Larry Sanger

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Larry Sanger (2006)

Lawrence Mark "Larry" Sanger (born July 16, 1968 in Bellevue , Washington ) is an American Internet project developer. He was hired by Jimmy Wales from March 2000 to February 2002 as editor-in-chief of the encyclopedia project Nupedia and in this position in January 2001 co-founder of the free online encyclopedia Wikipedia , whose development he had a major influence as chief organizer and the only paid editor until March 2003.

Many of the original, still valid principles of Wikipedia go back to Sanger. Since leaving, however, he has distanced himself increasingly vehemently from Wikipedia, as he believes that subject matter experts should play a greater role in the encyclopedia in order to increase the quality and reliability and to improve its reputation.

life and work

Larry Sanger grew up in Anchorage , Alaska . He received a Bachelor of Arts (BA) in philosophy from Reed College in 1991 and a Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) from Ohio State University in 2000 .

Nupedia

Nupedia had a complex peer review process that was supposed to ensure a high quality standard for the articles. As a result, Nupedia developed very slowly. When the project was discontinued in September 2003, only 27 items had been completed and 74 more were in the works.

Wikipedia

Note from Larry Sangers when determining the correct domain for the German language Wikipedia on March 30, 2001

Inspired by Ward Cunningham's WikiWikiWeb , Sanger and Wales decided to expand the Nupedia project through the Wiki principle. On January 15, 2001, the Wikipedia side project was started.

Sanger worked full-time on both projects until Jimmy Wales' Internet company Bomis stopped paying him in February 2002. Sanger continued his work as a volunteer at Wikipedia. He also started working as a philosophy lecturer at Ohio State University .

In December 2004, in an article on the kuro5hin website, he suggested that Wikipedia should prioritize the work and opinions of experts over those of laypeople.

Later there were serious differences between Sanger and Wales, as both claim the authorship of Wikipedia. Sanger claims to have had the brilliant idea for the implementation. He later led his motive for setting up an online encyclopedia in competition with Wikipedia back to disputes with the other Wikipedia founder Wales over the priorities and direction of the Internet encyclopedia. In late 2001, users protested Sanger's archive deletion from vandalism on early Wikipedia. He then justified himself with the essay Is Wikipedia an Experiment in Anarchy ? and in it set out his idea of ​​a lexicon: he advocated far more control and hierarchy in the organization of an encyclopedia than Wales.

On December 1, 2001, Bomis, the then operating company of Wikipedia, suggested that he leave the project. Bomis hadn't paid him a salary since February 2002. Sanger resigned on March 1, 2002 as editor-in-chief of Nupedia and chief organizer of the then new Wikipedia.

Since then, Sanger had never lost sight of the goal of a high quality Internet encyclopedia. From autumn 2005 he worked for the entrepreneur Joe Firmage at the Digital Universe Foundation and developed the first Wikipedia alternative or a fork with Digital Universe .

In 2010, Sanger reported the Wikimedia Foundation to the FBI for distributing child pornography on Wikimedia Commons . Specifically, he named the Commons categories Pedophilia and their sub-category Lolicon Lolicon as examples of representations that are illegal in the USA. The § 1466A cited by him also prohibits the graphic representation of child pornography, as in the manga / anime genre Lolicon . In particular, Sanger attacked the Deputy Director of the Wikimedia Foundation Erik Möller in his ad . Wikimedia legal counsel Mike Godwin denied the allegations in a discussion with Sanger.

Citizendium

On September 15, 2006, Sanger made the official announcement at the Wizards-of-OS conference in Berlin that the project would start for Citizendium as another fork of Wikipedia. Citizendium (abbreviation of: The citizens' compendium, i.e. compendium for citizens) is a MediaWiki -based web presence for the development of an English-language reference work. In contrast to Wikipedia, Citizendium does not allow anonymous contributions, the quality should be guaranteed by specialist editors . This should make Citizendium a “better Wikipedia”. Like Wikipedia, Citizendium also puts free information online.

After a pilot phase in which the wiki was only accessible to registered employees, Citizendium was opened to readers on March 25, 2007. Since then, Sanger has changed the concept of his lexicon several times: Should Citizendium initially be a "top-down" model in which a hierarchy of knowledge experts decides the truth of an entry, in December 2006 he turned this approach on its head. At Citizendium, "people who work academically or scientifically in less established positions", such as "teachers, university assistants, journalists", should now create lexicon articles instead of "in a model from the bottom up from above".

Even the initial intention of transferring the entire content of the English-language Wikipedia to the Citizendium servers, Sanger gave up in favor of the claim to develop articles autonomously. Sanger's project was financed until 2010 by the Tides Center, a foundation that supports social projects in the USA, and since then through fundraising.

Infobitt News

In November 2014, the Infobitt News project was released for general registration. There, a community of users is supposed to collect and briefly summarize all kinds of messages . The users can choose individual contributions by giving votes to the ten most important messages of the day in total or on a specific topic. The aim of the project is to make the general reporting more manageable and to separate the relevant reports from unimportant ones.

On July 8, 2015, Sanger informed the community via a newsletter that Infobitt was insolvent and the project was about to end.

Fonts

Web links

Commons : Larry Sanger  - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files

See also

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Larry Sanger: Why Wikipedia Must Jettison Its Anti-Elitism. December 31, 2004, accessed March 20, 2012 .
  2. ↑ By Kerstin Kohlenberg : Internet: Die anarchische Wiki-Welt. In: Zeit Online. Retrieved January 5, 2016 .
  3. ^ Larry Sanger: My resignation , March 1, 2002.
  4. ^ "Wikipedia co-founder plans a new project" ( Memento from October 17, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) In: Netzeitung , December 21, 2005.
  5. ↑ a b Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger on his departure from the online dictionary, the consensus of the masses and his new project. ( Memento of November 21, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) In: SonntagsZeitung , December 17, 2006.
  6. ^ Larry Sanger Blog: How we can organize the news (long version). In: larrysanger.org. Retrieved January 5, 2016 .
  7. ↑ Larry Sanger: Important: Infobitt's future, and mine. In: campaign-archive2.com. Retrieved January 5, 2016 .
personal data
SURNAME Sanger, Larry
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Sanger, Lawrence Mark
SHORT DESCRIPTION American philosopher
DATE OF BIRTH July 16, 1968
PLACE OF BIRTH Bellevue , Washington