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
Is letting a 17-year-old die morally equivalent to killing her?
A spate of news articles appeared yesterday, reporting that Dutch 17-year-old mental patient Noa Pothoven was euthanized. This formulation—she was euthanized—caused outrage in certain circles. This is factually incorrect, they say. She was
11 comments on Is letting a 17-year-old die morally equivalent to killing her?7 minutesHow to write an app (that respects privacy and supports security)
Some difficult-to-meet requirements Be open source. Don’t make users have to trust your black box. I don’t want to have to trust you. I don’t know you. Don’t just release your in-house source
4 minutesWhy your company should consider getting a NAS
What’s a NAS again? “NAS” means “network-attached storage,” but this buzzphrase has come to mean more than just a backup drive for your local network. It’s also, and maybe more importantly, an easy-to-set-up
13 minutesHow I got rid of Google calendar
It was about 2013 that my friend Terrence Yang told me I should be using Google Calendar, because everybody was using Google Calendar. So I did. And he was right: almost everyone else
7 minutesA Free Speech Credo
I. Free speech is nothing if not offensive. Free speech just is the right to say offensive things. Popular, safe speech needs no protection; only unpopular, unsafe speech does. Free speech needs protection precisely
8 minutes
Remarks on the drug crisis
As a drug-legalization libertarian, watching this video wasn’t easy: It’s a highly opinionated piece of propaganda; but it is also extremely persuasive. Thinking about this might make me moderate my position on drug
2 minutes
Support the Knowledge Standards Foundation:
/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 […]