Larry Sanger

Lawrence Mark Sanger (born July 16, 1968) is an American Internet project developer and philosopher who co-founded Wikipedia with Jimmy Wales. Sanger coined the name Wikipedia and provided initial drafts for many of its early guidelines, including the "Neutral point of view" and "Ignore all rules" policies. Prior to Wikipedia, he was the editor-in-chief of Nupedia, an online encyclopedia which was the predecessor of Wikipedia. He later worked on other encyclopedic projects, including the Encyclopedia of Earth, Citizendium, Everipedia, and Ballotpedia. Sanger's other interests include theology and philosophy such as epistemology, early modern philosophy, and ethics. He taught philosophy at Ohio State University.

Sanger joined the online encyclopedia Nupedia as editor-in-chief in 2000. Disappointed with the slow progress of Nupedia, Sanger proposed using a wiki to solicit and receive articles to put through Nupedia's peer-review process; this change led to the development and launch of Wikipedia in 2001. Sanger continued to serve as Nupedia's editor-in-chief and as an active contributor to Wikipedia in its first year, but he was laid off and left the project in March 2002. Sanger's status as a co-founder of Wikipedia has been questioned by Wales, but is generally accepted.

Since Sanger's departure from Wikipedia, he has been critical of the project, describing it in 2007 as being "broken beyond repair". He has argued that Wikipedia lacks credibility and accuracy because, in his view, it had a lack of respect for expertise. Since 2020, he has accused Wikipedia of having a left-wing ideological bias in its articles. Sanger's effort to change Wikipedia was received negatively by editors of the English Wikipedia.

In June 2026, he was banned from editing the English Wikipedia after the community determined that he had violated its "canvassing", or brigading, rule by publicizing an internal community discussion on his proposed "WikiProject Intellectual Diversity" to his 93,000 followers on X. The community also concluded that he was "not here" to constructively build the encyclopedia.

Lawrence Mark Sanger was born in Bellevue, Washington, on July 16, 1968. His father, Gerry, was a marine biologist who studied seabirds and worked for the United States Fish and Wildlife Service. His mother, Lana, was a homemaker. When he was seven years old, Sanger's family moved to Anchorage, Alaska, where he was raised. As a teenager, he played the violin and created a text-based adventure game using the programming language BASIC. Sanger later recalled, "I decided I wanted to study philosophy and make it my life's work when I was about 16". When he was 17 years old, Sanger, inspired by the works of René Descartes, began to believe "only the things that he could directly perceive or that could be logically derived from what he perceived".

In high school, Sanger played piano, did cross country running and cross-country skiing, was a champion debater, and completed his graduation requirements a year early. According to The Atlantic, Sanger "excelled in high school" and "fits the profile of almost every Internet early adopter: he’d been a good student, played Dungeons & Dragons, and tinkered with PCs as a youth". After graduating from high school he enrolled at Reed College, beginning in the fall of 1986, majoring in philosophy.

In college, Sanger became interested in the Internet and its potential as a publishing outlet. He 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. In 1994, Sanger wrote a manifesto for the discussion group:The history of philosophy is full of disagreement and confusion. One reaction by philosophers to this state of things is to doubt whether the truth about philosophy can ever be known, or whether there is any such thing as the truth about philosophy. But there is another reaction: one may set out to think more carefully and methodically than one's intellectual forebears.

Sanger graduated from Reed College with a Bachelor of Arts in philosophy in 1991. He then pursued graduate studies at Ohio State University, where he earned his Master of Arts in philosophy in 1995 and his Ph.D. in philosophy in 2000. He is a professional epistemologist. His doctoral dissertation, completed under the philosopher George Pappas, was titled, Epistemic Circularity: An Essay on the Problem of Meta-Justification.

Around 1994, Sanger met Jimmy Wales after subscribing to Wales's mailing list, "Moderated Discussion of Objectivist Philosophy" (MDOP). Beginning in 1998, Sanger 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, concerned about the year 2000 problem.

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. Sanger was hired as Nupedia's editor-in-chief. He began to oversee Nupedia in February 2000, developing a review process for articles and recruiting editors. Through working on Nupedia, Sanger "found that it was a fascinating problem to organize people online to create encyclopedias". Articles were reviewed through Nupedia's email system before being posted on the site.

Nupedia made very slow progress and was at a standstill at the end of 2000, causing consternation to Sanger and Wales, with Sanger saying that "by the summer of 2000, it had become clear that the process we tested out [for making articles on Nupedia] was very slow." In January 2001, Sanger proposed the creation of a wiki to speed article development, which resulted in the launch of Wikipedia on January 15, 2001. Wikipedia was initially intended as a collaborative wiki for which the public would write entries that would then be fed into Nupedia's review process. However, the majority of Nupedia's experts and the Nupedia advisory board wanted little to do with the project, with members of the Nupedia advisory board mailing list dismissing the idea of Wikipedia as being ridiculous.

The idea of using a wiki came when Sanger met up with his friend Ben Kovitz for dinner on January 2, 2001, when Sanger was first introduced to wiki software. 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 created Wikipedia's first introductory pages and home pages, and invited the first few people to make contributions to the website, which was then called the Nupedia Wiki. Within a few days of its launch, Wikipedia had outgrown Nupedia and a small community of editors had gathered. Sanger served as Wikipedia's "chief organizer", inviting new contributors and drafting early policy, including "Ignore all rules", "Neutral point of view", "No original research", and "Verifiability". He embraced Wikipedia's encouragement of boldness among its editors, telling users to "not worry about messing up". Sanger created the concept of "Brilliant prose", which evolved into featured articles as a way to showcase Wikipedia's highest-quality articles.

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. He also asked to be given more respect and deference by Wikipedians, which backfired and led to an increase in friction between him and the community.

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, aiming to bring more accountability and academic rigor to articles. 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 2011, Ars Technica reporter Timothy B. Lee said Citizendium was "dead in the water". Lee noted that Citizendium's late start was a disadvantage and that its growth was hindered by an "unwieldy editing model". 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".

Sanger has been involved with several other online encyclopedia projects. In 2005, he joined the Digital Universe Foundation as Director of Distributed Content Programs. 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. The first part of the project was the expert-written and -edited Encyclopedia of Earth. 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. It also aims to teach the meaning and context of each word.

Sanger's professional interests include epistemology, early modern philosophy, and ethics. Most of Sanger's philosophical work focuses on epistemology. In January 2002, Sanger returned to Columbus, Ohio, to teach philosophy at Ohio State University. In 2008, he visited Balliol College of the University of Oxford to debate the proposal "the Internet is the future of knowledge", arguing wikis and blogs are changing the way knowledge is created and distributed. 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 December 2010, Sanger said he considered WikiLeaks to be "enemies of the US—not just the government, but the people". 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 conservative 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". Sanger voted for Donald Trump in the 2024 United States presidential election.

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. As of 2021, he lives with his wife and two sons, who are both homeschooled.

Sanger was raised in the Lutheran Church – Missouri Synod and went to Sunday school, but became an agnostic when he was 16 after his family stopped regularly going to church. In 2023, Sanger described himself as a Christian and is authoring a Christian apologetics book titled God Exists: A Philosophical Case for the Christian God. In 2025, he said that he was seeking to be confirmed in the Anglican Church in North America, a confessing Anglican denomination of Christianity unaffiliated with the worldwide Anglican Communion.

Epistemic Circularity: An Essay on the Problem of Meta-Justification – doctoral thesis

Descartes's methods and their theoretical background – bachelor thesis

"Why Neutrality?". Ballotpedia. December 30, 2015. Archived from the original on March 7, 2026.

"How and Why I Taught My Toddler to Read" (PDF). LarrySanger.org. December 13, 2010. Archived from the original (PDF) on August 8, 2025.

"Individual Knowledge in the Internet Age". Educause Review. April 15, 2010.