Secular, Social, Scientific
by Ryan Merkley, August 1, 2017 https://creativecommons.org/2017/08/01/bassel/ [see also our previous post http://positivists.org/blog/archives/5296] We are deeply saddened and completely outraged to learn today that our friend and colleague Bassel... Read More | Share it now!
We fear for the life of our fellow Wikipedian, Bassel Khartabil. Amnesty International has it that he is likely sentenced to death, his bed in prison is no longer his. What can we do when a fellow Wikipedian is in mortal peril? We can either wave our... Read More | Share it now!
If there is one thing the early 18th century has taught me, it is that we are all eventually paid in the same three currencies. Whatever we do, we do it for physical pleasure, social prestige or money. Money is, of course, the most usual currency in... Read More | Share it now!
Why is it that Wikipedia is a man’s world? Why is our community 90% male, mostly white, either young or retired, mostly nerds, people whom you will not meet in clubs, a high rate of temporary singles… and mostly amateurs in the fields of their... Read More | Share it now!
The golden days of Wikipedia, the days of unlimited growth, are over. Yes, we are still getting new articles. But this is basically because we have a couple of open areas like plane crashes, new wars, new movies, new celebrities that generate this... Read More | Share it now!
Quora a question-and-answer website where questions are created, answered, edited and organized by its community of users. The company was founded in June 2009, and the website was made available to the public on June 21, 2010. Quora aggregates... Read More | Share it now!
We should focus on measuring how much knowledge we allow every human to share in, instead of number of articles or active editors. A project to measure Wikimedia’s success has been started. We can already start using this metric to evaluate new... Read More | Share it now!
The following is an (abridged) English version of an interview I gave for Germany’s Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung on Wikipedia and why scholars hesitate to write for the online encyclopedia (their issue of April 9, 2014, last page). Friedemann... Read More | Share it now!