Larry Sanger

Lawrence Mark Sanger was born on July 16, 1968, in Bellevue, a suburb of Seattle. His father was a marine biologist and his mother a homemaker; when he was seven the family moved to Anchorage, Alaska.⁠[1]

Sanger earned a B.A. in philosophy from Reed College in 1991, then an M.A. (1995) and a Ph.D. (2000) in philosophy from the Ohio State University, with a dissertation titled “Epistemic Circularity: An Essay on the Problem of Meta-Justification.”⁠[2]

In March 2000, Jimmy WalesJimmy WalesJimmy Wales is an American-born internet entrepreneur who launched Wikipedia with Larry Sanger in 2001, founded the Wikimedia Foundation in 2003, co-founded Wikia, later renamed Fandom, in 2004 and launched the social network WT:Social in 2019.Open the full entry and Sanger launched Nupedia, with Sanger as its editor-in-chief.⁠[3]

Nupedia, Wikipedia’s predecessor, was organized like existing encyclopedias.⁠[4]

Sanger married in 2001; he lives in Ohio with his wife and two sons.⁠[1]

Sanger wrote that after Ben Kovitz explained WikiWikiWeb to him on January 2, 2001, he proposed a wiki encyclopedia to Wales and named it Wikipedia. He also wrote that the open, collaborative encyclopedia idea “was entirely Jimmy’s, not mine.”⁠[5]

Sanger has said that, to his knowledge, he was first described as a co-founder of Wikipedia by The New York Times in September 2001, and that Wikipedia’s own press releases used the description from 2002 until 2004; he holds that his co-founder role was not in dispute in the project’s early years.⁠[6]

On March 1, 2002, Sanger resigned as editor-in-chief of Nupedia and gave up his position of authority at Wikipedia.⁠[1]

He has said he was laid off by Bomis rather than choosing to leave.⁠[7]

After this, Sanger and Wales parted company.⁠[4]

In September 2006, Sanger announced in Germany a fork of Wikipedia called Citizendium: starting from Wikipedia’s articles, it would invite experts to serve as editors making content decisions in their fields, though not directing work from the top down, and all contributors would have to log in under their real names, with no anonymous editing.⁠[8]

Citizendium ran a private pilot for its first six months and launched publicly in March 2007. By October 2007 it had more than 3,200 live articles and well over 2,000 authors, with over 200 accounts editing each month.⁠[9]

In 2009 Sanger persuaded Memphis-area philanthropist Charles Boone to let him organize a directory of the best educational videos online; it launched as WatchKnow and was later renamed WatchKnowLearn. From 2010 he switched to developing a digital reading program for Boone, Reading Bear, which he did for two years.⁠[10]

Reading Bear is a free, non-profit website that teaches reading through phonics and vocabulary; it was declared complete in August 2012, and its first press release followed that October.⁠[11]

Sanger has said he always intended to step down after two or three years, and that while working full time on Citizendium he was “getting paid almost nothing”; he reduced his activity in 2009, and the project’s charter was ratified in September 2010. He said Citizendium used the Tides Center as its fiscal sponsor while it was funded, and afterward operated on a close-to-zero budget.⁠[7]

In November 2014, Infobitt.com, a crowdsourced news site Sanger developed, had a soft launch allowing sign-ups without an invitation, and he started a 100,000-person pledge drive asking each person to add one fact.⁠[12]

On July 8, 2015, Sanger announced that Infobitt had run out of money, that he had let the programmers go and was looking for a job himself, though he did not wish to give up on the project.⁠[13]

In 2019 Sanger was chief information officer of the online encyclopedia EveripediaIQIQ is a blockchain project that grew out of the online encyclopedia Everipedia. It runs IQ.wiki, an encyclopedia of blockchain and crypto assets, and launched the IQ token in Seoul in 2018; in 2025, IQ and Frax launched KRWQ, a stablecoin pegged to the South Korean won.Open the full entry; he wrote that Everipedia was built on EOS and had received a major investment from Block.one.⁠[14]

On June 26, 2019, Sanger published the Declaration of Digital Independence, calling for decentralized social networks in which users legally own their data, posts are served from many independent services users control, private content uses end-to-end encryption, and no single corporation controls the standards.⁠[15]

In September 2019, Sanger and a team founded the Knowledge Standards Foundation, which aims to help bring into being a decentralized encyclopedia network called the encyclosphere and to keep it as politically neutral as the blogosphere.⁠[16]

On May 14, 2020, Sanger published the essay “Wikipedia Is Badly Biased,” arguing that Wikipedia had abandoned its original neutrality policy and calling on it to admit this openly.⁠[17]

Since 2025, Sanger has pursued an extended project to reform Wikipedia.⁠[18]

Sanger published the Nine Theses on Wikipedia, submitting nine reform proposals to Wikipedia’s community: ending decision-making by “consensus,” enabling competing articles, abolishing source blacklists, reviving the original neutrality policy, repealing “Ignore all rules,” revealing who Wikipedia’s leaders are, letting the public rate articles, ending indefinite blocking, and adopting a legislative process.⁠[19]

On August 27, 2025, Representatives James Comer and Nancy Mace of the cybersecurity subcommittee of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee wrote to Wikimedia FoundationWikimedia FoundationThe Wikimedia Foundation is a San Francisco-based nonprofit that hosts Wikipedia and other free-knowledge projects; announced by Jimmy Wales in 2003, it is funded mainly by donations.Open the full entry CEO Maryana Iskander. The next day Sanger welcomed the inquiry and proposed that an organization with over $100 million in revenue that hosts anonymously sourced defamatory content and will not identify key decision-makers should lose Section 230 immunity.⁠[20]

On October 28, 2025, Sanger reviewed Grokipedia, for which Elon MuskElon MuskElon Musk is an entrepreneur who founded SpaceX and has long served as chief executive of Tesla; he also took part in creating PayPal, OpenAI, Neuralink, The Boring Company, and xAI. He acquired Twitter in 2022, and his businesses span spaceflight, electric vehicles, energy, artificial intelligence, and social media.Open the full entry’s company xAI used LLMs to generate articles (885,279 by its own count), calling it a “very solid” launch but grading the first version at a C level and not yet clearly better than Wikipedia.⁠[21]

On July 21, 2026, Sanger responded to remarks by new Wikimedia Foundation CEO Bernadette Meehan that “The door is open” to conservatives, saying that he was blocked when he proposed and recruited for WikiProject Intellectual Diversity.⁠[22]

Sanger lives in Ohio, homeschools his children, is a member of the Anglican Church in North America and studies theology.⁠[2]

He wrote the essay collection Essays on Free Knowledge and published How and Why I Taught My Toddler to Read free of charge on his website.⁠[18]

Personal website: Public link: https://larrysanger.org/ (opens in a new window)⁠[23]

X: Public account: https://x.com/lsanger (opens in a new window)⁠[23]

YouTubeYouTubeYouTube is Google’s video-sharing and creator platform, founded in 2005 by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim and acquired by Google in 2006. Built around video uploading, viewing, and creator earnings, the platform has developed Shorts, YouTube Music, Premium, YouTube TV, and products for children, and is headquartered in San Bruno, California, United States.Open the full entry: Public channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCO1wYfKnzdZ57ytz3C9zLlw (opens in a new window)⁠[23]

Knowledge Standards Foundation: Official website: https://encyclosphere.org/ (opens in a new window)⁠[16]