Calling Larry Sanger a co-founder at this point is generous, he was involved with Wikipedia for just 14 months in 2001 and 2002. Calling him 'the founder' is just straight up wrong. Either way, I think it's highly disrespectful to Jimbo Wales to imply that other fucker deserves equal credit.
One of these two men has dedicated the last 25 years of his life to making Wikipedia the most comprehensive, well maintained, and generally accurate publicly accessible aggregator of information that has ever existed in human history; the other one coined the name "Wikipedia", which to my knowledge is the only very notable contribution he has made to Wikipedia as it stands today, and he has spent the last two decades complaining about Wikipedia and using his clout as a technical co-founder to help push his narratives. These people do not deserve to be spoken about in the same breath.
If he was there at the start, he is a founder; just because you don't like someone does not mean you should ignore definitions. I get that you want to downplay his contributions because of your personal distaste for him, but there is much more you can attack him for without resorting to making it look like you don't know what you're talking about.
That's not the point, the point is he's using the "co-founder" title to imply that he's had significant contribution to making Wikipedia what it is known and loved for today, which is not true. Sure he was a founder, but the comment above was simply specifying what his contribution was, which is barely anything compared to what the others have contributed, like adding your name to a group project you barely had helped with.
Calling his contributions "barely anything" is historically illiterate.
Larry Sanger coined the name Wikipedia, proposed the wiki format that made it possible, drafted the foundational policies, including Neutral Point of View, and was the one who publicly announced the project's launch. These aren't minor footnotes; they're the bones of what Wikipedia became.
Despise the man all you want. That's your right. But retroactively minimizing someone's documented contributions because you dislike who they became is motivated reasoning, not history.
Your feelings about a person don't rewrite the record of what they did.
Founding something isn't a popularity contest, and historical fact doesn't bend to who we'd prefer to credit.
You have not watched that Hank Green video, defend the grifter all you want. 11 months work vs 2 decades of work, but sure he deserves as much credit as the people who's worked on it for 2 decades
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u/HandsomeGengar Jun 28 '26 edited Jun 28 '26
Calling Larry Sanger a co-founder at this point is generous, he was involved with Wikipedia for just 14 months in 2001 and 2002. Calling him 'the founder' is just straight up wrong. Either way, I think it's highly disrespectful to Jimbo Wales to imply that other fucker deserves equal credit.
One of these two men has dedicated the last 25 years of his life to making Wikipedia the most comprehensive, well maintained, and generally accurate publicly accessible aggregator of information that has ever existed in human history; the other one coined the name "Wikipedia", which to my knowledge is the only very notable contribution he has made to Wikipedia as it stands today, and he has spent the last two decades complaining about Wikipedia and using his clout as a technical co-founder to help push his narratives. These people do not deserve to be spoken about in the same breath.