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By Gregory Kohs
Wikipedia is one of the world’s ten most-used websites, right up there with the likes of Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, Facebook, and Amazon. However, it is the only non-profit, educational site in the top 50, inspiring at least some of its hundreds of millions of monthly readers to pitch in and edit their way to an even better repository of the world’s knowledge. Every year in December, the face of Jimmy Wales appears on the site, making his annual appeal for cash donations. He has become a sort of global ambassador for Wikipedia, recognized by millions of people.
Dr. Larry Sanger, forgotten creator of Wikipedia
However, Wales is not the man who truly launched Wikipedia.
The honorable distinction of bringing life to Wikipedia rests with a philosopher and educator named Dr. Larry Sanger. You see, what Wales had co-created was another encyclopedia called Nupedia. Wales hired Sanger to work as Nupedia’s editor-in-chief. But using a strict process that limited to experts the contribution of articles, Nupedia wasn’t going anywhere. So, on January 2, 2001, at a burrito dinner shared with a computer programmer, Sanger was introduced to a new revision-storing editing software called “wiki”. Over the next few days, Sanger championed what was considered a crazy idea at the time — what if the encyclopedia were opened up so that anyone could write and modify it?
Sanger asked Wales to install some wiki freeware on the Nupedia server, Sanger named the new encyclopedia project “Wikipedia”, and Sanger issued the first public call for participation in the Wikipedia adventure, with a fateful yet humble mailing list post:
http://www.wikipedia.com/
Humor me. Go there and add a little article. It will take all of five or ten minutes.–Larry
Knowledge management taken out of the hands of experts and turned over to the online masses could have been a catastrophe, but somehow, the wild and open process mostly worked, thanks to the ensuing months and months of hard work that Sanger put into the project, devising and ironing out various guidelines and policies like “Ignore all rules” and “Neutral point of view“, which still govern Wikipedia to this day. Sanger even initiated Wikipedia’s first article deletion policy. Sanger tells Examiner:
“I take credit most importantly for insisting that we were working on an encyclopedia, not something else. Believe me, if I had not so insisted, it would have developed into a melange of all sorts of garbage.”
A culture of irresponsibility
However, as time went on and Wikipedia became more and more popular with zealous proponents of things like “free culture” and an “anti-expert” philosophy, Sanger grew weary of “people getting off-mission by posting irrelevant political screeds, personal pseudo-scientific crap, making personal attacks, and trolling in other ways.” Sanger became concerned about how little support from Jimmy Wales he had in dealing with this nonsense, and so Sanger became the target of attacks by many of the project’s trolls, kooks, and anarchists.
After a little more than a year, Wales began drawing down his company’s financial support of Sanger. The creator of Wikipedia would ultimately leave the project, having been its only paid editor from January 2001 to March 2002. Without Sanger, Wikipedia became less reliable over time, although continuing to grow in popularity. While Jimmy Wales began to accept five- and even six-figure paid speaking gigs and ramped up a for-profit spin-off to “commercialize the hell” out of Wikipedia, he very sadly began to publicly minimize Larry Sanger’s instrumental role in Wikipedia’s creation and growth. At one point, Wales could be found stomping around various Internet chat rooms, declaring that he was the “sole founder” of Wikipedia, and asking his loyal followers to begin re-writing Sanger out of the established histories of Wikipedia. Wales would not only get caught knowingly hiring someone who had entirely defrauded the Wikipedia community with a fake professional resume, but he also got caught in an embarrassing sexual tryst with a political pundit whose Wikipedia biography he had massaged. Wales’ second divorce followed in due time.
What has happened to Sanger’s legacy since his launch of Wikipedia is shameful. While Wales and Sanger can and should be considered at least equal co-founders of Wikipedia (in this author’s opinion, Sanger is the “leading” co-founder, as he prompted the wiki installation, gave the project its name, and issued the first public announcement of it), a recent survey of high school students showed that 45% can identify Wales as a co-founder of Wikipedia, but only 10% similarly can place that checkmark next to Sanger’s name. It would appear Wales’ scheme to deprecate Sanger has succeeded.
All the while, Sanger’s passion for helping to expand human knowledge never ceased. When he left Wikipedia, he concluded that one of the most tiresome aspects of the project was its tendency to reject the contributions of subject experts. So, Sanger founded Citizendium.org, where experts would be welcomed and cherished for their ability to present information in a more stable and truthful manner than what’s typically presented on Wikipedia. Citizendium struggles in the shadow of Wikipedia, but there is no denying, for example, that its article about an obscure subject like block ciphers is far better than Wikipedia’s version, even though Google will return Wikipedia’s page as the #1 search result for the term, while putting Citizendium’s on page 7 of the search results.
Teaching kids to read and learn
In 2009, Dr. Sanger began to turn over control of Citizendium to a committee of peers, and he moved on enthusiastically to a non-profit project called WatchKnowLearn, where he became Executive Director. WatchKnowLearn is a phenomenal resource, an index of over 30,000 educational videos, placed into a directory. You can watch the videos without any registration process, for free. The directory is organized both by subject matter and age level.
If you’ve ever seen the amazing feat of Sanger’s four-year-old child reading a college textbook, then it’s not much of a surprise that Sanger also launched a spin-off non-profit project from WatchKnowLearn, called Reading Bear. Using simple graphics and an attractive speaker, young minds are engaged from the start. Reading Bear is the first free program online to teach very early readers vocabulary and concepts while strengthening phonetic patterns of textual English.
Sanger lives in suburban Columbus, Ohio with his wife and two young children. He even plays a pretty mean fiddle. Not content to rest on the laurels of launching the world’s most popular encyclopedia, his passion for learning — and helping young minds develop the skills for learning — is unsurpassed. It was no shock to this reporter that when told about the possibility of winning a $50,000 America Inspired prize from Examiner, Sanger said, “I would donate it — most likely to the fund that pays for Reading Bear!” Inspired in turn, if this article wins any share of prize money, the journalist will donate all of the proceeds to a local food bank and a summer camp for special needs youth. Sanger has that just that sort of persuasive power for good deeds.
Photo credit: Image used with permission from Dr. Sanger’s Twitter profile
Excellent article about a caring, effective and innovative man.
Whassamatter, is business so bad that you’re hustling bets these days?
One hundred dollars. If I win, you make a check to the WMF. If you win, I pay the charity of your choice. Articles selected by hitting the SELECT RANDOM ARTICLE button until 10 pieces are selected that date back to 2002. Selection to be performed 5 by you and 5 by me on the honor system. Your entry is the last entry on record for 2002. My entry is the current version at the time of selection. Judgment of “reliability” to be performed by an independent person not affiliated with either Wikipediocracy or Wikipedia. A 5 to 5 score is no action.
RfB
Mr. Davenport, I responded to your challenge over here. I think the University of Minnesota proves that mistakes in Wikipedia on any given article are on the increase. Of course, the size of articles is also on the increase, so it may be a collinear thing. Regardless, a Wikipedia article with even one mistake is not “reliable”, by definition. So, that’s my angle and I’m sticking to it. If you still want the bet to transpire, you’ll have to help set it up. If you want to change how we interpret the rules (such as, is the reliability of any given Wikipedia sentence declining over time) that’s a bet I’m not so willing to take. I’m just saying any given article that existed when Larry Sanger left in March 2002 is less likely to have a factual mistake in it than the same article in April 2012.
Meanwhile, how funny is it that Rd232 is advertising this blog post over on Wikimedia Commons?
The first half of the blog was informative and topical, taking note of the Orwellian manner in which Sanger’s input into early Wikipedia has been scrubbed clean, so that only Jimbo “it was all me” Wales remains at the top of the pillar.
It is a shame that the second half devolved into a gushing puff-piece, and a regurgitation of the “teach-toddlers-to-read” scam. Baby memorization is a cute parlor trick, it isn’t actual reading.
My parents taught me to read when I was four years old. Having that head start has been a benefit for me throughout my life.
I’ve known children that could read at age 3 or 4 because they were read to since infancy, and mine could read and comprehend at a college level at age 7. Finishing a 300 page novel in a day was not unusual for them. It’s not a parlor trick.
You’re known children that could memorize. Cheers.
Are you seriously arguing that no one gets to kindergarten already knowing how to read? I did.
A little bit of revisionist history here, not that this particular question hasn’t been blanketed with the same for a decade. Sanger, who was Wales’ employee, has sung different tunes about events around that time as his relationship with Wales and Wikimedia has devolved. Nowadays even in job ad postings he credits himself as the sole founder, but outside of his teeny tiny coterie he is generally acknowledged as a co-founder if anything.
Of course, you won’t hear him tout his subsequent successes. That’s because there haven’t been any; each project he has truly founded himself has failed miserably and predictably, despite his enthusiasm in his efforts and himself.
While I disagree with Tarc on some of the particulars, in general, I agree with Tarc’s comment.
You do your readers and yourselves a disservice with the gradual shift in tone on this piece. You go from pointing out legitimate places where Sanger’s contributions have been overlooked and edited out of history, to a fluff piece uncritically pushing his current projects and praising the genius of his family.