Larry Sanger

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.

Yeah.

And so he told me how they worked, how if somebody edits a page, another person can edit it and correct errors and so forth.

And they negotiate with each other.

The edits are all immediately visible to...

as if you were working on your own computer.

Actually, they were just as centralized as they are now.

It's just that there wasn't all of this massive infrastructure behind them.

Wikipedia, if they wanted to simply change their policies, could become just like they used to be.

It would be probably a little more of a mess, but that isn't necessarily a bad thing all the time.