It’s been 15 years since I announced the opening of the new Wikipedia.com site, with a little message that said:
http://www.wikipedia.com/ Humor me. Go there and add a little article. It will take all of five or ten minutes. --Larry
I am still sometimes called “Wikipedia’s sharpest critic,” but if you actually look at the panoply of Wikipedia criticism, you’ll quickly see that that’s not actually true. I happen to know some critics of Wikipedia, people like Gregory Kohs and Edward Buckner. They know a lot more (and care and are more “outspoken”) about Wikipedia’s assorted flaws than I do. Saying Wikipedia’s co-founder is a critic does make a nice headline, though, which is why, when I did a long, nuanced interview with VICE recently, the headline writer (not the interviewer) called me “Wikipedia’s most outspoken critic.”
Some people might come to this page to see what have I been up since leaving Wikipedia 14 years ago, so let me fill you in. I taught philosophy for a while, I worked on somebody else’s failed startup for a year, then transitioned to start Citizendium, which is still kicking six years after I left. I allowed myself to be poached from my own project by a Memphis-area philanthropist who wanted me to work on what became WatchKnowLearn. While developing that I was teaching my toddler son to read, and the video of his precocious reading inspired the same philanthropist to fund ReadingBear, which digitizes the method I’ve used with both my sons. Reading Bear was very difficult to develop, but I’m proud of it. You’ll probably see some new features on the site soon—mobile compatibility, probably.
After that I decided to try my first for-profit funded startup, Infobitt; we ran out of runway, as most startups do, but we also learned a lot about how a volunteer, collaborative news summary site might work. Since last July I’ve been working part-time doing various fun projects for Ballotpedia as well as ReadingBear, and I’ve been wooed by a few different startups. I’ve been developing a few different exciting ideas, just to test them and make proposals to different organizations. Whatever I do, I want my next move to be into something that has a good chance of being long-term.
One idea I’m toying with a lot lately is educational videos like these, which my boys liked quite a bit and which surprisingly get a good bit of traffic. The best part is that they’re fun to make and I can make them pretty quickly. I don’t have a sponsor as such for them, yet, but making a bunch of such videos does seem like a worthwhile way to spend my time. I have various other interests that I’ve thought about parlaying into meaningful employment: writing a curriculum about philosophy for kids; free speech, a topic I’m greatly interested in; organizing a community to defend the fundamental ideas behind enlightenment Western civilization; writing superior reviews of homeschooling resources; and joining a news startup interested in letting me develop Infobitt further.
There are two grand ambitions lurking in the background, although the jury’s still out whether I will ever have time and resources to work on them. One is Textop. The other is developing a system of philosophy roughly in the vein of Thomas Reid, the great Scottish Enlightenment philosopher of common sense.
I would love to hear from anyone with advice and help to move forward on any of these fronts.
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