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reddalo01/15/20262 repliesview on HN

>He may not be with the project now, but don't airbrush him out of history.

I don't want to defend Jimbo Wales (he's very touchy about the subject), but to be honest, even if he's a founder, Larry Sanger didn't contribute much to what Wikipedia today is.


Replies

dlubarov01/15/2026

Larry Singer was essentially running Wikipedia in the early days though, until he was laid off, so in some sense we could think of him as a co-founder who was ousted. It's true that he didn't contribute much (as an unpaid volunteer) after that though.

vee-kay01/16/2026

If someone builds a free knowledge-repository platform and makes it available for worldwide use, and if that platform takes off to become commonly used globally, then I think some credit is due to such founder and innovator.