinary journalist". In September 2025, Sanger published a list of proposed changes to Wikipedia titled "The Nine Theses" on his blog and his Wikipedia user page. Sanger was interviewed about his critiques on the Tucker Carlson podcast, where he commented on what he saw as the degrading of neutrality policies and the "blacklisting" of certain conservative sources. He also claimed that intelligence agencies like the CIA may have influenced some direction or content on Wikipedia. Sanger's proposals were received well by members of the Republican party and second Trump administration, including David Sacks and Elon Musk, with the latter announcing Grokipedia the same day he shared and praised Sanger's proposals. Sanger said he felt it was his "civic duty" to report the images. Critics accused 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, 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. He said that NetSpark attempted to contact the Wikimedia Foundation in 2012 but received no response. In a subsequent interview with TechCrunch TV, Sanger criticized Wikipedia for containing too much pornography that children could access and said that he did not regret leaving Wikipedia. ==Later activities==

Citizendium At the Wizards of OS conference in September 2006, Sanger announced the launch of a new wiki-based encyclopedia called Citizendium—short for "citizens' compendium"—as a fork of Wikipedia. The objective of the fork was to address perceived flaws in the way Wikipedia functions; anonymous editing was disallowed, all users were required to use their real names, and there was a layer of experts who had extra authority. It was an attempt by Sanger to establish a credible online encyclopedia based on scholarship, The site attempted to implement an expert review process and experts tried to reach a decision in disputes that could not be resolved by consensus. Sanger predicted a rapid increase in Citizendium's traffic at its first anniversary in 2007. After a burst of initial work, however, the site went into decline and most of the experts were not retained. In 2014, the number of Citizendium contributors was under 100 and the number of edits per day was about "a dozen or so" according to Winthrop University's Dean of Library Services. By April 2026, Citizendium had about 16,400 articles, 145 of which had undergone expert review and were classified as "citable." Sanger, who in early 2007 announced he did not intend to head Citizendium indefinitely, effectively ceased to edit it in early 2009, although an announcement confirming this was not made until July 30, 2009, on the Citizendium-l mailing list. He stepped down as editor-in-chief of Citizendium on September 22, 2010, but said he would continue to support the project. On July 2, 2020, Sanger wrote that he had transferred legal ownership of the Citizendium domain name to Pat Palmer, saying that Citizendium had "stopped being 'my' project a long time ago. But until this morning, I still owned the domain name." Sanger refused to recognize women's studies as a top-level category on Citizendium, calling it too "politically correct". Sanger later said that "it wasn't about women's studies in particular", but about "too much overlap with existing groups". Other projects Sanger has been involved with several other online encyclopedia projects. He was a key organizer of the Digital Universe Encyclopedia web project that was launched in early 2006. The Digital Universe encyclopedia recruited recognized experts to write articles and to check user-submitted articles for accuracy. 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. 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. It is funded by grants, philanthropists, and the Community Foundation of Northwest Mississippi. Sanger headed the development of WatchKnowLearn from 2008 to 2010. It consists of a repository of educational videos for kindergarten to the 12th grade. In February 2013, it ranked as the top search result among educational videos on Google's search engine and attracted over six million page views each month. In 2010 and 2011, he continued developing a web-based reading-tutorial application for beginning readers, which was launched as Reading Bear in 2012. It uses the principles of phonics and multimedia presentations such as videos, PowerPoint presentations, and ebooks to teach pronunciation to children. The site, which aimed to be a crowdsourced news aggregator, went online in December 2014 but ran out of money in July 2015. In December 2017, it was announced that Sanger had become the chief information officer of Everipedia, an open encyclopedia that uses blockchain technology. That month, Sanger told Inverse that Everipedia is "going to change the world in a dramatic way, more than Wikipedia did". That same month, Sanger told TechRepublic that "Everipedia is the encyclopedia of everything, where topics are unrestricted, unlike on Wikipedia." On July 1, 2019, Sanger advocated for a social-media strike to take place on July 4 and 5 to demand the decentralization of social media platforms to their user bases from their top-level management so their users can assert control over their data and privacy. On October 18, 2019, 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.org. He said of the venture, "We need to do for encyclopedias what blogging standards did for blogs: there needs to be an 'Encyclosphere'. We should build a totally decentralized network, like the Blogosphere—or like email, IRC, blockchains, and the World Wide Web itself." In 2020, Sanger was appointed to the advisory board of blockchain company Phunware. ==Views==

Sanger's professional interests include epistemology, early modern philosophy, and ethics. Sanger has frequently written and spoken about collaborative content. 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, Sanger began to defend Christians as he viewed them to be unfairly attacked in the media. In September 2021, in response to U.S. President Joe Biden announcing a COVID-19 vaccine mandate for federal government employees, Sanger tweeted "Nor I.#IWillNotComply" in agreement with political commentator Tim Pool. In an earlier tweet, Sanger falsely claimed that COVID-19 vaccines are "not a vaccine". In March 2022, 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". ==Personal life==

In February 2000, when Sanger was hired by Wales to develop Nupedia, he moved to San Diego. He was married in Las Vegas in December 2001. In 2005, he and his wife moved to Santa Cruz, California, to work for Digital Universe. As of 2015, Sanger lives in the outskirts of Columbus, Ohio. In 2023, Sanger described himself as a Christian and is authoring an apologetics book titled God Exists: A Philosophical Case for the Christian God. In 2025, he said that was seeking to be confirmed in the Anglican Church in North America, a confessing Anglican denomination of Christianity. Ethnically, he described himself in 2016 as "a typical American cross-breed (lots of English, German, and French)". He is fond of Irish traditional music. ==Selected writings==

Academic work • Epistemic Circularity: An Essay on the Problem of Meta-Justification – doctoral thesis. • Descartes's methods and their theoretical background – bachelor thesis. Essays • Why Neutrality?. Ballotpedia, December 2015. • How and Why I Taught My Toddler to Read (PDF). LarrySanger.org, December 2010. • Individual Knowledge in the Internet Age. Educause Review, April 2010. • The Fate of Expertise after Wikipedia (PDF). Episteme – Edinburgh University Press, February 2009. • Who Says We Know: On The New Politics of Knowledge. Edge Foundation – Edge Reality Club, April 2007. • Humanity's Coming Enlightenment. (Archived) Edge Foundation – World Question Center, 2007. Presentations • What Strong Collaboration Means for Scholarly Publishing. Keynote at the Annual Meeting of Society for Scholarly Publishing, San Francisco, CA, June 7, 2007. • How to Think about Strong Collaboration among Professionals. Keynote at the Handelsblatt IT Congress, Bonn, Germany, January 30, 2007. • Why Make Room for Experts in Web 2.0?. Opening keynote at the SVForum, The Business of New Media, Santa Clara, CA, October 25, 2006. Books • Essays on Free Knowledge: The Origins of Wikipedia and the New Politics of Knowledge. September 8, 2020 ==See also==