Twenty years ago, an eccentric philosophy student from Seattle and a former futures trader from Alabama began debating the merits of the conservative American philosopher Ayn Rand in an online forum. Both were clever, liked to argue and weren’t afraid to disagree with one another’s ideas.
Their debate continued over email, and eventually Jimmy Wales, the trader and owner of a dotcom company called Bomis, a user-generated web portal that sold erotic photographs, asked Larry Sanger if he would help set up a new online encyclopedia.
Wales didn’t know what shape it would take, how it would work, or that it would become Wikipedia — according to some sources the third most visited website after YouTube and Facebook. Nor did he foresee that years later