Larry Sanger

Lawrence Mark Sanger (born July 16, 1968) is an American Internet project developer and philosopher who co-founded Wikipedia with Jimmy Wales. Sanger coined the name Wikipedia and provided initial drafts for many of its early guidelines, including the "Neutral point of view" and "Ignore all rules" policies. Prior to Wikipedia, he was the editor-in-chief of Nupedia, an online encyclopedia which was the predecessor of Wikipedia. He later worked on other encyclopedic projects, including the Encyclopedia of Earth, Citizendium, Everipedia, and Ballotpedia. Sanger's other interests include theology and philosophy such as epistemology, early modern philosophy, and ethics. He taught philosophy at Ohio State University.

Sanger joined the online encyclopedia Nupedia as editor-in-chief in 2000. Disappointed with the slow progress of Nupedia, Sanger proposed using a wiki to solicit and receive articles to put through Nupedia's peer-review process; this change led to the development and launch of Wikipedia in 2001. Sanger continued to serve as Nupedia's editor-in-chief and as an active contributor to Wikipedia in its first year, but he was laid off and left the project in March 2002. Sanger's status as a co-founder of Wikipedia has been questioned by Wales, but is generally accepted.

Since Sanger's departure from Wikipedia, he has been critical of the project, describing it in 2007 as being "broken beyond repair". He has argued that Wikipedia lacks credibility and accuracy because, in his view, it had a lack of respect for expertise. Since 2020, he has accused Wikipedia of having a left-wing ideological bias in its articles. Sanger's effort to change Wikipedia was received negatively by editors of the English Wikipedia.

In June 2026, he was banned from editing the English Wikipedia after the community determined that he had violated its "canvassing", or brigading, rule by publicizing an internal community discussion on his proposed "WikiProject Intellectual Diversity" to his 93,000 followers on X. The community also concluded that he was "not here" to constructively build the encyclopedia.