Nine Theses on Wikipedia: A Special Feature
I submit these nine theses to Wikipedia’s community and to the world. I do this, as Martin Luther said when he posted his famous 95 theses, “Out of love for the truth and the desire to elucidate it.” A quarter of a century ago, Jimmy Wales’ company Bomis hired me to start a free encyclopedia. The first draft, from which we learned much, was Nupedia—it made slow progress. So, a year later, on January 2, 2001, when a friend told me about wikis, I immediately began imagining a wiki encyclopedia.
My Blog
Introducing the Encyclosphere
This is the text of a speech I gave yesterday (October 17, 2019) at TheNextWeb’s Hard Fork Summit in Amsterdam. For now, you can go to Encyclosphere.org to sign up for news of
11 minutesWant to help build an open encyclopedia network—an “Encyclosphere”?
We are fed up. After ten years of domination by big social media—which might finally be in decline—we are tired of giant Silicon Valley corporations using us contemptuously. We still remember an Internet in which
7 minutesBig Tech In Decline?
Massive Shakeup of Major Players Under Way, Especially in Social Media LarrySanger.org does not usually break news. But since this is such a huge story and no other outlets seem to be covering
5 minutesWhy Be Moral
This essay represents my basic approach to ethics, so although I do not feel quite certain about everything here, I feel comfortable enough to post this theory here on my blog. It is
42 minutesWhy I haven’t read Lolita
I posted a Twitter poll recently, by way of unburdening myself of the following opinion about Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, the book about a middle aged man who has a love affair with a
8 minutesConstantly monitor those in power
“Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?” That’s a question we should be asking more in this day and age of constant surveillance. I’m toying with a proposal: Anyone who goes into public office should have
4 minutes
On the misbegotten phrase “surveillance capitalism”
The loaded phrase surveillance capitalism has been in circulation since at least 2014, but it came into much wider use this year with Shoshana Zuboff’s book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. The phrase
6 minutes
The challenges of locking down my cyber-life
In January 2019, I wrote a post (which see for further links) I have shared often since about how I intended to “lock down my cyber-life.” That was six months ago. I made
15 minutes
Things I don’t understand even after they are explained to me
Why public art is so ugly. Why the public are not up in arms about the ugliness of public art. Why I continue to drink and even occasionally desire beer even though it
3 minutes
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/larrysanger- I invited my X peeps to ask me questions and then "like" the various questions, and I would upload the answers in video form. Here it is! Christian identity – 1:10 "Call no man teacher" – 9:25 Role of government – 15:45 Authority & resistance – 19:15 Wikipedia labor – 24:20 Net value of Wikipedia […]
- Made for beginners, family, friends, study group members. Most of this stuff is obvious after you use LLMs long enough. If you have more good ideas, put them in comments!
- While I was raised Christian, I lost my faith in my teens, as so many do. But my life has been a truth-seeking quest, and I ended up earning a Ph.D. in philosophy (as I was starting Wikipedia). My reasons for disbelief fell away one by one; eventually I read the Bible, finally, for good […]