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
What should I do next?
Well, what do you think? My enjoyable time with the group behind WatchKnowLearn.org and ReadingBear.org is winding down, and soon it will be over. My benefactor of the last four years has kindly
14 comments on What should I do next?8 minutesUpdate about the boys
Since I always begin with 6-year-old H. and never seem to have time (in the same post) to discuss now-2-year-old E., I thought I’d begin with E. this time. Besides, it has been
39 minutesWho might you find in the lowest circles of hell?
I liked my answer to this Quora question so much that I had to put it here on my blog as well. I also used it to answer the question, “Why is murder
4 minutesReading Bear’s First Press Release (Please Share!)
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Contact: Dr. Joe Thomas 901-484-3347 INNOVATIVE NEW WEBSITE, READING BEAR, TEACHES PHONICS AND VOCABULARY FOR FREE Wikipedia Co-Founder’s Latest Project Launches to Acclaim MEMPHIS, TENN., OCTOBER 11, 2012 –
1 minuteMy Greatest Hits
The following pieces of writing produced the greatest reaction, or are simply my favorites. In order from most recent to oldest: What should we do about Wikipedia’s porn problem? (May 2012) I want to
14 minutesDoes a social contract require us to put our children in schools?
Tony Jones produced an interesting argument against homeschooling. As I understand it, Tony says that we are obligated by a social contract to send our kids to school, and by the fact that
4 minutesLet’s try out “Golden Filter Premium” on Wikipedia, shall we?
I encountered a journalist-activist on Twitter, a writer for (among others) Al Jazeera in English, who is nevertheless a free speech activist. We discussed the recent FoxNews.com article that reported, among other things, that
3 minutesReading Bear: Rave Reviews
Reading Bear has enjoyed excellent preliminary reactions from a wide variety of online sources. The following is just a selection, most of this in reaction to our 2011 launch, not to the full
19 minutes“Infant Intelligentsia: Can Babies Learn to Read? And Should They?”
There’s a very good article about baby reading in the latest issue of Pacific Standard, which is what Miller-McClune Magazine is now called. (The magazine is pretty cool–it was described to me as the Pacific
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 […]