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.”
My Blog
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Kindle Store version of essay available (for those who need it)
At least one person said she wanted to read my essay on her Kindle, but could not figure out how to get it. I’m pretty sure she could download it from her desktop and email it to her Kindle, but for those who want it on their handheld devices and can’t be bothered to figure…
1 comment on Kindle Store version of essay available (for those who need it)1 minute -
Does reading count as direct instruction?
I have a provocative question for the teachers and educational theorists out there: does reading count as direct instruction? I ask because, if it does, then there is surely nothing wrong with direct instruction, per se. I think it is plausible to call it instruction, anyway. The basic difference between reading a book, for example,…
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Review: “Your Baby Can Read”
Here is my review of the Your Baby Can Read videos, as posted on Amazon.com. Many people have found that Your Baby Can Read works, especially if it is used as part of a larger literacy program that includes plenty of reading to the child. I found that it helped quite a bit with my…
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Advice for the Wikimedia Foundation (not for Wikipedia!)
Since before I left Wikipedia, even before I proposed the old Sifter project in 2002, Wikipedians have talked about a method of using experts to rate, or approve, or review versions of Wikipedia articles (cf. this Slate interview). Similarly, some of the cooler heads both inside and outside Wikipedia have wished that Wikipedians would tag their copious…
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Update about the boys
Here is a “brain dump” about what I’ve been doing with my little boys, ages 4.5 and 2 months. I will refer to them as H. (the older) and E. (the younger). H’s biggest accomplishment, recently, has been finally to learn to write not only all of his numbers, but all of his capital letters…
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Wikipedia’s ancient history unearthed
Wikipedia programmer Tim Starling has discovered some ancient backup files from the earliest months of Wikipedia. The files themselves (which I haven’t downloaded yet, if I ever will) are here (8.4 MB) and cover some of the earliest history of Wikipedia. This should be very interesting indeed, if anyone decides to study what happened in those, um,…
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Are child development experts getting it wrong?
I just came across this Psychology Today blog by Richard Gentry, author of Raising Confident Readers: How to Teach Your Child to Read and Write — from Baby to Age 7. He poses the question, “Are Commercial-Product Claims that Babies Can Read Overblown?” He goes on: Or are too many child development experts from prestigious…
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Could you teach your baby to read?
Is your reaction, “If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is”? I claim that you can teach your baby, toddler, or preschooler to read–probably. What do you say to that? I was thinking about how my essay on baby reading hardly made a ripple on its first day out in the world,…
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A comment on Wikileaks
Over the weekend, I wrote a series of Tweets inspired by Wikileaks’ then-upcoming release of U.S. diplomatic communiqués. This caused quite an uproar, with people insulting me vociferously and demanding that I explain myself. (A few people were supportive, and thanks to them.) I am not going to write a whole essay in defense of…
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More replies about Wikimedia and the fallout of my report to the FBI
Background: on April 7, I posted the text of a report I made to the FBI to the EDTECH mailing list, in which I stated that, in my opinion, the Wikimedia Foundation may knowingly have posted “child pornography,” by which I meant one common usage of the term, namely, “obscene visual representations of the sexual…
12 minutes
Support the Knowledge Standards Foundation:
/larrysanger- An open reply to Jimmy Wales. He's wrong: Grokipedia won't necessarily be biased; and, obviously, the Trump article is badly biased. First of a series of replies to Jimmy's remarks in this Reason exposé: https://reason.com/video/2026/02/23/can-you-trust-wikipedia/
- 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 […]