On Fri, Oct 29, 2010 at 4:04 AM, Amir E. Aharoni <amir.aharoni(a)mail.huji.ac.il> wrote: Gotta agree with you, except for the part about Keen having legitimate ideas. Maybe that documentary just intentionally painted Keen in a bad light (*), but Keen came off as nothing more than an angry old man. Maybe he was supposed to be a strawman. (*) Though I doubt it, because it suffered from much the same flaw as many Wikipedia articles: it neither attempted nor accomplished actually saying much of anything. On Fri, Oct 29, 2010 at 12:14 AM, Fred Bauder <fredbaud(a)fairpoint.net> wrote: I thought Sanger, on the other hand, was good. I don't remember him being really prominent, and maybe he is "out of touch", but it's really the "outsiders" perspective which he brought to the table. Or, more specifically, the perspective of someone who knew as an insider what Wikipedia was supposed to be and then saw along with the rest of the public what it turned out to be. "A lot of kids are consulting wikipedia as the first and often the last source of information on anything that they're curious about. If it continues on in that capacity, we might have a generation of kids who have a fundamental confusion about basic principles of epistemology." As much a knock on Google as it is on Wikipedia, but I think he hit the nail on the head, and wish the movie would have delved deeper into that (or anything). I mean, one could likewise say that John Seigenthaler is "out of touch" with Wikipedia, but that was the whole point. The segment on him was one of the few parts of the film where I feel like I actually learned something - what Wikipedia is like from the perspective of an intelligent person who knows nothing about Wikipedia. Put another way, how Wikipedia presents itself to the public. There's another thread about a similar topic, "how can we mitigate misplaced reliance", and it hasn't come up with any answers. Not enough, though. Metz was a great example of what the whole documentary should have been. Have a perspective. Have a point of view. And express it honestly and eloquently. Or even if you're going to have multiple perspectives, at least develop them fully. Instead they couldn't even keep themselves from sticking a question mark in the title (and, sadly, it wasn't a question mark which was answered by the movie - in fact, little of the movie was even about the topic of whether or not there is "truth in numbers"). Fortunately, it was free. And I did get my money's worth: One quote from Sanger which I took the time to transcribe, and a section on Seigenthaler which truly helped me gain insight into the man's perspective.