This Interview Is A Stub: Wikipedia Co-Founder Larry Sanger on Being Wrong

Posted Monday, July 26, 2010 2:15 PM | By Kathryn Schulz



After Google, Wikipedia might be the single most powerful new influence on how we as a culture organize, disseminate, and access information. For millions of Web-connected citizens, the online encyclopedia is the place of first resort for looking up everything from Shirley Sherrod to sickle-cell anemia. There's no question about its scope or popularity: It has 3.3 million articles in English alone (compare that to the roughly 120,000 articles in the online edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica) and attracts nearly 78 million visitors each month. There's also no question that it's an astonishing triumph of open-source development: The entire colossus was built by a bunch of largely anonymous and entirely unpaid contributors.

There is, however, a great deal of argument—and consternation about the accuracy of Wikipedia entries. (A headline in the Onion made the point nicely: "Wikipedia Celebrates 750 Years of American Independence.") That's why I went looking for Larry Sanger, who co-founded Wikipedia along with Jimmy Wales, then quit the project over disputes about its governance and the quality and credibility of its content.

Sanger is also a trained philosopher with a focus on epistemology the study of knowledge which made him an attractive person to talk to about how technology is changing what we know, what we think we know, and how we think we know it. After leaving Wikipedia, Sanger founded Citizendium, a rival online encyclopedia, and now spends most of his time on WatchKnow, a nonprofit organization that uses wiki principles to organize and rate nearly 20,000 educational videos for kids.

What got you interested in encyclopedias? Did you have some kind of longstanding fascination with them, or was it just an accident of history?

It was pure accident. I was circulating an idea for a Web site around different Internet acquaintances and one of them happened to be Jimmy Wales. He responded by saying, "Well, I'm trying to get this encyclopedia project going; would you be interested in coming to work on it?"

That was Nupedia he had registered the domain name, but at that point it was just an idea — and I got hired for that job. And then I found that it was a fascinating problem to organize people online to create encyclopedias.

People have been trying to validate, organize, and disseminate information for a long time. Did you look back to other efforts in history to do so?

When I was first starting Nupedia and Wikipedia, everything was moving so fast that I didn't have time to go back and read Diderot and D'Alembert and all that, which would have been useful. I did read them later. I can't remember when I read The Professor and the Madman, but that made a big impression me.

That's pretty funny, considering that it's a book about the relationship between the editor of a major reference work and a certified lunatic.

It actually resonated very much with the experience I had trying to organize Wikipedia. It's very interesting to me that here you have the editor of the Oxford English Dictionary, and one of his most prolific contributors was in an insane asylum. A lot of the most prolific Wikipedians, or at least many of them, also seem to have a screw loose. But that doesn't mean their work is useless.

Do you have a theory about this? Is there something about the project of organizing knowledge that attracts slightly nutty people? Or that turns normal people nuts?

There are a lot of theories on that, actually. But I think the most important thing to say is that Wikipedia has very few practical constraints about people behaving according to normal rules of politeness and fair dealing. They've got a zillion rules, of course — that's part of the problem but there is no easy way to reign in the bad actors. And unfortunately the bad tend to drive out the good. A lot of the more sane, sensible people out there are just can't take too much of it.


Yeah, I can imagine that the social dynamics get pretty ugly. But my understanding is that you left Wikipedia over deeper philosophical schisms.

I had lots of deep philosophical schisms with Wikipedia in the end, although also some agreements. The first problem was what we were just talking about: reigning in all the bad actors, doing something to reduce the number of trolls and the amount of time we spent dealing with them.

The other problem was that there needed to be some sort of mechanism — it didn't have to be anything like editorships or review before publishing or anything like that — but some sort of low-key role for experts in the system.

Why did you feel so strongly about involving experts?

(Snip)

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I liked this interview because it addresses some of the epistemological issues that come up in the political debates/discussions here on waccobb.net. It also raises some of the self-governance issues that arise here.