User talk:Larry Sanger
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Contents of old User page:
My name is Larry Sanger and I was (with Jimbo Wales) instigator of Wikipedia, and the first (and so far only) editor-in-chief of Nupedia. I'm responsible for the original concept and the name "Wikipedia" and a lot of the original formulations of Wikipedia's most basic policy. Since funding for my salary ran out, leading to my departure in March 2002, I can take no credit and no blame for changes that have occurred since then. Ph.D. 2000, M.A. 1995, Philosophy, Ohio State University. B.A. 1991 Philosophy, Reed College. Home town is Anchorage, Alaska.
Please have a look at (and spread around links to) this Personal Statement about Wikipedia's Reliability (http://people.cohums.ohio-state.edu/sanger3/wikipedia_statement.htm).
I can be reached at blarneypilgrim (a t) yahoo (d o t) com.
All the best to Wikipedia and Wikipedians. May you continue
- to be open and warmly welcoming, not insular,
- to be focused singlemindedly on writing an encyclopedia, not on Usenet-style debate,
- to recognize and praise the best work, work that is detailed, factual, well-informed, and well-referenced,
- to work to understand what neutrality requires and why it is so essential to and good for this project,
- to treat your fellow productive, well-meaning members of Wikipedia with respect and good will,
- to attract and honor good people who know a lot and can write about it well, and
- to show the door to trolls, vandals, and wiki-anarchists, who if permitted would waste your time and create a poisonous atmosphere here.
I set up an encyclopedia meta-search engine (http://www.seeatown.com/search/) (dead link ?). I hope you'll find it useful when researching Wikipedia articles.
If you are spending too much time on Wikipedia, you could always use my Human Activity Logger (http://www.seeatown.com/halog/) (dead link ?)to help you toward more self-discipline! ;-)
Historical note:
- Until December 2001, I was a full-time paid employee of Bomis, spending most of my work time (especially in the latter part of 2001) on Wikipedia. As of February 1, 2002, I was no longer paid at all; I made an announcement (http://meta.wikipedia.com/wiki.phtml?title=Announcement_about_my_involvement_in_Wikipedia_and_Nupedia--Larry_Sanger) explaining that I'd continue on as a part-time volunteer. On March 1, 2002, I resigned responsibility for leading Wikipedia and as editor-in-chief of Nupedia; my reasons are given in my letter of resignation to the community (http://meta.wikipedia.com/wiki.phtml?title=My+resignation--Larry+Sanger). To reiterate, primarily I needed this extra time to find a job, and I felt that I could not work effectively as a leader when I am working only as a part-time volunteer. I participated in mailing list discussions and on the wiki to a small extent in the fall of 2002, but since December 2002 have drifted away.
Text from the old talk:Larry_Sanger page:
Larry - I think there is a partial consensus (oxymoron?) that when disputes arise you are the nearest thing to an arbitrator there is. I don't know if we have (or need) a formal system of arbitration.
I don't see a very large consensus yet, and I don't see a need to make it official in any case. --LMS
I am not opposed to establishing a voluntary system of arbitration/mediation at Wikipedia, but there is a very real danger that establishing any formal system of arbitration/mediation will lay the groundwork for establishing a hierarchical power structure here. At the same time, the best argument for establishing a formal policy regarding arbitration/mediation is to make certain that procedural safeguards are put into place to prevent anyone from establishing a hierarchical power structure.
Beyond the naked fact that Bomis hosts Wikipedia and that certain people who have made it past a probationary period are allowed to request Wikipedia administrator privileges from Bomis, there seems to be very little formal structure here. People make changes to articles as they see fit, and when a conflict arises, people are forced to work it out amongst themselves.
I am reminded of how ODP first established "voluntary editor mediation" to resolve disputes between editors. Very quickly, this voluntary mediation process evolved into a de facto process for enforcement of the ODP Guidelines by ODP's meta editors. Meanwhile, the ODP Guidelines themselves went from being a recapitulation of the consensus of the volunteer editors to a strict code of conduct which was determined by ODP staff, and ODP devolved into a Lord of the Flies subculture.
The question remains as to whether it is necessary to establish a formal system of arbitration/mediation at Wikipedia. I think it is, but not to resolve disputes. Rather, it should be established with appropriate procedural safeguards to protect the rights of individuals to ignore all rules.--NetEsq
If you want a list of "24"'s contributions, you might do worse than take a look at User:24.150.61.63. -- Anon.
Oh boy--time to get out the shovels. --Larry Sanger
Hello Mr. Sanger. I'm pretty new to Wikipedia and have only now put together the history behind the project. I'm saddened by the way you were compelled to resign. Really it's just one of thousands of saddening stories accompanying the bursting of the Internet bubble, but it's just a shame that excellent work like this really can't find decent remuneration and I guess it won't change soon. I'd like to personally thank you, though, for your crucial role in creating Wikipedia and sustaining it in its infancy. It's a real achievement that can never be deleted from your past... I have a vague hope that the project will be transferred from Bomis (which, judging from its rather laughable website is not long for this world) to a company that can support it while understanding there's no chance of its making money for years. I think such a company would be very keen to try to get you back.
Anyway, I was hoping that if you have the time and inclination you might go to talk:Race and give your input on a dispute I'm having with another writer. It started out being slightly ad-hominem but we've got that under control now. I think the balance I'm trying to bring to the article is important and hope you'll agree and maybe put in a few words to that effect. The other guy has threatened to blow away some very carefully crafted stuff I added and I hope a word from you will give him pause. I know it's not your job anymore and I ask mostly because I think you'll find it interesting. Thanks -- JDG 17:35 Oct 17, 2002 (UTC)
Thanks for your kind words.
I can tell you that Bomis (Jimbo Wales) would never, as long as they can afford it, want to give up sponsoring Wikipedia. Whatever you might think of Bomis.com, they put well over a hundred thousand dollars (various salaries, mainly) into the project of building a free encyclopedia, and lack of funds for my salary notwithstanding, continue to support it very well. It's a feather in Jimbo's cap and by golly, he can and ought to wear it proudly.
I would not want to come back to lead Wikipedia. It is unleadable. Certain characters, who would be delighted if I named them by name so I won't, made my job quite unpleasant due to their constant attacks on my (very modest) attempts to exert some authority or influence (and thus do my job).
I would like to come back and lead a different Nupedia, though. It was rather sad that it worked out precisely as it did, but here's the story--in January 2001, I started Wikipedia when Nupedia had just gone live with its new system. Even by then I knew that Nupedia's editorial mechanism had become too cumbersome, and indeed Wikipedia was one of the ideas to supplement it. Over the next months, through the spring and summer of 2001, I started spending more and more time on Wikipedia, at first just because it really needed the guidance, and later because Jimmy specifically asked me to spend as much time on Wikipedia as possible, because it seemed to be the project that really had a going chance of succeeding.
In the fall and early winter of 2001 on Nupedia-L and Advisory-L (Nupedia's advisory board mailing list) we had a discussion and vote on a new editorial system for Nupedia. By then my time allotted to Nupedia was practically zilch; so, before January 2002, when I was on half pay and half time, and February 2002 when money ran out entirely, I didn't have enough time to get Nupedia going again under the new plan.
I have run the idea by Jimmy that I simply completely take over the Nupedia project (I would actually buy the thing from him) but he doesn't like the idea. He has assured me that he will get it running again, soon, but I'm not holding my breath. Don't get me wrong--I think Jimbo's heart is in the right place, he just doesn't have enough time to manage the projects he's started. It's a good thing that Wikipedia is more or less self-managing.
I'm sorry, but I'd rather not step into the race debate...
- I'd agree that Wikipedia is unleadable under current rules. I don't think any community can survive when there's no mechanism to shut down those who disrupt it at the foundations. Pure unpoliced egalitarianism runs up against one enduring fact of human nature: there will always be those who dedicate themselves to undermining the careful labor and cooperative spirit of others. It's just in their bones. If the finance situation were to turn around somehow and you could come back, there would need to be some new and startling by-laws. Heading the list would be a provision allowing you to propose a ban of anyone (perhaps for something like 2 months the first time, permanently the second time) who you feel is sytematically hindering your work. This proposal would be put to a vote by Wikipedians in which your vote alone counts for 10% of the vote total (if 300 people voted, your vote would be 30 votes)... It's sad there are people like Cunctator who are sly enough not to commit outright vandalism but who can make the leader's life miserable. In the Old West they had a phrase: "That man needs killin'", applied to people who gummed up the whole works by setting people and families against each other. Usually the offender was run out on a rail rather than actually killed. Online collaboration is settling a frontier and no frontier was ever settled without a supply of tar and feathers.-- JDG
I think the community--and this includes me, by the way--has made it clear enough that money for Wikipedia would not go first and foremost to the salary of anything like an editor.
You might not know this, but I am as responsible as anyone for the current extremely liberal banning policy. While I was managing Wikipedia, while I did pretty much immediately ban anyone who was obviously just a vandal (often, though, I'd wait for at least two infractions), and while I often threatened miscreants with banning and told certain individuals privately that they should just leave (e.g., that was the case with Helga, many months before things came to a head for her), in fact the first person who was actually banned from the project was "24," by Jimbo. Generally, I support the current policy of having public discussion of outright bans (not just recommendations and threats) and then doing it only after really serious consideration--and only in the most egregious cases.
Your proposal, to give me the power to ban people who are thorns in my side, would receive virtually no support from anyone now in the project. I would oppose it myself, or rather, if given such a power and I had my old job back, I wouldn't use it. That just isn't the way forward.
Please have a look at the Wikipedia-L archives from last August or September, in which I brought up the issue of mediocre quality and how to deal with it. You'll find that I have a different sort of solution: we need to revive a different Nupedia. Wikipedians, in their hubris, think they have all the answers to making a great encyclopedia. In fact, they really need a Nupedia. --Larry Sanger
- I take your points, but it was you who said Wikipedia is "unleadable". Maybe you meant it can grow into a solid resource without any leadership, but I don't know about that. Anyway, I realize I'm asking you to restate stuff you're probably tired of stating. It's just that I'm new to Wikipedia and in the first blush of fascination with the idea. At least you're still around in some form -- JDG
Well, what you're saying makes total sense, from a certain point of view, and I didn't mean to say it didn't. Some of the stuff I said above in fact I said for the first time, actually, and you're the first person in a long time to suggest that we need more centralized control.
Wikipedia does have the leadership of a shifting group of people who happen to be most active and well-respected in the project. They're not elected, though. They just take responsibility and work a lot.
I do have some apprehension that, if we keep losing many of our best people, the overall quality of the project will decline. For one thing, I think people don't realize how important experts and academics are and have been for Wikipedia. Without them, I still maintain (as I maintained on Wikipedia-L), Wikipedia will probably never rise above a certain level of mediocrity, just as Everything2 never will. The question is whether some manner of leadership--whether from within Wikipedia or from some project independent of Wikipedia--is required to attract and retain such people. I suspect the answer is yes, so on that point I actually agree with you. --Larry Sanger
As resident philosopher, can you look at my description of the use of counterxamples in philosophy on Counterexample and make sure that it's reasonable? Thanks! — Toby 12:19 Nov 3, 2002 (UTC)
It's reasonable! --Larry Sanger
Would you have a moment to check what is said about Analogy of being at the entry on Apophatic theology? I'm not sure that I've got it right. — Mkmcconn
I really don't know anything about that--sorry. --Larry Sanger
- Thank you anyway. I hope that doesn't mean that I've distorted beyond recognition, a topic you are in fact familiar with! — Mkmcconn 23:39 Nov 7, 2002 (UTC)
Larry,
I've been reading about the "Problem of Induction" lately, and I'm now left with the impression that philosophers have put a lot more effort into figuring out the circumstances under which inductive reasoning is justified than those under which deductive reasoning is. In particular, while it seems very popular to be skeptical of the soundness of induction, deduction seems, for the most part, unquestionably acceptable in almost every case. (Provided fallacies are avoided, of course.) I'm wondering if, to help even the score, you could suggest any philosophers who either try to problematize deductive reasoning, or others who make a serious attempt to justify it. Surely this must keep someone up late at night.
The most interesting things I've found along these lines are:
- Lewis Carroll's "What the Tortoise Said to Achilles" (in Godel, Escher, Bach)
- Hofstadter's justification of the rules of first order logic (also somewhere in Godel, Escher, Bach). It's something along the lines of, "Don't these rules sound like what a sane person must believe? If you are sane, and you intuitively believe them, do you really need to question them?"
Obviously I could find someone willing to argue about deduction if I go far enough afield, say, into postmodern literary theory. But that stuff doesn't strike me as terribly serious or compelling.
--Ryguasu 04:33 Nov 7, 2002 (UTC)
One of the best things on that question is my dissertation. ;-) Seriously, what my dissertation was about was the problem that the justification of induction and of deduction have in common.
The leading view on the question you mention is that there's nothing wrong with the circularity involved in deductive justifications of deduction. The modern locus classicus of this view is Nelson Goodman's Fact, Fiction, and Forecast. Also, Susan Haack wrote an article called "The Justification of Deduction" in Mind. For the underlying issues, you could always go here (http://enlightenment.supersaturated.com/essays/text/larrysanger/diss/contents.html) and use your browser's search function to find "deduction" on the Chapter 3 page. --Larry Sanger
Larry,
Thanks for the philosophy references. I've copied them to my user page now, in case you want to delete the above.
On another note, you were right about the Lakoff page being a bunch of crap. I'm starting to fix it up.
--Ryguasu 23:23 Nov 22, 2002 (UTC)
In curious as to whether or not you had been following the Irish potato famine article and its related talk, and the issues of domineering bias permeating it... I feel Ive been compromising too much on the issue of British imperialism, and have some inkling that this has being done with the threat of my removal, for making my voice known. -Sv
Larry, what was that page I just edited that I thought was this page? Anyway, to answer your question that by now you've probably forgotten asking: No, "Anglican Church" is not the same as "Church of England". All churches belonging to the Anglican Communion, and some that do not belong are Anglican churches. That includes the Episcopal Church in the USA, which is obviously not part of the Church of England. Michael Hardy 20:27 12 Jul 2003 (UTC)
Hey Larry, if from time to time people have edited the article on identity and change, is it still the same article? (Do you still read this page? If not, then ignore this posting.) Michael Hardy 21:58, 13 Aug 2003 (UTC)
Regarding the article on Noumenon: I've barely read Kant, so maybe its my fault, but can someone please explain to me what the text in the article means when it says Max Born solves the enigma of Kant's Ding an Sich with the statement One person cannot convey the concept of the color red, but two people can agree (on the color). Is this really what Kant meant by Noumenon? It doesn't seem right to me. Its also strange to say that he "solved" the enigma--I did read Hegel, and I know that both Hegel and Gottlieb Fichte, as well as other German Idealists, made arguments refuting the notion of the thing-in-itself. Hegel says there is no thing-in-itself that is beyond understanding. Does this article need to be changed and corrected? Brianshapiro
on the talk page for the United Kingdom you say that the UK includes Great Britain, Northern Ireland and the channel islands and the isle of man. Just wanted to point out that this is very wrong, the UK is in fact just great britain plus northern ireland, the channel islands and Man are crown dependencies. Grunners 03:25, 23 May 2004 (UTC)
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Article Licensing
Hi, I've started a drive to get users to multi-license all of their contributions that they've made to either (1) all U.S. state, county, and city articles or (2) all articles, using the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike (CC-by-sa) v1.0 and v2.0 Licenses or into the public domain if they prefer. The CC-by-sa license is a true free documentation license that is similar to Wikipedia's license, the GFDL, but it allows other projects, such as WikiTravel, to use our articles. Since you are among the top 1000 Wikipedians by edits, I was wondering if you would be willing to multi-license all of your contributions or at minimum those on the geographic articles. Over 90% of people asked have agreed. For More Information:
- Multi-Licensing FAQ - Lots of questions answered
- Multi-Licensing Guide
- Free the Rambot Articles Project
To allow us to track those users who muli-license their contributions, many users copy and paste the "{{DualLicenseWithCC-BySA-Dual}}" template into their user page, but there are other options at Template messages/User namespace. The following examples could also copied and pasted into your user page:
- Option 1
- I agree to [[Wikipedia:Multi-licensing|multi-license]] all my contributions, with the exception of my user pages, as described below:
- {{DualLicenseWithCC-BySA-Dual}}
OR
- Option 2
- I agree to [[Wikipedia:Multi-licensing|multi-license]] all my contributions to any [[U.S. state]], county, or city article as described below:
- {{DualLicenseWithCC-BySA-Dual}}
Or if you wanted to place your work into the public domain, you could replace "{{DualLicenseWithCC-BySA-Dual}}" with "{{MultiLicensePD}}". If you only prefer using the GFDL, I would like to know that too. Please let me know what you think at my talk page. It's important to know either way so no one keeps asking. -- Ram-Man (comment (http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=User_talk:Ram-Man&action=edit§ion=new)| talk)
LarrySanger moved to User:Larry Sanger/old
Heya, In an effort to clean up the main namespace, the redirect at LarrySanger has been moved to User:Larry Sanger/old, as there's some edit history of yours there, should you want to keep it. --fvw* 03:17, 2004 Dec 13 (UTC)
- Ditto for User:Larry Sanger/old-LarrysText. --fvw* 20:15, 2004 Dec 14 (UTC)
purpose and objectivity
Any opinions on my comments at Talk:List of philosophical topics (A-C) discussion page on the articles with these two titles? Michael Hardy 22:41, 18 Oct 2004 (UTC)
conspiracy theories
I am having trouble finding a neutral lead definition. There is the legal definition which combines the concepts of a "theory" and "people conspiring together" in a criminal act context. Then there is the colloquial defn which talks about unfounded theories defying common understanding. These definitions are in some ways at polar opposites.
In my googling, I've found that dictionary definitions tend to agree with the legal version. However the previous lead wikipedia definition
- A conspiracy theory is a theory that defies common historical or current understanding of events, under the claim that those events are the result of manipulations by two or more individuals or various secretive powers or conspiracies.
seems to match up more with the colloquial definition and is hard to grasp. I changed the lead wiki definition to be more consistent with the legal/dictionary definitions, and easy for me to read/understand. Since you are the creator of this article, I thought it would be best if you resolved this issue and merged my thoughts with yours to be more NPOV and accurate. Bogusstory 22:17, 30 Mar 2005 (UTC)