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Welcome to my personal site!

© 2001 New York Times

Though best known as a founder of Wikipedia, I have recently worked on a series of educational projects.  Most recently (October 2011), I launched ReadingBear.org, of which I’m rather proud.  I launched this blog in December 2010.  It is devoted mainly to early education and education theory, only because those are my main interests right now.  I posted a book-length essay, How and Why I Taught My Toddler to Read when the blog launched.  I have “come out” as an advocate of teaching tiny tots to read.  Yep, I am a user of programs like Your Baby Can Read, as well as a phonics flashcard (careful: 122 MB zip file) system of my own design (Reading Bear is a digitized version of this), and various PowerPoint presentations for kids.

I organized a brand-new educational video directory, now called WatchKnowLearn.org, which launched in the fall of 2009. As of October 2011, the WKL editors had gathered about 30,000 videos in over 6,000 categories with a brand new sort of wiki software and community. Videos we catalogue are teacher-approved and kid-safe. It’s now possible to start your own WatchKnow with our brand-new WatchKnow Classroom feature, which is what I was working on through November 2010.

© El Mundo (Madrid, Spain), used by permission

According to its charter (something developed almost wholly independent of me) I am now “Founding Editor-in-Chief” of the Citizendium, the Citizens’ Compendium: a wiki encyclopedia project that is expert-guided, public participatory, and real-names-only.  The project has garnered around 15,000 articles (and in its first year added more words than Wikipedia had in its first year) and is still growing at a solid rate, and becoming more popular.  I led the project from its announcement on Sept.15, 2006, through October 2010, although in my last year as editor-in-chief I was no more than a figurehead.  I now am treasurer of the community–I still want to make sure the servers keep running!

My current full-time occupation is helping with WatchKnowLearn’s projects. I am fortunate enough to be able to work on these great non-profit projects due to generous support from the Community Foundation of Northwest Mississippi.

Here is “How I started Wikipedia,” an informal video presentation, with lessons interspersed, about my involvement in the first few years of Wikipedia, and a little about my life before and after. This is a brief presentation delivered at OSU’s Fischer College of Business on May 6, 2010, as part of their “What If?” conference, about innovation.  They urged me to focus on Wikipedia, so I did.

Education

Ph.D. 2000, The Ohio State University, Philosophy.  Dissertation: Epistemic Circularity: An Essay on the Problem of Meta-Justification.

M.A. 1995, The Ohio State University, Philosophy

B.A. 1991, Reed College (Portland, Oregon), Philosophy

Websites Associated With

• An Appreciation of the Donegal Fiddle (1996)
• Sanger’s Review of Y2K News Reports (1998, offline)
• Wikipedia (2001)
• A Virtual Drive from Anchorage to Whittier (2003, for my Dad’s business, playing with a new camera and Perl)
• The Digital Universe, The Digital Universe Foundation, and the Encyclopedia of Earth (2005-6)
• Textop (Text Outline Project) (2006) – on hold
• Citizendium (2006)
• WatchKnow (developed 2008, launched Oct. 2009)

Press Photos

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