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.
Let's be clear that, especially after the failure of Nupedia to take off, Wikipedia's success was a surprise both to Sanger and Wales. Neither of them expected that this would happen and can therefore not take full or too much credit for it. Both of their lives have been redefined by Wikipedia's success and it seems reasonably human to not want to let go of that. At the same time, while an individual can co-found an encyclopedia, they cannot take credit for the community's work.
I say this because I get the feeling that Wales and Sanger both believe there is a lot at stake here and at the same time I feel that they both take too much credit for what has happened. What they did is akin to writing an academic paper that first introduces an idea. They cannot claim authorship or credit for all of the publications that cite their initial publication - just the initial idea. 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.
On Sun, Apr 12, 2009 at 10:16 PM, Jussi-Ville Heiskanen < cimonavaro@gmail.com> wrote:
but if people are confused to the degree that they think his views have merit, that clearly needs to be clarified.
What has been muddied in all this is the question of *what* precisely does Sanger claim to have co-founded.
[...]
What would *really* interest me, and what I consider to be the seminal moment - even the foundational moment - in creating the wikipedia we all know; is when somebody made the conceptual breakthrough to the vision of wikipedia as something sui generis, and freestanding.
I am betting there were hold-outs fairly long into the last days of Nupedia, who still thought it should be revivified in some form. I think for anyone who really wants to put a face on the founding of wikipedia, it would serve well if we revisited that particular period, and gave credit to who ever it was that first suggested that Wikipedia was *it*, and Nupedia wasn't. If that was Larry Sanger, I *do* think he deserves the credit, though that would clearly make him an apostate, since he has clearly spent much of his time lately arguing that no, after all, wikipedia _wasn't_ *it*.
Yours,
Jussi-Ville Heiskanen
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