This is exactly what matters. From what I can tell Sanger wrote much of Wikipedia's initialy policy - policy that lives on today in various edited forms. Not only was he key in coming up with the more formal guidelines for Nupedia, he personally wrote many of the informal guidelines that came to be used on Wikipedia. This is well documented on archive.org and Wikipedia itself.
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It seems clear that this initial idea was authored and implemented by Sanger & Wales (2001?). It would be a grave injustice to just cite Wales (2001) if the idea was only part, or not even, his.
Sanger probably had the initial idea, but Wales listened to him. Wales paid for the initial operation and supported the project financially for at least a year, including paying wages to Sanger. Sanger came up with a lot of policy, but Wales insisted on assume good faith and lived it. Sanger himself might have torn the project up banning people if given his way.
Fred Bauder