Hi all,

I want to start by saying that I have not read Sanger's memories yet, just the thread on this list. So, what I say here comes only from this list and my (hopefully not so failing) memory.

I came to Wikipedia sometime on January 2001, and that would make me the only non-founder wikipedian still around. While I don't know anything of Larry and Jimbo's interaction outside the wiki, in Wikipedia itself Larry seemed to run the show, and either created or developed many (maybe most) of the conventions that we still follow. The direct work of Jimbo (again, just from what I remember I saw in the wiki) was much smaller, which makes sense considering he had somebody hired to do the job of running an encyclopedia, and the job was being well done. Larry wrote at least once a week what I remember as "encyclicals" for wikipedia, documents that delved in detail in some aspect of policy, and that then sparked discussion about that policy or proposed policy in particular. At first the term that Larry used for himself was "Editor in chief of Nupedia and main instigator of Wikipedia", as he worked approximately as just another wikipedian, but generating much more policy and correcting much that the rest, nudging the project into a direction, that has mainly been followed ever since.

It was interesting to see The Cunctator again on the list just to remember Larry's supposed paranoia about him. I'm not Larry, and I felt the same way about his attitude respect to him. The fact that there was a main authority in Wikipedia (though asserted that authority very slowly along his year long tenure), was apparently offensive to some, among them the Cunctator. Jimbo himself was thinking that maybe a "central" authority would not be necessary I remember a couple of lines, I don't know if they are in the list of were part of some long erased page on Wikipedia, where Jimbo said 'maybe Wikipedia can run without a paid editor' to which Larry answered, either in the page on in an email 'Larry breaks into a cold sweet' (Jimbo's words may not be exact, Larry's I'm pretty sure they are). This was a few months before Larry's position was left unfunded.

The Cunctator was not the only Larry's nemesis, just the main one, in the last couple of months of Larry's paid tenure there were several conflict with other users,like one that wanted to "archive" in his personal page some vandalism offensive to Larry on main page, and after Larry erased it accused him of censorship (that stupid accusation was later resurfaced between the "reasons" for the Spanish fork).

Talking about the Spanish fork, Larrys letter announcing he was no longer an employee was the spark for it, but that is another long story.

In the few months that Larry stayed in the project as a volunteer, the sport of Larry-bashing did not decrease its popularity. Even when he was no longer employed, he continued to be the center of negative attention of people who disliked authority, or just him, so I do not blame him at all for leaving Wikipedia completely after a couple of months.

About Larry not coming to discuss policy with us in the list, or in the wiki, is perfectly understandable, as there were Larry-bashers waiting in the wings (and I repeat, at least in my opinion that was not mere paranoia). Larry had also the idea of a "Sifter" that would use Wikipedia articles, but selected by "experts" of Nupedian definition and posted in a different side. I don't know why exactly the project died, but Jimbo's opinion of it, though never expressed, could be read from a post in which he said (not mentionin the sifter, I must point out) that we deserved to make a stable version of wikipedia ourselves, not leaving that to outsiders. I suspect he was thinking about Larry's proposed experts (I repeat, this last thing is just speculation from my part).

I think that Larry deserves a lot of credit for what Wikipedia is. We trust "the community" to take the right editorial decisions, but the idea of that community has about wikipedia was shaped mainly by Larry. One of the things that makes wikipedia great is that, despite its freedom and apparent chaos, there is an idea of what wikipedia should be and there is the will to enforce it, even if it means partial unpopularity by those we would like this to be even more chaotic. Larry was our first enforcer, and, like an old movie sheriff, probably fell for that reason...

AstroNomer

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