[Foundation-l] Truth in Numbers? Everything, According to Wikipedia

[Anthony]

On Fri, Oct 29, 2010 at 4:04 AM, Amir E. Aharoni
<amir.aharoni at mail.huji.ac.il> wrote:
> The appearance of Andrew Keen is the most disappointing part, because
> he babbles about the exact same things he babbled about in the
> otherwise good documentary "The Truth According To Wikipedia" (
> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WMSinyx_Ab0 ). I sincerely hope that
> it's not the last documentary about Wikipedia, but that it would be
> the last featuring Keen.
>
> It's disappointing because, as legitimate as his ideas are, he really
> doesn't have anything more to say.

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 at fairpoint.net> wrote:
> The movie is gravely flawed by coverage of poorly founded opinions of
> people who either were never familiar with how Wikipedia works or are
> long out of touch such as Ed Poore and Larry Sanger. There is even
> considerable coverage of the "bumblebee could never fly" variety. Here is
> a list of some of the people who appeared:

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.

> Cade Metz of The Register appears [snip mention of someone not allowed to reply]

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.