I was harassed in the restrooms of a museum in London two weeks ago for… having short hair and loose clothing. I was with my toddler, who’s still asking about it. And a lot of signs have been swapped, from men/women to male/female. The UK isn’t just going back, it’s inventing a whole new hell.

Il y a une expo chouette sur les portraits d’artistes à Petit Palais, une histoire visuelle d’artistes voulant asseoir leur réputation (par ex en se peignant plus âgé) et témoigner des liens avec leurs pairs, contrastée avec des artistes femmes qui se représentent fragmentées ou doubles, comme ici

Taking myself on an encyclopedia history tour of Paris ahead of Wikimania. First stop: BNF Richelieu. Voltaire was a minor contributor but also wrote extensively about encyclopedic principles. (Did you know they also kept his mummified heart in the pedestal)

As he should be. A distinctive characteristic of Wikipedians is that they engage in good faith, even in heated arguments. This type of behaviors threatens the culture that made wikipedia possible!

Haven’t seen a good font post in a while.

I fell in love with Wikipedia because where else will you be having discussions about whether interpunct would be better described by an article about medial point en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:In...

Realized today I’ve drawn my kiddo over several thousand times by now. Entire notebooks worth, yet I notice something new everyday. Little humans are awesome.

Well, I guess now is a good time to say I’ve left Sussex (and academia, though you wouldn’t know that by the amount of volunteer work I’ve accepted to keep doing…). It’s mostly unrelated to this; I had been at Sussex for 8 years, and was amazingly supported there. I’m sad for my colleagues.

Fellowship: Unlocking the National Trust Sound Archive (placement from September 2026 onwards, 3 month awards) www.nationaltrust.org.uk/who-we-are/r...

Did you know Wikimedia is building a translation tool and abstract model of its encyclopedic knowledge? (or trying to) I summarized Michael Falk's investigation into this attempt at creating perfect languages: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikiped...

This - baby.inc - gives some strong "baby in a box" vibes, Skinner style media.pluto.psy.uconn.edu/babyinabox.h...

With the caveat that test scores should be taken very critically, this is concerning because it reflects what we're seeing in higher education. +I wish that alongside the hot takes on the effects of screens, we talk about growing inequalities that likely are a factor. www.nytimes.com/2026/05/13/u...

Sad they had to do this - but glad that they saved these archives. www.theguardian.com/world/2026/m...

"What I miss is the cultural confidence that wandering meant something. That the encounter with the unfamiliar was a moral education [...]. I miss living in a culture that believed the wider world was something we owed our attention to." fugitivemargins.substack.com/p/the-end-of...

I just want to say we’ve had good non petroleum alternatives for everything from laundry detergent to fertilizer forever, but not the political oomph to subsidize their scale out, unlike solar and batteries

UGH this struck a chord. Even as a childhood researcher well aware of the gender bullshit adults project on kids, it was a shock to be constantly told it must be horrible to have a boy. And to see how badly toddlers are stereotyped. www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle...

Toddler question today: do objects still have colors when there's no light? They should tell you at uni that philosophy classes will pay out tenfold when you have a kid.

Meanwhile the ACM Digital Library is creating AI “podcasts” of papers with no author approval that of course contain inaccuracies (including e.g. misgendering authors) I don’t care about copyright. Legal /= ethical & academic institutions are embarrassing themselves www.404media.co/asu-atomic-a...

Wrote the Wikipedia biography of Elizabeth Allen, a 'naive' artist who made beautiful patchwork tapestries of her daily life and folk and religious subjects. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabe...

Careful what you wish for, 3yo wanted a dinosaurs and trains birthday, and asked for the cake to be a tar pit with fossils you can eat. (We ended up 3d printing fossils buried in a tiramisu)

I am concerned so few people can/are willing to name more than 5 dinosaurs! Half of the kids books section is about dinosaurs!

Journalists know that losing the Wayback Machine would be a nightmare: www.wired.com/story/the-in...

Two years baby and I won the #wikipedia Halloween contest for our disambiguation page costume: Orion (child) riding the Orion (spacecraft) above the Orion (nebula) I saved it for #Artemis2 and I’m now the Earth and a launch/crash pas for the toddler powered spacecraft. How time flies. 🚀

Toddler at bedtime wanted to know: - how we have different hair color - why we have DNA - how atoms know they should be DNA and not other things - how atoms make things that are hard and also soft - how we know about atoms - how there are atoms How did parents manage before Wikipedia??

As @wikipedia.org turns 25, what do we learn from Wikipedians about our potential to organize for the common good? Yesterday @sarahagilbert.bsky.social & I gave a main stage talk at Wikipedia’s 25th birthday in NYC on the science of cooperation. The talk is here: citizensandtech.org/2026/03/disc...

The #WCCWiki meet-up for March is happening online on Tues 24 March, 13.00-15.00 GMT. All warmly welcome. Editing session on Zoom, with training if needed. Join Zoom Meeting us06web.zoom.us/j/85192010168. Email [email protected] for more info. @womeninclassicsuk.bsky.social

I haven’t seen any coverage of this contextualizing it in the scholarship on FAA - especially Diane Vaughan’s 2021 book ‘Dead Reckoning’ She studied the FAA because it was a counterexample of how accidents emerge from normalized deviance in organizations www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026...

I've just published a new userscript that remembers the path of your cursor over the linked pages of Wikipedia, averaging and wearing them into the page, showing your browsing history over time Install at greasyfork.org/en/scripts/5... or read more about it everest-pipkin.com#projects/des...

RIP Jurgen Habermas - one of the five major social theorists of the past 60 years. Much to learn from his work. Many gaps, some errors, but he was so rigorous that he inspired some of the best simultaneously dissenting and generative thought of any postwar academic.

The Spectator published this attack on me & colleagues just as the High Court is considering Sussex’s request for review of the Office for Students fine. It accuses us of ‘repressing’ our students. The magazine ignored my request for to reply. Please disseminate. alanlester.co.uk/blog/smearin...

I often find myself wanting to explain to students how things like floppy disks work. Great series of explainers with really helpful illustrations. Just gotta remember where this is next time I need it! www.makingsoftware.com

This resonated a lot for me - I grew up at a time we were building the EU, opening borders, thought the internet would give us access to unprecedented knowledge… Like, I remember how impressive and hopeful the EU parliament and flag felt. I don’t know how we can pass that on, right now.

Or like my 3yo today, “how do we know that something exists?”

De la défiance envers la science au refus de se soigner, la désinformation en santé a des conséquences très concrètes. Comment la combattre ? Un rapport récent propose 9 recommandations et plaide pour la valorisation de l’information de qualité plutôt que la seule lutte contre les fausses nouvelles.

It's a busy wiki day today - I wish people were sharing @theverge.com's article about the Enterprise API instead of the AP/TechCrunch coverage! www.theverge.com/news/862109/...

Today, @wikipedia.org turns 25 years old. It's never been more important — or under more attack from authoritarians. Here's what to know about how we got here, and what we can do to push for its future. There's no better example of the web we make together. www.anildash.com/2026/01/15/w...

wikipedia turns 25 today! the last unenshittified major website! backbone of online info! triumph of humanity! powered by urge of unpaid randos to correct each other! somehow mostly reliable! "good thing wikipedia works in practice, because it sure doesn't work in theory" - old wiki adage

This seems like a maliciously put headline to make people feel a certain way. Wikipedia is not partaking in generative AI. They are making AI companies and scrappers having to pay for training their modules off wikipedia texts. And having an AI (not that ai) tasked with updating dead links.

Celebrating Wikipedia turning 25 with the kiddos today! Next year will be my ten year anniversary as a Wikipedian, and I am so incredibly grateful for that community as a person and as a parent. Here's to the next quarter century! 🎉

Sure. AI companies have ALWAYS been training their models on Wikipedia content, which under the free and open access model is available to anyone — including AI companies. Agreements like these require AI companies to limit and offset the strain they place on Wikimedia infrastructure.

People who produce AI slop papers love to skip the boring research and get right to the dramatic discovery. The LLMs tell them their idea is awesome and original, and write it up as a "proposed framework" (with no data or evidence). That term increased 70% in Web of Science abstracts last year.

Not me reading scholarship about the development of drawing in young children because my 3 years old draws elaborate dinosaurs and landscapes but STILL NO TADPOLES. I should know better, but it still bothers my childhood-researcher-self that he's just skipping a pretty universal step 🙈

The ACM Digital Library, where a LOT of computing-related research is published (I'd say at least 75% of my own publications), is now not only providing (without consent of the authors and without opt-in by readers) AI-generated summaries of papers, but they appear as the *default* over abstracts.

this, from @kevinbaker.bsky.social, is a better analysis of the intersection between LLMs and academic science than 98% of what's out there.

Good luck losing less than an hour to this: a huge archive of logos for government, non-profit, private, military, and even fictional space agencies and companies. [kottke.org]

"'baby-friendly hospitals' [promote] breastfeeding as best practice, [so] the new boxes include nursing supplies but no formula, bottles or pacifiers" really means "these hospitals would rather babies go hungry than providing accurate info about formula" In 2025!!! www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

60% of those who speak French daily now live in Africa, and 80% of children studying in French are in Africa. There are as many French speakers in Kinshasa as in Paris. “French flourishes every day in Africa,” said Souleymane Bachir Diagne, professor of philosophy & French at Columbia U. Gift link

Really positive sign that open source projects are standing up to do the right thing. Kudos to the Python folks: www.theregister.com/2025/10/27/p...

"We must absorb the past out of each object, so it can turn into empty rubbish. This alchemy is deeply exhausting. Every clearing day, the same fog sets in." www.theguardian.com/books/2025/o...