Truth in Numbers? Everything, According to Wikipedia

Older Comments on Truth in Numbers? Everything, According to Wikipedia

• Posted 10/29/10 by Fred Bauder
  The movie is good in that is covers a wide range of views regarding Wikipedia. It is flawed in that it often gives considerable time to ill-formed opinions of people who are not familiar with how Wikipedia works. This results in inclusion of information in the movie which lacks a reliable source, precisely the complaint that is generally made regarding Wikipedia, and which Wikipedia works very hard to avoid. Fred Bauder, I made my first edit on Wikipedia March 1, 2002
• Posted 10/25/10 by mfn
  I thought the film was brilliant; effective counterpoint, not heavy handed, and as it unfolds, the viewer comes to understand Wales, both for good and for bad. The music and audio is well done and by the end, you have a different insight into wikipedia and the dissemination of knowledge and expertise. But most telling is the comment that we will understand whether wikipedia was "correct" 100 years from now; that in the internet age, you can't put the genie back in the bottle.
• Posted 10/24/10 by metasonix
  This film is remarkable---because, for the first time, we are getting an honest and equable evaluation of Wikipedia. An "encyclopedia" that operates more like 4chan or Something Awful than like an "encyclopedia". It is basically run by trolls and sociopaths, who feel that they are above the law and beyond the reach of any control or accountability, simply because they are Wikipedians. As if their project gave them angelic moral purity. Watch starting at 26:00 for the Seigenthaler mess. Not only did someone defame Siegenthaler, when he objected and tried to get it fixed, scores of anonymous trolls made the defamation worse--to "punish" him, for daring to criticize their "encyclopedia". And that was FIVE YEARS AGO. It also mentions administrator Durova going on a crazed campaign to ban a user who was alleged to be from "Badsites", websites that openly criticized Wikipedia. Many of those "Badsites" are still in operation, while Durova has since resigned her adminship. Not to mention admin "Slimvirgin" and her campaign against Judd Bagley, who had discovered that financial writer Gary Weiss was editing Wikipedia articles to make not-exactly-legal investor tricks like "naked short-selling" look respectable. Those are not the only examples of Wikipedia's arrogance, and there are a lot of things that happened in the background which have not even been discovered or publicized to date. Wikipedia has made a LOT of enemies in the last 5 years---but you won't read about that on Wikipedia! And since this film was finished last year, I suspect that the situation has gotten worse, not better. The WMF recently fired their legal counsel, Mike Godwin, a well-known expert on Internet law and "free culture". No one will discuss or explain why they felt the need to push Godwin out. Attempts to ask WMF director Sue Gardner about Godwin's exit were rebuffed with great hostility. This is typical of how Wikipedia mismanages everything--secretly, and with much backstabbing and sleaze.
• Posted 10/21/10 by Gregory Kohs
  My favorite 5 minutes of this film begin at 25:15. Rigged content, hijacked articles, banned outsiders, paranoia, Durova's cult-like behaviors, the deliberate revenge attacks on a 78-year-old man. It's everything that represents the real Wikipedia.