Wikipedia formed by former Buckeye

On the evening of Jan. 2, 2001, Larry Sanger’s friend told him about something called a wiki. Thirteen days later Wikipedia was launched.

According to dictionary.com, a wiki is “a collaborative Web site whose content can be edited by anyone who has access to it.”

Sanger, who received his master’s and doctorate degrees from Ohio State and taught in the department of philosophy until 2005, had previously been editor-in-chief of a project called Nupedia.

Sanger said Nupedia was essentially a peer-reviewed online encyclopedia written by experts.

“The problem with Nupedia … was that it was not growing as quickly as we thought a free encyclopedia project could grow,” Sanger said.

He said when he heard about the wiki concept, he knew it could “supplement the Nupedia project (because) it would create content more quickly and would be more open to the general public.”

He said the Nupedia community did not support the project, so he came up with the name Wikipedia and it was launched under its own domain name.

“The whole idea of an encyclopedia that anyone could edit struck the Nupedia community as a bad idea,” Sanger said. “It was easy for anyone to get involved instantly without even signing up and that was a pretty unusual concept.”

As Wikipedia’s success grew, Sanger said, so did its problems.

He said he always thought Wikipedia would be developed together with another more “mature” encyclopedia, such as Nupedia, that would edit the Wikipedia content and release accurate versions of the entries.

“As it turned out, Jimmy Wales, who pays the bills, decided he liked Wikipedia and didn’t like Nupedia so he let Nupedia die,” Sanger said.

He said he stopped working for Wikipedia at the beginning of 2002 when the company told him they could not pay his salary anymore. They did invite him to stay on as a volunteer, but he declined.

“I had come to the conclusion that I didn’t want to have anything to do with Wikipedia as it was being allowed to develop,” he said. “The problem was that there was no credible way whereby articles would become approved. We had talked about an approval process for a long time but no action was ever taken on it.”

Sanger said Wikipedia still does not have an approval process and anyone who has an account can edit entries.

Although Sanger admits the reason Wikipedia has grown so quickly is because it is a “radically open project,” he said the accuracy of entries is an issue because there is little to no input by experts.

Sanger is currently working on a project called Citizendium, which opened to the public two months ago at citizendium.org. He said it is similar to what he originally envisioned Wikipedia would be.

Citizendium is a wiki in the sense that anyone can become a member and edit entries, but it also has many expert editors who correct and approve entries.

“We want a different kind of Internet community,” Sanger said. “We don’t want another MySpace that’s basically uncontrolled. We want a project that uses real names and where people take responsibility for what they do.”

Sanger said Citizendium is growing at a rate comparable to the rate Wikipedia grew in its early days, and he hopes the growth will accelerate.

He said Wikipedia can be a good place to start looking for information online, but should never be used when writing papers.

“I think that Wikipedians themselves … say that you shouldn’t cite any encyclopedia in papers for college work … I would say that middle schoolers should not (even) cite Wikipedia articles,” Sanger said.

Lindsay Betz can be reached at [email protected].