Andrea Macdonald, founder of ideaXme, interviews Larry Sanger, Philosopher and Co-Founder of Wikipedia and discovers some surprising things about him!
This is unlike any other interview of Larry Sanger in print or on the Internet.
Background: From Larry Sanger’s Wikipedia Page
Lawrence Mark “Larry” Sanger, born July 16, 1968 is an American Internet project developer, co-founder of Wikipedia, and the founder of Citizendium. He grew up in Anchorage, Alaska. From an early age he has been interested in philosophy. Sanger received a Bachelor of Arts in philosophy from Reed College in 1991 and a Doctor of Philosophy in philosophy from Ohio State University in 2000. Most of his philosophical work has focused on epistemology, the theory of knowledge.
He has been involved with various online encyclopedia projects. He is the former editor-in-chief of Nupedia, chief organizer (2001–02) of its successor, Wikipedia, and founding editor-in-chief of Citizendium. From his position at Nupedia, he assembled the process for article development. Sanger proposed implementing a wiki, which led directly to the creation of Wikipedia. Initially Wikipedia was a complementary project for Nupedia. He was Wikipedia’s early community leader and established many of its original policies.
Sanger left Wikipedia in 2002, and has since been critical of the project. He states that, despite its merits, Wikipedia lacks credibility due to, among other things, a lack of respect for expertise. In October 2006, Sanger started a somewhat similar encyclopedia to Wikipedia, Citizendium.
Sanger has taught philosophy at Ohio State University and was an early strategist for the expert-authored Encyclopedia of Earth. He has worked on developing educational projects for individuals behind WatchKnowLearn. He has designed a web-based reading program named Reading Bear which aims to teach children how to read. In February 2013, he attempted to start a news crowdsourcing project named Infobitt; it ran out of money in mid-2015 without the code being ready to handle a fullscale launch.
Below, read the full interview transcript.
Andrea Macdonald, founder ideaXme: [00:00:00] Who are you?
Larry Sanger, Co-Founder of Wikipedia: [00:00:03] Well, you know, what I put on my Twitter account is “online knowledge organizer”. In terms of a career direction or title, that fits it pretty well. That sort of describes what I’ve done.
Larry Sanger, Co-Founder of Wikipedia: [00:00:27] Since having kids. I’m not sure that I define myself as my career so much anymore. I’m also a homeschooling dad. Although, my children actually call me poppa because that’s what mama calls me! The other thing is, I continue to think of myself as a philosopher, because I do try to apply a “philosopher sensibility” to the way I think about everything. My bachelor’s, master’s and PhD are all in philosophy. I studied it for about 20 years. So, it really has stuck with me.
Andrea Macdonald, founder ideaXme: [00:01:20] Can you take us through the type of philosophy you’ve studied, the philosophy of knowledge?
A Love for Philosophy
Larry Sanger, Co-Founder of Wikipedia:[00:01:28] Well, that’s one of the things that I studied anyway. That was my specialization, I wrote my dissertation on the problem of epistemic circularity, which I won’t go into. Epistemology or the theory of knowledge is the philosophical study of knowledge and of the nature of knowledge and other than what it is when we have it. Whether we have any of it, what ultimately the sources of it are and here we don’t mean that in the sense of a studied by brain science or psychology but in terms of what the ultimate sources could be like, could they be divine revolution? Could that be included? Is it all through sense perception? Is there a special faculty of reason that itself outputs truth that we know that are self-evident to us. Anyway, those are the three biggest questions of epistemology and there’s a lot of specialized ones. I suppose in the last 30 years or so, one of the biggest has been how is knowledge justified or what are our grounds to warrant our beliefs? So that’s pretty much it.
Andrea Macdonald, founder ideaXme: [00:03:14] So it’s no wonder that you went on to become the co-founder of Wikipedia.
Larry Sanger, Co-Founder of Wikipedia: [00:03:24] It’s not totally unrelated, yes.
Andrea Macdonald, founder ideaXme: [00:03:28] Could you describe the history of how Wikipedia came about?
The Founding of Wikipedia and Open Source News
Larry Sanger, Co-Founder of Wikipedia: [00:03:34] Well, I knew Jimmy Wales from the mid 1990s. We met in some philosophy forums that we were both part of and we actually met in person once when I was flying around the country and he was living in Chicago.
Larry Sanger, Co-Founder of Wikipedia: [00:03:58] Then in 1990, actually the beginning of 2000, the millennium bug had just failed to materialize as a disaster and I had been working on a website called Sanger’s Review of Y2K News Reports, Y2K Meaning the Millennium Bug. I mocked up an idea for another website and circulated it around different friends and acquaintances, one of whom was Jimmy Wales. He said, well, rather than working on that, why don’t you come to work on developing a new encyclopaedia for my company, Bomis? He had already picked out a name for the project called Nupedia but he really hadn’t done much more than that and the only thing that he really knew he wanted to do was to model the development of the community after the open source community, the open source software community.
Andrea Macdonald, founder ideaXme: [00:05:25] When Nupedia was launched, I believe it was launched to compete with Encyclopaedia Britannica?
Larry Sanger, Co-Founder of Wikipedia: [00:05:35] Right. Well, one of the articles that I wrote when we were first talking about Nupedia and in the first year of Wikipedia too, we talked about how we would be going head to head with Britannica but that was a little bit tongue in cheek. We didn’t really think that we would be Britannica killers or anything or Encarta. We didn’t think that we’d be able to take down Encarta. But I think we probably are as responsible for that as anything. Encarta meaning Microsoft’s encyclopaedia, which is now defunct.
Andrea Macdonald, founder ideaXme: [00:06:26] You reached a point with Nupedia where you had a problem to solve?
Larry Sanger, Co-Founder of Wikipedia: [00:06:35] Right. Well, so I moved out to San Diego to work on it and in the first six months or so, we developed a lot of the basic processes of the encyclopaedia and the organization just using email and mailing lists. By the time that we had written some software for the project, I was surprised and disappointed that the email process was going pretty slowly.
Larry Sanger, Co-Founder of Wikipedia: [00:07:16] We had set up a seven step review process, which was far too arduous, basically. So Jimmy Wales and I were well agreed that by the fall of 2000 or so we needed to do something to increase the pace of production. We weren’t sure what it might be, so I made a number of proposals. They all, however, required new programming and Jimmy Wales being, at the time, a typical entrepreneurial tightwad, didn’t want to spend any more money on any new software.
Larry Sanger, Co-Founder of Wikipedia: [00:08:15] So then on January 2nd, 2001, I was having Mexican food with a friend of mine and he was telling me about this cool new kind of website that he had been playing with called a Wiki. It wasn’t actually that new, Wiki’s had been around for something like five years at that time. It was basically just a page where you go to the page, you click the edit button and you can edit the text on the page itself and otherwise it’s just like a bulletin board. You can just put anything up there that you want and the amazing thing my friend said is that this is robust and it’s hard for trolls to take it down or to really mess things up, because it’s easy to roll back the bad edits that they have made.
Larry Sanger, Co-Founder of Wikipedia: [00:09:35] To make a long story short, I thought that tool could solve our problem. I proposed it that very evening. I think I sent a one page proposal to Jimmy Wales saying let’s install all this and that’s something that he felt that he could do.
Larry Sanger, Co-Founder of Wikipedia: [00:10:01] So they installed a Wiki and over the next two weeks or so, we debated whether to include the Wiki as part of Nupedia or to launch it on its own domain. The people who are the editors, the PhDs who are in control of Nupedia wanted to have nothing to do with anything called a Wiki. So we relaunched it under a name that I picked out, Wikipedia on January 15th which was just two weeks later. I wrote all of the introductory pages, the help pages, what our mission was and a few sample pages and so forth. Then it just really took off from there. Wikipedia got a good start because it was seeded by a fairly large and motivated community. We had around 2000 people on our mailing list that I had collected with the help of a couple of other people over the previous year.
Larry Sanger, Co-Founder of Wikipedia: [00:11:31] A whole bunch of people were kind of tired of working in the slow process of Nupedia and watching it. When we just said here is a blank bulletin board for you to just start writing things on and linking easily. They just took to it and really went to town.
Andrea Macdonald, founder ideaXme: [00:11:57] So you came up with the idea, you introduce a form of the fairly static technology to this environment and you thought of how the system might work.
Larry Sanger, Co-Founder of Wikipedia: [00:12:15] Right.
Larry Sanger, Co-Founder of Wikipedia: [00:12:16] The way that we used the Wiki tool was not the same as anyone had used it before. For example, one thing that we did was to put discussion of the contents of pages on so-called talk pages and clearly distinguishing between the content and discussion of the content was something that hadn’t really been done in Wikis up to that time. So we made a number of innovations.
Leaving Wikipedia Behind
Andrea Macdonald, founder ideaXme: [00:13:00] So what happened next?
Larry Sanger, Co-Founder of Wikipedia: [00:13:05] Well, it really took off in the spring and summer. We had several thousand articles, I believe, by the summer. Because we were going so quickly, we captured the attention of some of the tech blogs. It was easy for Jimmy Wales to write for websites, I forget whether he wrote for Corrosion or Slashdot. I also wrote a couple of articles for a tech website called Corrosion and at least one of those was slashdotted which means it was shared on Slashdot, which at the time was the biggest website for programmers. So we just had this huge influx of these techie types in the summer and fall of 2001.
Larry Sanger, Co-Founder of Wikipedia: [00:14:23] In the very first few months of Wikipedia, it was a little bit more general and academic. When the techies descended from Slashdot, it became a lot more, shall we say, of a free for all. We gained a lot more anarchistic elements. Some of those people just had to be shut down. It was easy to do. Others were obviously trying to disrupt the proceedings but in a way that wouldn’t be immediately shut down. So there was some difficulty in dealing with that and also maintaining a fully open and free sort of atmosphere. Then at the end of 2001, just after I got married, I was told that I would have to look for another job because the bottom had dropped out of the tech market.
Larry Sanger, Co-Founder of Wikipedia: [00:15:54] The 1990s tech bubble had finally burst and there was no money left from advertising. Bomis, the parent company that Jimmy Wales was the CEO of and which basically hired me to start Nupedia and Wikipedia, they lost a big ad contract that they had. So they couldn’t pay for me and all these other new hires that they had hired in 2000. In 2001 I was laid off and I decided I didn’t want to devalue my professional labour, so I just decided not to work on the project.
Larry Sanger, Co-Founder of Wikipedia: [00:16:52] In 2002 I finally officially stepped down. I think it was the end of February, if I remember right, in 2002. Then, for most of that year, I was quiet and occasionally spoke up, saying, for example, that there needed to be a review process put in place for articles, and if it wasn’t part of Wikipedia itself, it should be sponsored by Wikipedia as a way of selecting the best versions of articles, according to experts. There was a huge amount of pushback which I thought was quite irrational and I had very little support from Jimmy Wales for the idea. In addition, a lot of the people that I thought had been really disruptive were sort of taking over and making life quite difficult for some of the most productive, well-meaning and knowledgeable members of the community who had been there the longest time in some cases.
Larry Sanger, Co-Founder of Wikipedia: [00:18:09] Things really came to a head for me and I made an ultimatum to Jimmy Wales and I said, I really don’t want to have anything to do with this project unless you can find some way to rein in all of the bad actors, and to setup a fair procedure for keeping the community polite and productive and also to create some sort of way, low-key, it doesn’t have to be controlling or anything, but some sort of way to involve experts as experts in the project, because this is an encyclopaedia after all. So that’s what I said.
Larry Sanger, Co-Founder of Wikipedia: [00:19:03] Jimmy Wales disagreed apparently with both points. He simply argued with me. He didn’t want to have a dialogue about those points. I had made a threat. So I made good on my threat. I just cut ties and I have never had anything to do with the organization since.
Larry Sanger, Co-Founder of Wikipedia: [00:19:29] It began as a commercial entity. It became a non-commercial entity after a few years. So Bomis, the parent parent company was a dot com, Nupedia was nupedia.com, Wikipedia was wikipedia.com. We were going to sell ads and well, I won’t go into all of the details there but after I left, the costs in supporting Wikipedia went down dramatically. They really didn’t have a lot to spend to keep it going. It had become very clear to the loudest voices anyway, to the leaders of the community or the people who are speaking the most anyway, that they would have nothing to do with ads being sold for any purpose, even for non-profit purposes on the website. Therefore, Jimmy Wales decided to make it a non-profit.
Larry Sanger, Co-Founder of Wikipedia: [00:20:46] This is something that we had talked about. I remember very early on in 2000, I said, look, are people really going to, especially academics, are they really going to want to contribute to an encyclopaedia which is for profit and that other people are profiting off of? We discovered that the answer to that is no. What he always told me is that, if that happens, then, we’ll pay ourselves salaries out of a non-profit and that’s how that’ll work. That’s to do with the setting up of the non-profit itself. That didn’t happen until 2004 or so.
The Launch of Citizendium and Children’s Educational Websites
Andrea Macdonald, founder ideaXme: [00:21:34] You later launched Citizendium. Can you talk us through that and how it has addressed the sort of negative opinions about Wikipedia.
Larry Sanger, Co-Founder of Wikipedia: [00:21:53] So Citizendium was and still is actually an attempt, I use the past tense because I don’t really have time to work on it anymore, but an attempt to do Wikipedia right.
Larry Sanger, Co-Founder of Wikipedia: [00:22:17] Citizendium does two things. First of all, we require the use of real names so you can’t use anonymous handles on the website. That lends credibility and accountability. In addition, we have working versions of articles and expert approved versions of articles. Now, experts don’t have to approve edits to articles and as they are at work on the same website, experts and non-experts are working pretty much shoulder to shoulder within the Wiki.
Larry Sanger, Co-Founder of Wikipedia: [00:23:03] So the role that experts have in Citizendium is twofold. First of all, they approve final versions of articles and second of all, they resolve content disputes, protracted content disputes, and generally only after they’ve been fully canvassed. There’s no way to shut anybody up about these content disputes either. So you can be sure that it isn’t simply whatever the expert says goes. It doesn’t work like that. The experts have, one could say, a low-key but existing role in the system.
Larry Sanger, Co-Founder of Wikipedia: [00:24:02] There’s another difference between this project and Wikipedia, or at least it was a difference when it got started. That is that if you’re involved in Citizendium, then you commit to a sort of constitution, an online charter that defines how everyone should treat each other and how the system is to work. That tended to weed out a lot of the anarchistic types. Who, of course, wouldn’t agree to that. So it went very well at the beginning, we had an enormous launch actually in, I guess it was 2007. We first started working on it in 2006. Citizendium itself was sort of an offshoot and a little bit of something called the digital universe.
Larry Sanger, Co-Founder of Wikipedia: [00:25:13] Some of the early work that I did on it, I did as part of another start-up, which has since failed. After a few years, by 2009 or so, the growth curve really started dropping off as a lot of people left Citizendium to go back to Wikipedia. The reason for that is that Wikipedia was at its steepest part of its growth curve during the months when Citizendium was launching and it was already so enormous it was really difficult to compete. It turns out that one of the main reasons why people do contribute to something like Wikipedia so much is that they love to see their words represented as truth before the world. You can get that by working on Wikipedia, but, you’re not going to be the first result on Google if you write for Citizendium, except on a few articles and a few topics.
Andrea Macdonald, founder ideaXme: [00:26:41] So for Citizendium you’re the soul founder?
Larry Sanger, Co-Founder of Wikipedia: [00:26:41] Yes.
Andrea Macdonald, founder ideaXme: [00:26:41] As opposed to Wikipedia, you’re the co-founder.
Larry Sanger, Co-Founder of Wikipedia: [00:26:53] Right.
Andrea Macdonald, founder ideaXme: [00:26:55] What’s happened next?
Larry Sanger, Co-Founder of Wikipedia: [00:26:56] There was a couple of educational websites that I worked on. There was one called Watch No Learn, which was originally just called Watch No and is a directory of free educational videos for kids arranged into a handy directory and within each category ordered according to rating. Then a gentleman from Memphis, Tennessee, in the south of America, the man who funded the educational videos saw a video that I made of my son reading at an advanced level at the age of two. He asked me to basically digitize the method I had used with my son to teach him to read. So, that was kind of fun, it was very difficult. I’m sort of proud that they’re still used. They’re still growing, actually.
Larry Sanger, Co-Founder of Wikipedia: [00:28:20] The second website is called Reading Bear, readingbear.org. Then I spent a couple of years on Info Bitt and it was to be a Wikipedia for news. We proved, as I think nobody had ever done before, that it is possible to organize random people from the Internet to prepare a readable, interesting and pretty balanced, extremely meaty presentation of the news by summarizing from multiple sources and different articles. It’s kind of like Wikipedia, except that unlike Wikipedia, it breaks news down into individual facts and so one Bit is made up of many facts. The facts can themselves come from lots of different sources, so you could have five different sources for the same story. Anyway, it went very well and we were poised to grow. In fact, we were growing quite well but we ran out of money and we really needed that money, too, in order to not only host the website, but to get it to a position where it could absorb all the traffic that it had gotten and that it could have gotten. It wasn’t scalable, unfortunately. It’s not out of business, I should say, It’s just currently offline.
Andrea Macdonald, founder ideaXme: [00:30:37] How do you spend most of your time at the moment?
Larry Sanger, Co-Founder of Wikipedia: [00:30:43] Right now, I am working on a new start-up. It isn’t mine. It’s a local man’s called mymentor.com
Larry Sanger, Co-Founder of Wikipedia: [00:30:57] The mission of My Mentor is to push boatloads of information about careers to people who are getting into careers or who are thinking of changing careers with the view of helping them to plan their careers. So it isn’t a job search site so much as a career planning site and we want to make it a social network. Also, we want to have something like a Wiki involved so that the public can participate in the creation of at least some of the resources we have. A lot of the resources we want to make will also be curated in some cases by script automatically from various sources.
Larry Sanger, Co-Founder of Wikipedia: [00:32:12] One of the things that we really are excited about is something called the path. What you can see right now on the site is a mock-up of what we have in mind. Over the next six months or so, we’re going to add a new kind of path feature where people will be able to not just make a to-do list, but they’ll be able to add notes about each item, they’ll be able to check it off and when they check off an item, a note will go out to their friends and their friends will be able to congratulate them. If they have mentors on the site, then the mentor will be able to certify that they have actually done what they say they’re going to do. I’m probably getting into too many details.
Andrea Macdonald, founder ideaXme: [00:33:06] That sounds very interesting.
Larry Sanger, Co-Founder of Wikipedia: [00:33:07] Yeah. So, it should be really useful and, for a couple of different reasons, I am learning programming at the same time. I’ve learned programming languages in an amateur sort of way before but I’ve decided that as an Internet project manager, it’s high time that I learned how to really program as a professional myself. So I’m spending about half of my time doing that and I’m getting busier doing other things lately. It also gives me new insight into the whole idea of switching careers as well, even though it’s just a sideways movement for me.
The Threat to Free Speech in a Technological World
Andrea Macdonald, founder ideaXme: [00:33:54] Technology is, of course, a vehicle for you. You used it in the past to deliver all these different products to the market as well as these future products that you’re working on. Do you have any concerns about the exponential growth of technology?
Larry Sanger, Co-Founder of Wikipedia: [00:34:15] Probably not any that a lot of other people have or don’t have, I should say. I’d say, I am very much worried about threats to privacy. The ability of Facebook to collect so much data about us and the government then to grab that data from us. There are some very sobering threats that could come out of a situation if we were ever under a totalitarian regime again, which nevertheless had a robust social networking component to it, would be very frightening to me.
Larry Sanger, Co-Founder of Wikipedia: [00:35:22] But I think the other thing is and I’ve commented about this in a couple of other forums, actually. I’m very disappointed with how in the past 10 years, as everybody has gotten online, we found our silos and we aren’t talking to each other anymore. Political partisans basically demonize the opposition constantly. This is not healthy for a democracy. The support for literal democracy is on the decline and has been for decades, actually, but it seems to be accelerating lately. Support for restrictions on free speech and in academia and from Europe tends to bleed over online and there’s concerns about that. The expectation that Facebook, for example, should censor views that quite intelligent, well-meaning people can hold but other people think are evil in a democratic, free, open society. That is a real problem.
Andrea Macdonald, founder ideaXme: [00:37:16] What’s your opinion of the transhumanist movement?
Larry Sanger, Co-Founder of Wikipedia: [00:37:21] The transhumanist movement. I don’t know very much about it.
Larry Sanger, Co-Founder of Wikipedia: [00:37:30] I think it’ll be very interesting if we ever do develop a really robust A.I., it’ll be very interesting to see how that impacts humanity. I’m not like a strong believer in the singularity. But I think it’s possible that something like that could happen. It gets a little bit woo for me and I’m not that kind of thinker but I certainly do like to keep an open mind. I myself have thought a bit about A.I. and it’s a fascinating subject. So insofar that transhumanism just involves exploring the implications of that, I’m very interested in it. On the other hand, I think that until more robust scientific and technological advancements are made, human nature will remain what it is. As a philosopher, it will be fascinating to me to see what is possible and how it will affect how we think about ethics, politics and social philosophy generally, if it turns out that human nature is not as stable as it has been for thousands of years.
Andrea Macdonald, founder ideaXme: [00:39:26] Have you read the book Technology vs Humanity by Gerd Leonhard?
Larry Sanger, Co-Founder of Wikipedia: [00:39:32] No, I’m afraid I haven’t.
Andrea Macdonald, founder ideaXme: [00:39:35] One of the key driving forces of the book is that he feels there’s a necessity to create a group of people, guardians of humanity, to oversee exponential technological growth. Do you think we should have a group like this and what sort of process would we have to go through to choose that group?
Larry Sanger, Co-Founder of Wikipedia: [00:40:06] It’s hard for me to comment on a proposal when I know nothing about it other than what you’ve just told me. But generally, I am a lover of liberty and anyone who is set up as guardians of humanity, who will regulate the growth of technology, I would think that we would need to be guarded from the machinations of such people myself.
Larry Sanger, Co-Founder of Wikipedia: [00:40:49] Let’s put it this way, I do think that is necessary, absolutely, for society on a case by case basis to examine the consequences of the existence of new categories of technology like nanotechnology, for example, or genetic engineering on human beings. I would think that this wouldn’t require a centralized star council, whatever group of favored individuals who decide for all the rest of us what technology should be allowed to proceed. To restrain technological advancement, if you think about it, requires an enormous amount of government power.
The Need for a New Political System Where Democracy Can Work
Andrea Macdonald, founder ideaXme: [00:42:11] What is your opinion of the U.S. presidential election result?
Larry Sanger, Co-Founder of Wikipedia: [00:42:19] I’m pretty disappointed. I was very disappointed with both candidates. I voted for Gary Johnson, the Libertarian. I thought Hillary Clinton was corrupt. I think Donald Trump is, well, disappointing, shall we say. I think he’s scary. I hope that we will be proven not to have a reason to be scared, but we’ll see, won’t we? So, yeah, we’re kind of screwed actually at this point.
Andrea Macdonald, founder ideaXme: [00:43:07] Do you think the political system needs reforming?
Larry Sanger, Co-Founder of Wikipedia: [00:43:11] Absolutely. I think it needs to be broken down into little pieces, so there’s a lot more local government. I think that it needs to be decentralized and de-federalized. I’m a strong believer in democracy and democracy simply does not work at the enormous levels that we see in the United States and Europe, it just doesn’t work. It wasn’t designed to be this way. Even a state like California or Texas or New York or Ohio where I live are probably too large for an individual to have a meaningful say in their government. So I think that’s one part of it.
Larry Sanger, Co-Founder of Wikipedia: [00:44:17] I think that there is simply too much of a tendency on the part of everyone, certainly everyone who is not on the Right to think of societal problems as requiring governmental solutions. I think that we have forgotten something that was well known by our grandparents and everyone before that, that a lot of societal problems can be quite effectively addressed through civic society. So civic organizations can be quite robust, especially, I would think, in the 21st century with the help of the Internet. I think the tendency to centralize, corporatize and to collectivize everything is an insidious influence. People love it because it means togetherness, love, kindness and everyone coming together to agree and so forth. That all sounds great, but the problem is that it also means quashing of dissent and conformity, standardization, the elimination of individuality, which are essential to our being human.
What Books Should Every Human Being Read?
Andrea Macdonald, founder ideaXme: [00:46:15] You’ve been a big proponent of encouraging reading. You spoke about teaching your own child to read before the age of two. For the listeners and viewers, which are the top five books that you would recommend that we should read as human beings?
Larry Sanger, Co-Founder of Wikipedia: [00:46:55] Well, you know, I’m doing a quick Internet search here because I answered this question on Quora. Let’s see, I’ll just try to get it off my top of my head because I don’t think I’m going to find it.
Larry Sanger, Co-Founder of Wikipedia: [00:47:24] Even though I myself am a non-believer. I’m a strong believer in liberal education and in Western civilization. I run a group on Facebook called Fans of Western Civilization. So although I’m not a believer, I’m reading the Bible to my sons. I would actually put the Bible on the top of the list simply because it’s the most influential book in the history of Western civilization, period. I would also put some collection of Plato’s dialogues, and definitely the ones that are attributed to Socrates, especially things like The Apology. Then some other philosophy, it doesn’t necessarily matter what. Descartes, The Discourse on Method and Meditations on First Philosophy would be good.
Larry Sanger, Co-Founder of Wikipedia: [00:48:54] If you’re asking me which particular books then I have to pick out the most famous books as opposed to types of books that people should all study. So everybody should study the history of their country, but I don’t have any particular history books of the United States or of Great Britain in mind. I would also say in terms of literature, Pride and Prejudice is one of my absolute favorites. I think at least I would like to have something represented there from Libertarian philosophy, I think probably from something by Hayek. It would be nice to have everybody read The Road to Serfdom by Friedrich Hayek.
Andrea Macdonald, founder ideaXme: [00:50:12] You didn’t mention The Fountainhead.
Larry Sanger, Co-Founder of Wikipedia: [00:50:16] Ok. Right, of course.
Andrea Macdonald, founder ideaXme: [00:50:18] I was just thinking about your Libertarian views and wondered why you hadn’t mentioned The Fountainhead.
Larry Sanger, Co-Founder of Wikipedia: [00:50:27] The Fountainhead is more about ethics than it is about politics, I would say. If you really wanted to pick some Ayn Rand that favored her philosophical political philosophy and explained it. It would be Atlas Shrugged.
Larry Sanger, Co-Founder of Wikipedia: [00:50:52] I mean, I liked Ayn Rand when I was younger. I would still definitely recommend that my boys read The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged when they’re old enough, but it doesn’t really have as much subtlety as I would require. I’ve always had a love-hate relationship with Ayn Rand. There’s things about her that she said that I agree with, but those other things that I think she’s wrong about or it was simply misstated. She’s a poor public advocate for the philosophy. We could have somebody better.
Andrea Macdonald, founder ideaXme: [00:52:02] As you know, ideaXme is about the humans behind the big ideas shaping our world. What would you like us to know about you as a human, outside work?
Larry Sanger, Co-Founder of Wikipedia: [00:52:18] Well, I’m not a very important person, so I don’t know. I wouldn’t say that anybody needs to know anything about me. Maybe you could rephrase the question.
Andrea Macdonald, founder ideaXme: [00:52:37] Tell us a bit about your childhood.
Larry Sanger, Co-Founder of Wikipedia: [00:52:45] I was born in the Seattle Washington area and I went to Redmond Elementary School. Redmond, Washington, where Microsoft is now located before Microsoft existed. I went there for a couple of years and then moved up to Alaska. From the age of seven until the age of 18, I went to school in Anchorage, Alaska, with my family. Three other kids and two parents, and I was the youngest, so kind of the baby of the family. I was always the shortest kid in the class, had thick glasses and was hard of hearing. I still had lots of friends, though, but I was a bit of a geek, by the time I was in high school, I became a little more popular.
Larry Sanger, Co-Founder of Wikipedia: [00:53:54] I was into cross-country, cross-country skiing in Anchorage (Alaska). My partner and I were the best pair of debaters in the state of Alaska in our senior year. In our junior year, we came in first and second. He beat me. He’s now a New York Times reporter.
Larry Sanger, Co-Founder of Wikipedia: [00:54:32] I really enjoyed the outdoors and we did go out camping and fishing a fair bit. No hunting, but we did a lot of camping and hiking and fishing. I grew up skiing too, in the winter. That was fun.
Andrea Macdonald, founder ideaXme: [00:55:04] Who were your heroes growing up?
Larry Sanger, Co-Founder of Wikipedia: [00:55:07] I can’t really remember. I don’t know if I had any heroes growing up.
Who Would Larry Sanger Like to Meet and Why?
Andrea Macdonald, founder ideaXme: [00:55:25] Out of everybody that you could meet, who would you most like to meet and what question would you like to ask them?
Larry Sanger, Co-Founder of Wikipedia: [00:55:34] You asked me this before, so I had a little time to think about this one. I’ve got a few different ideas for you.
Larry Sanger, Co-Founder of Wikipedia: [00:55:42] First of all, I’d like to ask Jesus to perform a miracle, that’d be fun, because if he did it, then I would become a believer and if he didn’t and gave me some sort of lame excuse, then I would be confirmed in my non-belief.
Andrea Macdonald, founder ideaXme: [00:56:02] Is there any particular miracle that you would like him to perform?
Larry Sanger, Co-Founder of Wikipedia: [00:56:07] Yeah, I’d have to think about that one. Raising the dead would be a good one.
Andrea Macdonald, founder ideaXme: [00:56:13] Anyone in particular?
Larry Sanger, Co-Founder of Wikipedia: [00:56:18] Raising a particular person to life? Just somebody who is known to be dead, it doesn’t really matter who.
Larry Sanger, Co-Founder of Wikipedia: [00:56:25] Anyway, then Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, Thomas Jefferson being the author of the Declaration of Independence and James Madison being the main author of the Constitution of the United States. I’d like to describe to them the political and social situation of the United States today and ask for their reaction. I’d ask them, “Are you surprised?” and “Is there anything you would do differently?” That’d be fun. Then, I’d like to do the same thing with Karl Marx, especially since history didn’t really unfold scientifically in the way that he thought it would. The revolution came from a feudal society, not from the most industrial society. Industrial societies are more robust, “So what do you think of that, Karl?”
Andrea Macdonald, founder ideaXme: [00:57:41] Larry Sanger, co-founder of Wikipedia, educational evangelist and philosopher. Thank you very much for your time. It’s been an absolute pleasure.
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