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 college a waste of time?
More from the anti-intellectualism dept.: I admit this is news to me: a “Thiel Fellowship” has been set up by PayPal founder Peter Thiel, which encourages tech entrepreneurship by under-20-olds with the requirement
14 comments on Is college a waste of time?14 minutesThe value of knowledge – the anti-intellectualism problem versus the philosophers’ problem
I need to complain about my fellow philosophers. But maybe I’m confused. Maybe some philosophers out there can set me straight, somehow. In recent years, as my interests have turned away from encyclopedia-building
5 minutesOn Robinson on Education
This very striking video has been circulating, and I’m inspired to reply to it: First, let me say that the video design is very cool. Moreover, Sir Ken Robinson is quite an excellent
13 minutesWikipedia’s proposed legal policies
It looks like Wikipedia might be, finally, accepting its legal obligations. Geoff Brigham, General Counsel of the Wikimedia Foundation (which is the legal owner of Wikipedia), has posted to the Foundation-l mailing list a
4 minutes25 Replies to Maria Bustillos
In a recent essay, in The Awl (“Wikipedia and the Death of the Expert“), Maria Bustillos commits a whole series of fallacies or plain mistakes and, unsurprisingly, comes to some quite wrong conclusions.
6 minutesCan early education literally create geniuses?
I’m interested in this question, and I am asking in order to be enlightened by you, dear reader. Suppose you had twins, separated at birth, Norman (for “normal”) and Gene (for “genius”). Norman
1 minuteAsk DadDude: learning a second language
I regularly get questions from people asking advice about their early learning situations. I always tell them that I’m not an expert, just a fellow parent who is highly involved in his boys’
10 minutesAny volunteers to help with the reading tutorial?
I need some volunteers for my new free reading program, and I hope someone (or several someones) out there might be able to help! I really need it! If you are interested, please
3 minutesReviews of educational apps for little kids
Here are some app reviews I just posted on BrillKids.com. Below that are some older reviews, still valid. Five star apps National Geographic World Atlas HD – 5/5 – can’t believe I
20 minutesManifesto of Very Early Education (version 1)
I have been “pre-homeschooling” my two boys, H. (almost five years) and E. (seven months). It has been an interesting journey. I have picked a few very general principles, which I thought it
10 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 […]