Why Is Wikipedia Broken? - Dr Larry Sanger - #118

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
Oh yes, hello friends. Welcome back to Modern Wisdom. As you might be able to hear by my nasal tones, I am fully in the depths of a very British flu at the moment. However, the podcasts continue to roll in, and today I'm sitting down with Dr. Larry Sanger, who is the ex-founder of Wikipedia. Ex-founder is quite a weird way to describe anyone. Once you're a founder, you're a founder, but you will hear today exactly why Larry has his criticisms, his disagreements with how Wikipedia has moved forward. He's also starting up the Knowledge Standards Foundation, which is hopefully going to fix some of the issues which he sees with the Wikipedia platform. But yeah, there's a lot of politics going on at the moment. You may have heard in the past about people who've had articles written about them on Wikipedia, and then they've been locked down and they're unable to be edited. There is quite a militant, bureaucratic editing process. And it all seems pretty sort of contrary to what you want from a user generated encyclopedia that is free for everyone to access and probably one of the single biggest reference sources on the planet. Anyway, this really opened my eyes. Enjoy. Here is Dr. Larry Sanger.
ladies and gentlemen, welcome back. I'm joined by Larry Sanger, who is the ex-founder of Wikipedia, among many other things. Larry, welcome to the show.

**Larry Sanger** (1:45)
Well, thanks for having me on, I appreciate it.

**Chris Williamson** (1:47)
Really good to have you here. First things first, I've never heard the term ex-founder before. Can you explain what that means, please?

**Larry Sanger** (1:55)
I made it up yesterday.
Okay, a couple of days ago, I did a Twitter poll about it, and over 50% of the people thought it was a good title for me to claim. So I was once considered by everyone co-founder, even Jimmy wales. But then he started denying me the founder the title, like in 2005, which everyone thought was ridiculous, but he was insisting on it. So it's a little bit of a dig at him for that. But it's also, whenever I tell people online that I'm co-founder of Wikipedia, especially in the last, I don't know, three or six months, they've started getting hostile toward me personally. It's like Wikipedia is out of control, they say now. You must be the devil if you actually started it. And so, I'm distancing myself from it, because I have been a critic of Wikipedia for, well, I'm one of the first critics of Wikipedia, frankly, outside of the very original naysayers. But, you know, yeah. And then I've been gone for a long time. So sometimes when I tell people I'm co-founder and, but now I'm working on whatever my latest project is, they get confused and they think, oh, so they seem to assume that I just left it like a couple of years ago. No, I left in 2002 I permanently distanced myself from the project in 2003 And I've been working on all kinds of other things since then. So, but I got it started. Yeah.

**Chris Williamson** (4:05)
And also world's first ex-founder, which is, I think so.

**Larry Sanger** (4:10)
That's right. I founded the term.

**Chris Williamson** (4:13)
Yeah, you are the world's, you're the ex-founder founder. So before we get into Wikipedia and where it's at at the moment and also your exit, could you tell us the genesis story? Could you tell us how it started on your side?

**Larry Sanger** (4:32)
Okay. Well, I first met Jimmy wales in the mid 1990s through our common interest in philosophy. Actually, it was Ayn Rand. I joined one of his mailing lists and later on made one myself, and he joined that about philosophy.
We lost touch for a few years, but then I was sharing an idea that I had for what would later become a blog around early 2000
One of the people that I shared the idea with was Jimmy wales, and he wrote back and he said, don't work on that, work on this thing. You'd be editor-in-chief of an encyclopedia. I was like, wow, this sounds great. That was practically my dream job. If I wasn't going to be a professor of philosophy, which by that time I decided not to be, even though I was all but dissertation at the time, it would be like an editor of an encyclopedia. That's sounded great. So it was my job to start Newpedia, N-U-pedia, and that was to be built on the principles of open source software. So there was this guy who wrote an essay called The Cathedral in the Bazaar. His name is Eric Raymond. I was told to read this. It's still a great thing to read. It explains how volunteers can get together to build great things online, simply by sharing a common vision and a common need, solving common problems, but in a way that results in something that lives in the commons. And so that was the idea. And the problem was, we wanted Newpedia to be as trustworthy as possible. So we had this seven-step, really arduous editorial process. And not many people wanted to go through it, so we generated only a few dozen articles in the first year. And that wasn't good enough, so we were well agreed that there needed to be a new source of content for the project. And so I made some different proposals, and Jimmy wales, he dismissed them all because it would involve more coding. And then a friend of mine, January 2nd, 2001, told me about this software called Wiki Software, very uber geeky, where you go to a web page, and you click an edit button, and you can edit the text of the page right there on the page, and hit save, and your changes are instantly live. And it was an insane sounding idea, but, you know, okay, even by that time, I had been living online for, you know, the better part of 10 years. And so it wasn't that hard to imagine how it actually might work. So he got me excited enough about the idea that I started thinking, well, this could solve the problem that we were having with Newpedia. And so I ran home, actually, and made a one-page proposal to Jimmy wales, basically saying, set up the software for me to, you know, work on a new project, you know. And originally, it was going to be the Newpedia Wiki. But then, the editors of Newpedia, they were mostly Ph.D. academics, they didn't want to have anything to do with anything called a Wiki. It just did not have the sort of credibility and heft that they wanted to be associated with. And they were really good people, actually. There were some famous scholars even among them.