Author: Larry Sanger

  • An explanation of the Citizendium license

    Preliminary notes (please read): Purpose: this long essay explains in depth why we have chosen CC-by-sa as the license for our own original collaborative content. Summary: this probably isn’t an easy read. You can skip ahead to the license decision, and here is asummary of the reasoning behind it. About links: links to places within…

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  • The Citizendium one year on: a strong start and an amazing future

    Contents: Debunking some myths What we have demonstrated in our first year Our new initiatives Short-term plans Longer-term plans The coming explosion of growth Essential reading in bold above. A possibility you may not have considered It’s been exactly one year since work on the Citizendium wiki started ramping up.  I said then that I…

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  • The New Politics of Knowledge

    Speech delivered at the Jefferson Society, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, Virginia, November 9, 2007, and at the Institute of European Affairs, Dublin, Ireland, September 28, 2007, as the inaugural talk for the IEA’s “Our Digital Futures” program. I want to begin by asking a question that might strike you as perhaps a little absurd. The…

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  • What Strong Collaboration Means for Scholarly Publishing

    Keynote delivered at the Annual Meeting, Society for Scholarly Publishing, “Imagining the Future: Scholarly Communication 2.0,” San Francisco, California, June 7, 2007. When I was asked to speak to you, the Society for Scholarly Publishing, I have to admit that I found this puzzling, because I don’t know anything about scholarly publishing. Why should someone…

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  • Why the Citizendium Will (Probably) Succeed

    This essay argues that the Citizendium is feasible.  The wiki is in public view, or will be within a few days.  You can join now. 1. So far, so good. The Citizendium pilot project wiki got under way privately at the start of last November.  In the intervening months, we have steadily grown to some…

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  • Toward a New Compendium of Knowledge (longer version)

    1. Thinkers of the world, start imagining. According to one source, there are over one billion (a thousand million) people on the Internet.  That means there must be tens of millions of intellectuals online–I mean educated, thinking people who read about science or ideas regularly.  Tens of millions of intellectuals can work together, if they…

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  • The Role of Content Brokers in the Era of Free Content

    Draft June 9, 2006; very lightly revised, October 2006 I. The problem of funding content Ever since entering the open content arena in 2000, I have thought about, and been asked (repeatedly) about, how to pay for free content. This is a pressing problem for professional content creators, because of pressures from the Internet. It…

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  • Why Wikipedia Must Jettison Its Anti-Elitism

    This first appeared on the now-defunct Kuro5hin.org. Wikipedia has started to hit the big time. Accordingly, several critical articles have come out, including “The Faith-Based Encyclopedia” by a former editor-in-chief of Britannica and a very widely-syndicated AP article that was given such titles as “When Information Access Is So Easy, Truth Can Be Elusive”. These…

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