Oh yes, hello friends, welcome back to Modern Wisdom. As you might be able to hear by my nasal tones,

I am fully in the depths of a very British flu at the moment. However, the podcasts continue to roll in,

and today I'm sitting down with Dr Larry Sanger, who is the ex-founder of Wikipedia.

A ex-founder is quite a weird way to describe anyone, once you're a founder, you're a founder,

but you will hear today exactly why Larry has his criticisms and his disagreements with how Wikipedia has moved forward.

He's also starting up the Knowledge Standards Foundation, which is hopefully going to fix some of the issues

which he sees with the Wikipedia platform. But yeah, there's a lot of politics going on at the moment.

You may have heard in the past about people who've had out, it calls written about them on Wikipedia,

and then they've been locked down and they're unable to be edited. There is quite a militant bureaucratic editing process,

and it all seems pretty sort of contrary to what you want from a user generated in Wikipedia that is free for everyone to access

and probably one of the single biggest reference sources on the planet. Anyway, this really opened my eyes. Enjoy. Here is Dr Larry Sanger.

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back. I'm joined by Larry Sanger, who is the ex-founder of Wikipedia among many other things.

Larry, welcome to the show.

Thanks for having me on. I appreciate it.

Really good to have you here. First things first, I've never heard the term ex-founder before. Can you explain what that means, please?

I made it up yesterday. Okay, a couple of days ago. I did a Twitter poll about it, and over 50% of the people thought it was a good title for me to claim.

So I was once considered by everyone co-founder, even Jimmy Wales. But then he started denying me the title, like in 2005, which everyone thought was ridiculous, but he was insisting on it.

So it's a little bit of a dig at him for that. But it's also, whatever I tell people online that I'm co-founder of Wikipedia, especially in the last, I don't know, three or six months, they've started getting hostile toward me personally.

Wikipedia is out of control, they say no. And you must be the devil if you actually started it.

And so I'm distancing myself from it because I have been a critic of Wikipedia for, well, I'm one of the first critics of Wikipedia, frankly, outside of the very original naysayers.

But, you know, yeah. And then I've been gone for a long time. So sometimes when I tell people I'm co-founder and now I'm working on whatever my latest project is, they get confused.

And I think, oh, so they seem to assume that I just left it like a couple years ago. No, I left in 2002. I permanently distanced myself from the project in 2003 and I've been working on all kinds of other things since then.

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