Larry Sanger Banned from Wikipedia He Cofounded

Wikipedia cofounder Larry Sanger was blocked from editing Wikipedia, reportedly connected to off-wiki canvassing. The thread quickly became less about Sanger specifically and more about the general experience of contributing to Wikipedia, which commenters describe as miserable, dominated by entrenched editors who treat it as their personal territory, and hostile to newcomers.

One commenter called it 'like arguing with cranks at a town hall meeting' and said it was the worst collaborative process they'd experienced. Another predicted that blocking the cofounder signals the beginning of the end, that admins will eventually fracture the wiki into forks.

The pattern here connects to a recurring tension in open-source and community-driven projects: governance structures that made sense at small scale become capture mechanisms at large scale, and the original founders often have less power than long-tenured middle contributors.