Is Larry Sanger the co-founder of Wikipedia?: A look over the years.
Larry Sanger has long claimed to be the co-founder of Wikipedia, and has claimed that honor over a dozen times over the last year in major publications. In reality he was an employee of Bomis during the entire time (February 2000 – February 2002) when he held the title of Nupedia editor-in-chief and, starting in January 2001, acted as "chief organizer" of Wikipedia. For the full two years he was under the direct supervision of Jimmy Wales who had hired him and then laid him off when he decided that Bomis could no longer afford his services. In January 2003, a press release posted by Jimbo says that the project "was founded by Internet entrepreneur Jimmy Wales and philosopher Larry Sanger".
Despite Sanger's limited Wikipedia editing since then (about 1,780 edits), he has continued to attract the attention of Wikipedians, at least until his community banning on June 22, 2026 for canvassing. The topics of interest include his claim to be the co-founder of Wikipedia, his criticisms of the way Wikipedia has been run, his failed attempts to create alternative online encyclopedias, and his political criticism that Wikipedia has a liberal point of view and censors right-wing editors.
The Signpost has reported on Sanger's activities since our very first issue on January 10, 2005 after Sanger published a criticism of Wikipedia's purported anti-elitism off-Wiki in Kuro5hin and inspired a round of debate about Wikipedia's credibility in the press.
This article follows Sanger's Wiki-career as documented in The Signpost, the off-Wiki news reports that often inspired our stories, and on-Wiki documentation of his career, until early this year. There are about 182 Signpost articles that mention Sanger.[a] We'll concentrate on about forty of them. For the more current news on Sanger's community ban see News and notes from July 13.
This investigation shows that Sanger's claim to be a co-founder of Wikipedia is at best dubious and that he has often changed the specific subject of his dissatisfaction with Wikipedia, but has seldom changed his general discontent with it.
One week after the first Signpost coverage of Sanger, he appeared again as one of several Wikipedia critics in an article on the encyclopedia's credibility.
A third Signpost article about him, published on March 21, 2005, reported on a very early promotional piece by Sanger, also in Kuro5hin, published on July 25, 2001, halfway through Sanger's paid Wikipedia career. It highlighted "Nupedia Chalkboard", something like today's draft articles, and explained how it could be used as a feeder system taking the then-6,000 articles in Wikipedia to produce higher quality articles for Nupedia. Then he described how this system could produce a strong competitor to Encyclopædia Britannica.
The Signpost article "The Sanger memoirs" appeared on April 25, 2005 and should be of interest to anybody interested in the minutiae of the founding of Nupedia and Wikipedia. It appeared soon after Sanger published a 14,620 word Memoir off-Wiki.[b] (Sanger also published a 2006 on-Wiki summary User:Larry Sanger/Origins of Wikipedia which is only 2,800 words.) These show why Sanger's claim to be the "co-founder of Wikipedia" is dubious.
In 1999, Jimmy Wales wanted to start a free, collaborative encyclopedia.
To my great surprise, Jimmy replied to my e-mail describing his idea of a free encyclopedia, and asking if I might be interested in leading the project. He was specifically interested in finding a philosopher to lead the project, he said. He made it a condition of my employment [at Nupedia] that I would finish my Ph.D. quickly (whereupon I would get a raise)--which I did, in June 2000. I am still grateful for the extra incentive. I thought he would be a great boss, and indeed he was.
To be clear, the idea of an open source, collaborative encyclopedia, open to contribution by ordinary people, was entirely Jimmy's, not mine, and the funding was entirely by Bomis. I was merely a grateful employee; I thought I was very lucky to have a job like that land in my lap. Of course, other people had had the idea; but it was Jimmy's fantastic foresight actually to invest in it. For this the world owes him a considerable debt. The actual development of this encyclopedia was the task he gave me to work on.
— Larry Sanger, The Early History of Nupedia and Wikipedia: A Memoir
Any inconsistency between being "merely a grateful employee" and being a "co-founder" – a word he used four times in the Memoir – was not mentioned by Sanger.
Sanger commented in the Memoir at great length on many Nupedia and Wikipedia topics, preferring the management style and culture of Nupedia to that of Wikipedia. He refused the title of editor-in-chief at Wikipedia, despite keeping that title at Nupedia until he was laid off. His title at Wikipedia was "chief organizer," which he performed by soliciting Nupedians and others to edit the new wiki, suggesting rules for Wikipedians to follow, and similar duties.
The quote above shows that Sanger was not a founder of Wikipedia because he didn't meet any of the three criteria in the standard usage in business [1] [2]:
Sanger fails these criteria as shown by the quote since 1) he did not participate in the founding of either Bomis or the Wikimedia Foundation. His employment lasted only from 2000 to 2002, when neither of those organizations were founded. 2) He did not own any equity in these organizations, but was simply an employee. And 3) he was hired, directly supervised by, and ultimately laid off by Wales, who had delegated him some limited powers for a short period.
By 2009 Sanger must have realized the weakness of his claim to be a co-founder, so he created his own highly idiosyncratic usage for the term. (See the bottom of this page added to an earlier blog) In part it reads
A note about the word "founder": I believe "founder" is used in two closely-related ways, depending on whether the thing founded is either a business enterprise, on the one hand, or a community project, movement, etc., on the other hand. In a business context, frequently, the founders of an enterprise are its original funders or sponsors. In a community context, however, the founders are those who had the most personal influence in getting a community started. So, for example, we might say the French government was a "founder" of the United States in the business sense, while Washington, Jefferson, and Franklin were among the community founders.
So, on the one hand, we can say that Bomis, Inc. was the founder of Wikipedia in the "business sense." …
On the other hand--and I am sorry to have to say this myself, because I know it sounds so immodest coming from my own mouth, but after the events of recent years I just want the truth stated clearly--I have a much stronger claim than Jimmy Wales has to being a founder of Wikipedia in the community sense.
He is mistaken in saying that just any type of funding, rather than equity financing, can justify the term "founder". Equity financing is usually needed to establish the founder's control. This confusion is likely the cause of Sanger saying that France might be considered the founder of the United States "in the business sense". He is also mistaken saying that Washington, Jefferson, and Franklin are considered founders "in the community sense" because of their wide influence in society. Like all of the signers of the Declaration of Independence and of the Constitution, they received their power and their claim to be founders, by their office of delegate to one or both of the great founding conventions.
Sanger is also mistaken if he believes that he has had more influence than Wales in setting the future of Wikipedia. For example much of Sanger's Memoir was spent in arguing that Wikipedia should be a feeder system into the supposedly more important Nupedia project, with more top–down order imposed.
But Sanger really didn't care for the term "founder" in any case, writing at Talk:Jimmy Wales:
I disagree, that does not really describe the "dispute." In fact, I really don't know what Jimmy disagrees with, other than the name "founder," and who cares about that? If one actually describes the actual things I did, one sees immediately that I was more responsible than any single person, Jimmy included, for getting Wikipedia started. Jimmy has the honor of having paid my salary, ;-). To say I "helped" does me a disservice, frankly.
By insisting that I was not a founder and merely an employee under his direct supervision, Jimmy makes it appear as if the big decisions and major work were all done by him. They were, in fact, at best participated in by him, but done by me.
Ask him if he disagrees with this. --Larry Sanger 17:08, 20 December 2005 (UTC)
Sanger's new ideas for online encyclopedias continued through 2006–2010. An article in The Guardian about the Digital Universe, another encyclopedia website inspired by Sanger's work, appeared in July 2006.
A week later The New Yorker ran a long piece on Wikipedia, how its rules and admin corps had quickly grown. It also described the views of Sanger and those of Encyclopædia Britannica president Jorge Cauz.
A few weeks later the Signpost reported that Marshall Poe in The Atlantic Monthly took a deep dive into the early history of Wikipedia. Poe appears to have read Sanger's Memoir in detail and concluded that "Wales's part in [the founding of Wikipedia] was clear; he owned Wikipedia. Sanger's role was murkier."
In September 2006 Citizendium, another Wiki alternative, was announced. A Signpost reader commented that Sanger has "been trying different ideas based on this for a while, all fail because of no editing in them…. Funding problem perhaps."
A week later we reviewed the media's early reactions to Citizendium.
"Sanger said he was pleased that Wikipedia was accepting of his new project. 'We will take the best of their articles and edit them and hopefully make them better,' he said. 'And they are free to take from our articles. We're in a partnership to a certain extent, two parallel-thinking projects.'"
— San Diego Union-Tribune
By April 2007, Citizendium still hadn't fully opened.
Later that April a passing mention raised the heat, as Sanger mentioned that Wikipedia governance was "beyond repair".
By February 2008, the gloves were off. Sanger, while promoting Citizendium at Eastern Michigan University, according to the Detroit Free Press said "I sort of separated myself from that organization and that crowd…We can actually do better."
On April 8, 2009 Sanger posted an "Open letter to Wales" at User talk:Jimbo Wales and republished it in the Citizendium blog, among other venues. It's a long, impassioned complaint, demanding that Wales admit that Sanger was a co-founder of Wikipedia and that the Wikimedia Foundation officially endorse Sanger's claim.
Sanger appeared particularly incensed by a perceived slight in an interview which may have suggested that Sanger was fired from his position rather than just laid off like several other Bomis employees. The interview does not appear to have been archived on-line.
Sanger wrote in the open letter, "The interviewer asked: 'Sanger said that proof of his being co-founder is on the initial press releases. Are you saying that he basically just put himself down as co-founder on these press releases?' You [Wales] answered 'Yes.'" (Later Sanger called it "your simple 'Yes' answer".)
The press releases cited by Sanger can also be difficult to document since they were mainly crowdsourced, and every edit made in 2002 is not necessarily recorded in Wikipedia's existing edit records.[c]
Wikipedia's first press release was issued on January 15, 2002 – Wikipedia's first birthday. It appears to have been written solely by Sanger and sent out the same day. Five other edits are shown for the file, but they all are simple formatting edits made a month or years after the original release date.
The text about "founders" is "The founders of Wikipedia are Internet entrepreneur Jimmy Wales and philosopher Larry Sanger. Wales has supplied the financial backing and other support for the project, and Sanger, who earned a Ph.D. in Philosophy from Ohio State in 2000, has led the project." This appears to minimize Wales's role while giving the greater part of the credit to Sanger.
Similar text was issued in two later Wikipedia press releases, in 2003 and 2004. The new Wikimedia Foundation's first press release, which mirrored much of the 2004 Wikipedia release, also contained similar wording on co-founders. The six remaining Wikipedia press releases either did not contain information on "founders", or only mentioned Wales as the founder.
The Signpost followed up and quoted Wales's talk page reply to Sanger, "As I have said many times, I think the entire 'controversy' is silly....Larry didn't make Wikipedia, and neither did I. It was made by the community, and lots of people played interesting roles. If other people feel a burning need to discuss this, please do so elsewhere other than my talk page; I'm not interested in discussing it at this time."
In October 2009 the "Sanger controversy reignited," according to the Signpost headline. This reporter cannot find any archives of the off-Wiki articles referenced, so I just use the quotations from the Signpost article.
Jason Calacanis and Sanger alleged that Jimbo Wales has downplayed Sanger's role on Wikipedia for financial motives. Calacanis, in an interview then on YouTube, stated:
In another forum Sanger stated:
A very serious Sanger allegation about child pornography was covered by The Signpost in 2010. Sanger reported this allegation to the FBI and to his congressional representatives. He got a serious, if controversial, reaction from Jimmy Wales, the WMF, and the community as shown the next month in The Signpost.
In October 2014, in "The story of Wikipedia", The Signpost reviewed extracts from the book The Innovators, Walter Isaacson's then-new book, which gives a sympathetic view of the two co-founders narrative, supporting Sanger's view. Isaacson's view gains further support since he was an early Wikipedian.
Isaacson "waxes enthusiastic about Wikipedia's mechanisms of collaboration and consensus as it applies to both the development of articles and the governance of the project. He particularly stresses the principle of neutral point of view in producing articles," according to The Signpost.
In December 2014 Sanger launches a "Wikipedia for news" on the Infobitt launch, citing Newsweek. Unfortunately Infobitt ran out of money by July 2015, as reported by The Signpost.
In November 2015 Sanger was interviewed by Vice about how Wikipedia started. One problem according to Sanger was that "trolls sort of took over. The inmates started running the asylum." The Independent reprinted much of the interview with its own interpretation. Sanger said "they got the thrust of the interview wrong."
In December 2017 Sanger joined Everipedia as CIO, promising to put that encyclopedia on the blockchain and give editors tokens that would give them a financial reward for their editing. A dozen other Signpost articles mentioned Everipedia, but Sanger resigned in 2019 and returned his digital wooden nickels after contributing an article to it about his left thumb.
Also in 2019, Sanger introduced his new encyclopedia project, the Encyclosphere, writing that "Wikipedia has become an arrogant and controlling oligarchy."
An interesting podcast was mentioned in In the media in 2021. It questions Sanger's co-founding role, but examines both sides in excruciating detail over 45 minutes. The Signpost article's comments page gives a more Sanger-friendly interpretation.
Sanger gave up criticizing Wikipedia in 2013, according to one of his twitter posts at the time, but his political criticism of Wikipedia was just taking off in 2020, according to a long series of Signpost items in our In the media column. In Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2020-05-31/In the media § CBS on COVID-19, Sanger on bias, false noses, and five prolific editors (May 2020), we reported the comments he made on Fox News about Wikipedia's bias and lefty politics.
In November 2020 Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2020-11-01/In the media § The Christian Post, Sanger and the Breitbart newsletter shared a complaint about userboxes being removed on Wikipedia when they read "This user believes that marriage is the union between one man and one woman."
In February 2021 Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2021-02-28/In the media § Larry Sanger, Fox News, The Daily Mail, and The Washington Times take on Wikipedia's bias Fox News covered a Sanger blogpost decrying Wikipedia's purported lack of a neutrality policy. Sanger apparently means that Wikipedia's policy is the opposite of his own views on neutrality. For example, he writes "Wikipedia frequently asserts, in its own voice, that many of Trump's statements are 'false.' Well, perhaps they are. But even if they are, it is not exactly neutral for an encyclopedia article to say so, especially without attribution."
More bias accusations emerged in July 2021, this time called "propaganda". Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2021-07-25/In the media § Larry Sanger on bias in Wikipedia – with opinion orthodoxy, truth becomes more elusive was described somewhat differently by Fox News, The Independent and by The National Review.
See also October 2021 Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2021-10-31/In the media § Don't bite the newbies.
In 2022 Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2022-04-24/In the media § In brief Sanger was interviewed by Tucker Carlson on Fox News complaining about "the left's 'relentless' takeover of mass media and Wikipedia" and emphasizing his own dedication to neutrality.
In 2023 Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2023-01-16/In the media § Court orders user data in libel case, Saudi Wikipedia in the crosshairs, Larry Sanger at it again Sanger is quoted as saying "If you want to participate in the world's largest encyclopedia [Wikipedia], you must collaborate with a shadowy group of anonymous amateurs and paid shills on exactly one article per topic." The article then goes on to describe Sanger's increasingly complicated Encyclosphere.
2025 was the climax in Sanger's political commentary, with at least seven Signpost articles mentioning him.
Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2025-03-22/In the media § Larry, Elon, and Don; or, will Wikipedia get its very own Executive Order? Sanger explains in a Fox News video why he asked Elon Musk to investigate whether US Federal employees are being paid to edit Wikipedia and help stop it. He continues by asking US President Donald Trump to prohibit such activities.
In an hour-long YouTube interview with James Poulos on Blaze TV, covered by The Signpost Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2025-04-09/In the media § In brief "Wikipedia scandal exposed: Big Tech manipulates what you see", Sanger calls Wikipedia "rank propaganda" and "the mouthpiece of the Establishment".
In May Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2025-05-01/In the media § Trump-nominated prosecutor targets WMF's tax status Sanger's statements against Wikipedia were used to justify the then-interim U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, Ed Martin to investigate the Wikimedia Foundation's non-profit tax status. (Neither the investigation nor Ed Martin went very far after the original announcement.)
By September Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2025-09-09/In the media § US Congress probes Wikipedia Sanger stated "I am glad that Congress is investigating the use of foreign and U.S. government funds to pay for biased editing on Wikipedia."
The following three articles tell similar stories:
The blocking of Sanger in June 2026 is a different kind of story than this deep dive into The Signpost's archives, but two mentions of Sanger in the 2026 Signpost conveniently set the stage for Sanger's apparent last act on Wikipedia.
A Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2026-03-10/In the media § Video from Reason shows separate interviews with Wales, Sanger, and others, skillfully spliced so that it almost looks like they are debating one another. While this video might be taken as a slanted summary of Sanger's wiki-career as it was viewed in early 2026, a more conventional text piece from India's The Economic Times repeats the now common co-founder story, taking us back to the start of Sanger's career.
Larry Sanger has had a long and contentious relationship with the Wikipedia community. He feels that his contributions have been downplayed by those who don't recognize him as a co-founder of Wikipedia. It all started innocently enough when Wales hired Sanger to be editor-in-chief of Nupedia, but there was a problem with Nupedia, it was too slow producing articles. Wikipedia was started a year later and Sanger had the position of "chief organizer" where he made many contributions but could not control Wikipedia the way that he could control Nupedia. By all the usual indications he was not the co-founder of Wikipedia. He was "merely a grateful employee" of Bomis, hired, supervised, and later laid off by Wales.
Sanger expressed his discontent in his 2005 Memoir and later in an open letter to Wales. He used a personal idiosyncratic definition of founder to claim the status of co-founder. He has even said that he doesn't care about being recognized as a co-founder. He has had some success with members of the community supporting his claim. Perhaps he's had some success claiming that official Wikipedia press releases support his claim, but those are difficult to document and there is also some evidence that he was the sole author of one of them.
Over the last 24 years he has criticized Wikipedia for being anti-elitist, for not being enough like Nupedia, for being ungovernable, not having or maintaining a neutrality policy and most recently for having a liberal bias. Of course Sanger has a right to express those opinions and others have a right to disagree.
Discuss this story
Well, it has to be said that the article elides a few things.
In addition to the 2002 and 2003 press releases, in 2001, Jimmy himself credited Larry with the very idea of Wikipedia:
This is backed by contemporaneous Nupedia-l mailing list posts – it was Sanger who
Twenty-five years later, we are sitting here ...
More importantly, the article elides
Jimmy also described himself as "co-founder of Nupedia and Wikipedia" in 2002, explicitly referring to the above New York Times article as a place where people could read about the project.
Of course Sanger was an employee throughout, so presenting them as equal co-founders does appear odd, even allowing for the fact that Sanger championed the idea and organized the first community. Part of the reasoning surely was that the co-founder billing lent the fledgling project a veneer of academic respectability – Sanger had just acquired a Philosophy PhD, and academic respectability was considered important then. Note this visionary paragraph from the MIT piece:
Response