Larry Sanger

So, you know, we weren't, we weren't really close friends, but we were friends sort of in, and, um,

When I was looking around in 2000 for a way to pivot my work on the internet, because I had started a website before this, I was looking for advice from friends about what to do with a website that I had been working on.

And that was Newpedia?

Yeah, it's called Sanger's Review.

I see.

Yeah, it's no longer online.

And he said, well, don't work on that.

Come and actually work for me and you'll start a new encyclopedia called Newpedia.

Yeah.

So I thought that was a great idea.

I actually had dreamt of working on an encyclopedia.

I thought, if I'm not going to be a philosophy professor, which for reasons I don't need to get into, I decided against as I was finishing my Ph.D.,

I thought maybe working on an encyclopedia would be a good alternative.

And so here I had the opportunity of not just working on one, but starting one.

So that was the mission, essentially, to start Newpedia, to organize the people, to set the policy and the processes, and actually be the editor-in-chief.

So I worked on that for a year, but it was very slow going because we wanted the whole product to be very reliable and high quality.

A friend of mine was telling me January 2nd, 2001, about wikis, which was a type of website that had been around for, at the time, like six years.

The original wiki was called WikiWikiWeb, which means fast after the Hawaiian word wikiwiki.

Exactly.

At the Honolulu airport, apparently.