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
How I use SuperMemo with my 6-year-old (video)
Comments, discussion, questions welcome.
2 comments on How I use SuperMemo with my 6-year-old (video)1 minuteUpdate 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 minutesReading Bear is complete! Why it works.
After many months of development, I can finally announce: Reading Bear is complete! Reading Bear now has a full set of fifty presentations, with an average viewing time of about 15 minutes each. I
7 minutes
Support the Knowledge Standards Foundation:

- 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 […]