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
On changing student beliefs
I came across a very irritating post in the Coffee Theory blog by Greg Linster, and felt inspired to respond. This began as a comment on his blog, but after a while it
10 comments on On changing student beliefs8 minutesNominate Reading Bear for an Edublog award!
Hey, I can’t nominate ReadingBear.org myself in the Edublog Awards “Best free web tool” category, but it would be grand if you did! We need the publicity–we just launched! And don’t forget WatchKnowLearn.org in
1 minuteThe case for using Reading Bear in preschools
Or, how and why to use Reading Bear in preschools. First, let me say what I am not arguing for here. I am not arguing that preschoolers should be required to learn to read,
9 minutesWhat are the best books about countries for children?
As I explained in an earlier post, my older son (age 5) and I are reading through books about most of the countries of the world. In the last few months we’ve gotten
9 minutesPost-launch raves about Reading Bear
Here’s a run-down of the initial publicity and online buzz about Reading Bear. Reading Bear was on the front page of the high-profile tech blog TheNextWeb.com yesterday, with this article. Techie Buzz “Reading Bear
3 minutesWhy build a site that teaches children to read?
Or: why am I spending over a year of my life developing a reading tutorial for little kids? You might think such a question invites boring platitudes of the sort that afflicts a
13 minutesReading Bear launches!
All, after a lot of planning and even more work, Reading Bear is now live on ReadingBear.org. We are launching with 14 presentations, averaging around 15 minutes per presentation–in the longest of seven
1 minuteThe “times-are-changing, specific-knowledge-is-unnecessary” canard
I don’t know how many times I have read, “The world, and research findings, are changing so fast that it is pointless to insist on learning particular bits of knowledge. Much of it
3 minutesUnobvious concepts that are important, but rarely taught
To understand history, geography, fiction, and a whole lot else besides, it is fairly important that children be taught in considerable depth certain practical yet universal concepts about history that, I think, are
10 minutesMy “for kids” videos
Here are some of my videos for little kids. Some of them, like “Counting to 100” and “The Moon for Kids,” are getting pretty popular on YouTube. You can also find these (accessible
1 minute
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 […]