Larry Sanger

Biography

Larry Sanger was born in Bellevue, Washington, in 1968 and grew up in Anchorage, Alaska. He studied philosophy at Reed College, graduating in 1991, and went on to Ohio State University, where he earned a master's degree in 1995 and a doctorate in 2000 with a dissertation on epistemic circularity; he also taught philosophy there. Through online philosophy discussion lists he came to know Jimmy Wales.

In 2000 Wales's company Bomis hired Sanger as editor-in-chief of Nupedia, an expert-reviewed online encyclopedia. Frustrated by its slow progress, Sanger proposed using a wiki to draft articles, which led to the launch of Wikipedia in January 2001. He named the project and wrote early versions of several of its core policies, but he was laid off and left in 2002.

Sanger later became a prominent critic of Wikipedia, faulting its treatment of expertise and, since 2020, alleging ideological bias. He founded the rival Citizendium in 2006 and led it until 2010, and worked on other reference projects including the Encyclopedia of Earth, Ballotpedia and Everipedia, where he was chief information officer from 2017 to 2019. He then set up the Knowledge Standards Foundation. In 2026 he was banned from editing English Wikipedia for canvassing.