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.
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The Meaning of Life
…just in case you haven’t figured it out yet. In this old answer, which I still believe and endorse wholeheartedly, I integrate many of popular answers—happiness or flourishing, meaningful work, benefiting mankind, love
No comments on The Meaning of Life1 minuteGay activists and Hollywood liberals vs. traditional Muslims vs. free speech liberals
Here’s a richly ironic slice of our strange, sad old world in 2019. Ellen Degeneres is (quite rightly) protesting the Sultan of Brunei for introducing the death penalty (stoning to death) for gay
5 minutesIs Western civilization collapsing?
A perennial topic for me (and many of us) is the notion that there is a deep malaise in Western civilization. There are, it seems to me, three main camps on the question,
5 minutesHow I replaced Dropbox
Updated April 2 at bottom. My main beef with Dropbox is that it’s not secure, not adequately encrypted, and there’s been a little too much indication that Dropbox is spying on user data.
9 minutesHow and why I got a VPN
As part of my ongoing efforts to lock down my cyber-life, I finally decided to investigate VPNs (virtual private networks) and subscribe to one, if it seemed to be a good idea. Well,
6 minutesShould we be satisfied with mediocre schools?
Michael J. Petrilli is president of the conservative educational thinktank, the Thomas J. Fordham Institute–whose tagline is “Advancing Educational Excellence.” Petrilli argues that it’s totally okay if his children study at a school
4 minutesFurther on my Linux journey: Ubuntu on a laptop
First, I decided to switch to Linux. I have to tell you: I’m so glad I did. It’s not just the sheer relief from the knowledge that I’m not being monitored by Microsoft
4 minutesThe meeting of the Larrys
Today I was on Larry King Now (his Hulu/YouTube/RT program, similar to the old CNN “Larry King Live”). I was on a half-hour panel about blockchain with XYO’s Markus Levin and Eric Tippetts
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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 […]