Larry Sanger

“ Imagine, if you will, that the year is 2020, and the free, open content encyclopedias, Nupedia and Wikipedia, have successfully weathered the challenging vicissitudes of young, ambitious Internet projects. Imagine that Nupedians and Wikipedians have created and edited to a brilliant luster many hundreds of thousands of high-quality articles, having managed to attract tens of thousands of qualified contributors, deal with many and various kinds of controversy, and establish and maintain a good reputation. ”

“ In academia, we learn, one way or another, that the reputation of an author is very important for determining credibility, and reputation is determined to a great extent by such things as faculty appointments and by publications. Given that, how can we respect the credibility of a project to which any anonymous user can drop any string of characters onto a Wikipedia page? There are a lot of other, closely related objections. If anyone can contribute, how do we know that what we're reading hasn't been written by a crank, a mediocre student, or someone with an ax to grind? ”

“ Someone might feel inspired to start a project that has considerable intrinsic merit in itself, and might nicely complement an encyclopedia--but for a variety of reasons it would overly complicate work on the encyclopedia, and distract our attention. If Wikipedia were entirely anarchic, we would permit such projects to be started, no questions asked. But the focus on writing an encyclopedia is the higher priority, so we avoid such projects, as a rule. ”

“ First of all, Wikipedia's contributors--called Wikipedians--understand that their efforts will be freely distributable forever. That is, I think, one of the main incentives they have to participate. If the organizers of the project were instead to claim the content for themselves, and not release it freely, the participants would have the sense that they were merely working for someone else's gain. But since the content is free, contributors instead have the sense that they are working for the benefit of a worldwide audience. ”

“ It's very important that you continue to edit each others' work, that you encourage in each other good habits, that you welcome new contributors, and that you praise good work when you see it. As for Nupedia, obviously, the only way it can be revived is if it either finds money to pay an editor-in-chief or perhaps an emeritus professor who is willing to volunteer. I am no longer going to pretend to be able to be editor-in-chief as a part-time volunteer--even if I had the desire and the spare time. ”

“ Moreover, Wikipedia's freedom will grow only more important as our content grows in breadth, depth, and quality. If there comes a time when it is beyond any doubt that, in terms of breadth, depth, and quality, Wikipedia is comparable to some given proprietary encyclopedia, that encyclopedia might have a difficult time staying in business. And if, as is possible but by no means certain, Wikipedia and Nupedia together develop to become a really great encyclopedia, one has to wonder what will become of the proprietary encyclopedias like Britannica and Encarta. ”

“ A third important reason is that I feel I simply cannot do a good job working only part-time. It seems like every time I sit down to do a little work on Wikipedia or Nupedia, I am now asking myself, "What's the use? I don't have any time to do anything of importance." If I can't do the job right, what's the point of doing it at all? ”

“ Our avowed purpose is to create an encyclopedia, and it is not to do a lot of other things that would detract from this purpose. For example, among the things Wikipedia isn't doing is creating a dictionary and providing a discussion forum for political issues. The reason Wikipedia exists is to create an encyclopedia. ”

“ Who "had the idea" of a free encyclopedia open for development by the general public? Again, the idea and inspiration behind the project of a free encyclopedia comes from Jimmy Wales. By 1999 Jimmy had the idea for a "Nupedia," which would apply open source principles to the development of an encyclopedia. As I wrote in my memoir, "To be clear, the idea of an open source, collaborative encyclopedia, open to contribution by ordinary people, was entirely Jimmy's, not mine... ”

“ There is no reason that Wikipedia's content ever needs to, as it were, sit on someone's shelf, gathering dust, as traditional encyclopedias have done. It's because it's open content that the world is free to continue to develop it. I think that's a great thing. It portends great things for Wikipedia and for its sister project, Nupedia, in the future. Though Wikipedia has 20,000 articles now, the quality of the articles is admittedly uneven--while we have a lot of rather good articles, we also have a lot of articles that need work. ”

“ This is puzzling to me because I was more responsible than anyone else for insisting on and articulating Wikipedia's neutrality policy. Moreover, I always presented it as a way to "keep the peace," to enable people of widely divergent views to work together peacefully.
There is really little to debate about here; the simple fact of the matter is that from a very early stage in the project, Jimmy and I were very well agreed that Nupedia, and then Wikipedia, would aim to be neutral or unbiased in a certain sense that I think we both understood very well and in the same way. ”

“ For me this allows us to focus on a very important and timely issue: what role does total freedom and openness--to the point of anarchy--play in the Wikipedia project? I think its purpose is to help build the encyclopedia, no more and no less. Is Wikipedia an experiment in anarchy? I don't think so. Is anarchy of such extreme, perhaps intrinsic, value that we ought to try to preserve it at the cost of other values? ”

“ The encyclopedia, used casually just as a reference, would foster continuing education by providing an attractive, free, interlinked resource that would encourage people to learn and keep learning. A truly deep and broad codification of human knowledge, rendered in hypertext, would make self-study considerably easier than it is now. As supplementary readings for traditional education, the encyclopedia's articles would provide a particularly clear, as well as unbiased, second view of their subjects. ”

“ Another area in which one might well think that Wikipedia is of importance is as an online, collaborative project. I say this because it tests and demonstrates the viability of completely wide-open, collaborative writing, made possible only by the Internet, and implemented perhaps for the first time by wiki software. The Web is of course an amazing medium, permitting the extremely rapid propogation of and interlinking between documents, and thereby providing a lot of new ways to learn, discuss, and collaborate. ”

“ As you know, since the beginning of February, I've been working on Wikipedia and Nupedia as a part-time volunteer. I haven't been able to do nearly as much as I wish I could do, but job-hunting and money-making activities necessarily occupy a great deal of my time. Unfortunately, I do not expect to see, within the foreseeable future, any sort of compensation for the time and responsibility I've continued to hold in the projects. Now that I'm unemployed, I can ill afford to spend my free time this way. ”

“ But over time, articles improve considerably, and a number of our articles are nearly as good as anything you'll find in any encyclopedia. That's because the core group of our contributors includes quite a few Ph.D.'s, professors, professionals, and top-flight students. So I would say that a better way to estimate the reliability of Wikipedia, than simply to say that it permits cranks and vandals to contribute, is to observe that the articles that are now part of Wikipedia have been created by a general public under the general guidance of some very smart, articulate people. ”