[chalst]

Larry Sanger has made something of a career out of being "the cofounder of Wikipedia who thinks it's getting it all wrong". There's a point at which the latest iteration of his criticism ceases to be a stop-the-presses newsworthy event.

Sanger wrote a great set of essays, largely based on the lecture notes of courses he taught as an academic, that seeded Wikipedia with a load of freely licensed content that kickstarted the whole enterprise. It's quite possible that without this initial burst of momentum, Wikipedia would have failed. For that he has earned and will never lose recognition. But the negative part of his critique of Wikipedia is not more searching than that Wikipedia editors perform on themselves without his help, and his series of suggestions for positive alternatives have lost credibility because his ideas never work.

I still pay attention to what Sanger says, but not with a high expectation that what he says will be exceptionally insightful.