I came across this announcement from The Paley Center for Media that the New York premiere for Truth in Numbers? will be held at its NYC location on October 20 at 7:00 p.m. As most of you will recall, the documentary had a less than enthusiastic reception at its world premiere in Gdańsk at WikiMania 2010 in July.

My guess is that the filmmakers are looking to hopefully network at this do with an eye toward getting a distribution or broadcast deal. Evidently, your $15 ticket for the event includes free food and wine at the reception after the screening.

See the flick, if you have the stomach, but don't drink the “wine” …

Jon

I popped by "Big Live", the website that simulcast the debut for free to an Internet audience, a few minutes after the movie wrapped up. I asked how many people they got (from all over the Internet, across the globe) to watch this free premiere.

"almost 60 people stopped by"

It can still be watched for free for another 5 or 6 days at StagFilms.

What really amazed me was this comment:
(my emphasis)

The more Wikipedians I see, the more they look like Sheldon on The Big Bang Theory.

(Surely you remember him?.....the OCD-manic, Aspergerish, fictional sitcom physicist who has an
absurdly long and detailed WP bio.....longer than the bios of most real-world physicists.....)

I sincerely hope that Wales and the WMF directors realize that they have
hitched their wagon to a meteorite made of crazy, insecure shut-ins.

The difference between Sheldon and a typical Wiki-nerd:
Sheldon is funny.

Wikipedians are more like Booger. Always trying to out-do the other and always the last word on an issue.

Gee that's the first youtube enable-disable I've seen.

Alas, I've had way too many of the same thoughts as Sheldon. Worse, I find myself critiquing the science of Sheldon's writers to the point that often I can't watch that show.



But he's right about the deceleration of poor Lois Lane....

I highly, highly recommend that if you take just nine minutes with this film, before it goes away from the free viewing, start at 25:15, and let it run from there. Those are the "Wikipedia Review" nine minutes, as far as I'm concerned.

Why? Is it actually cyanide-laced Kool-Aid?

It's very interesting to see both sides of the Seigenthaler story. I understand them both. From the Wikipedian side, it's so obvious that malicious libel written on Wikipedia is no more surprising than malicious libel written in the comments section of a blog posting (or here on Wikipedia Review). It appears, someone finds it, it goes away. But yet, there's something so different about Wikipedia. It presents itself as, well, an encyclopedia, not as a bulletin board.

I also wonder whether or not that "whole big family trip" to Berlin was paid for by the Wikimedia Foundation. What was that Berlin conference that Wales was talking about?

Ironic moment at 1:20:15, after talking about how the rosy family life is not so rosy any more, Jimmy Wales is captured by the camera strolling down a NYC street, over 1,150 miles from his daughter, walking under a store facade that reads:

Koh's Kids

And Sheldon has a MA and 2 PhDs which unqualifies him for Wikipedia service ... (for the record, I only watched the clip for the member of the master race in it).

Actually, I thought you meant this Sheldon, an expert who again actually did know something rather than just how to copy and paste it ... thereby again disqualifying him. RIP.

I've been trying to watch this thing for hours now; I have yet to make it past 17:30. The file is of good quality, but their embedded video player is a piece of shite. It appears to be incapable of preloading more than two minutes or so, and it has gotten stuck twice already, requiring a page refresh. The only saving grace is that it remembers where it got stuck and allows you to restart from there.

Same issue for me -- required at least 5 re-starts.

It could have been around this: The Quadriga trophy awarded to him on 3 October 2008 in the Komische Oper in Berlin.

Did you put an "allow" in your browser settings for automatic reloading by that site?

Jon

"Streaming not allowed in your region."

Koh's Kids has a few google book hits (~19?), but it doesn't appear to be 'notable' enough for Wikipedia. maybe they would be interested in a Wikipedia Review directory entry!

btw, does that image need a copyright/fair use notice of some sort? Help:Copyrights suggests it should, but I don't see any tags and other non-free images on Wikipedia Review don't contain notices.

He suggests that it was his first time out of the country, doesn't he?

So use a proxy.

Fair use, for purposes of criticism of an artistic work.

As for the other images, I'm waiting for a giant take-down notice and/or lawsuit that will bring Wikipedia Review crumbling to the ground. At that point, I'm going to hire Guy Chapman as my lawyer, because he seems to have figured out how to plagiarize content, then lie that he's the ab initio author, and not get into any trouble for it.

Some restrictions apply. Immunity valid in strictly limited juris-dick-tions.

Jon

At 23:55 in the film, the subtitle indicates they are in "Holland, Netherlands".

Yep, that was a goof. The Netherlands actually has two provinces called "Holland": North Holland (Noord Holland) and South Holland (Zuid Holland). If memory serves, the wiki-mashup was held Amsterdam, which is in North Holland.

Thanks to the craptacular web video player at SnagFilms, I still have not made it all the way through the film (now stuck at about 1:12:00). Despite some irritating background music in some portions of the film, on the whole it is rather better than I was expecting. I thought the contrasting of the production methods of Wikipedia and the OED starting around 52:00 and the visual depiction of "COI editing" starting around 59:20 were rather effective. It also seems that the filmmakers made an honest attempt at being even-handed here; "wikipedians" are given time to explain what they think is so wonderful about Wikipedia without being edited to appear too foolish.

Still, I can readily see what caused the aghast reaction in Gdańsk. The Frei Kultur Kinder were probably expecting a love poem, and they didn't get it. In retrospect, the addition of the "?" to the main title, and the altered subtitle, should have been a clue that this was not going to be a WMF Production. Amusingly, the IMDb still lists the WMF as one of the production companies.

Thanks to its parent Amazon, IMDb is an investor in Wikia, Inc. I don't know what to make of that, but it's one of my hobby horses.

All in all, I have to sense that Jimmy Wales is quite displeased about how he comes off in the movie. He is presented as arrogant, mean-spirited, clumsy, untruthful, and sad.

Think of the amount of footage they must have had to go though, like searching a haystack for a needle, in order to get a few snippets of his bad side. The mind reels.

The meanies.

After watching that clip you suggested. I think I know one of the people who "was visibly wounded by the film and commented that he felt attacked". Oh, "he", nevermind...

You wouldn't be referring to a certain "photograph restorer", now would you?

As for Jimbo, he should consider himself lucky. There is no mention of his personal scandals in the film, and knowing Jimbo as we do, he could have come off looking much, much worse. Still, I have wondered if Jimbo was behind the takedown of the filmmakers' Wikia pages just after the Gdańsk premiere. If so, it was an act of impotent rage, since that wiki had had no significant edits for over two years, but you know, The Old Man, he kinda acted funny sometimes . . .



Incidentally, the WP article on the film is back now. Predictably, it has less information in it than several versions of the article when the film was still in post-production hell.

Are there any links to this action?

No publicly viewable ones that I know of. When I first discovered this and posted about it here, the main page for their wiki redirected here, but as you can see, that page is now blanked. Back in July, the page simply said this Wikia community was closed, no date or reason stated, but did provide a link regarding closed communities. That page simply provided a list of reasons a community could be closed, nearly all of which involved rule violations.

Now when you click on the old link for the main page you get directed here instead. Back in July I did do some further searches to see if I could find a specific page referring to the takedown, but I never found one.

I watched the whole thing, although not in one sitting. I didn't find it very interesting or compelling, but perhaps that was because there wasn't really much in there that was new to me.

A documentary like this, with a lot of talking heads and very little dialogue between opposing sides, can get tedious fairly quickly unless the filmmakers find ways to draw the audience into the debate, or present the information in an interesting way. The graphics used in this were very bland. The one direct discussion between sides -- Andrew Keen debating Jimmy Wales -- came too late (I thought).

Overall, it seemed to be a fairly even-handed look at WP and its detractors. Jimbo probably won't like how he comes off (they did let Keen get in more cheap shots at him than were necessary), but I liked seeing him interacting with his daughter and thought it was a very humanizing depiction of him. I think people here and at WP forget sometimes that Jimbo is a human being.

I hope this graphic gets fixed in time for the next showing:

Many human beings in history have been nice to children and also loved animals. (Godwin!)

Note, a more recent interview found Jimbo saying that he's now living half-time in London. Does it strike anyone other than me as odd to situate yourself a 9-hour flight away from your daughter, whom you supposedly see every other weekend? And there are very few non-stop London flights to/from Tampa.

Some British nookie involved, doubtless. Or do you find teh notion of British nookie odd?

Then why don't he act like one on WP?

(To paraphrase Jim in Huckleberry Finn)

Actually he does, in a way-- but he only shows the bad qualities of humanity, mostly having to do with screwing everybody else, to benefit yourself and your family. He's human, but a mafioso Roman medieval feudal human. Not a modern one at all. Running an advanced computer interactive website. Zeeezus. It's worse than Farm Town.

It was pretty bad. I'm not sure who the target audience was supposed to be. I especially liked Cade Metz. Could have done without any Andrew Keen.

Quote from Wales: "it's not like an encyclopedia"

Brad Patrick was in the credits as an "individual donor".

Of his balls?

You said a mouthful.

This thing was supposedly "finished" in 2009. Yet I see no signs of its release, anywhere, in any form,
until the 19th of this month.
They are starting to get listings in film festival schedules.

I suspect but can't prove: that the WMF cooperated with the producers, thinking they were going to get
a happy-time puff piece about Wikipedia. Something they could use for outreach and fundraising.
Instead, the final film was much more honest/negative than they expected.
Embarrassed, they fought against its release (quietly) until the producers secured additional funding.

Actually, the WMF did use two minutes worth of the filmmakers' footage in their 2007 fundraising video; the one with the close-ups on Jimbo's creepy eyes and wringing hands. I saved it on my HD ages ago. Looking at it again, it looks like only about 30-40 seconds of that ended up in the final film. As for the rest it, my surmises are the same as yours.

I just watched the film. Very sophisticated. Conveys the idealism and promise of Wikipedia, and expresses well the problem as well. Sanger comes off looking good.

The problem isn't crowd sourcing, that's actually brilliant. The problem is lack of structure that would build increasingly reliable content, with crowd sourced material providing the raw material, the fuel.

The flat encyclopedia model, as well, confines the project and forces conflict over due weight.

"Notability" was a mistake, treated as if notability were a property of knowledge. Rather, again, the film addresses the issue of importance, i.e., when one is learning a subject, some knowledge is, at the beginning, important, and other knowledge is of lesser importance. A decent approach to knowledge involves proceeding through a hierarchy of knowledge. But "the sum of human knowledge" would include all of it.

The encyclopedic project, properly understood, would categorize knowledge and place it in a hierarchy. At the top level is what is extremely well known, not controversial among anyone with knowledge of a topic. At the bottom is trash and nonsense. Wikibooks and Wikiversity have more potential for hierarchical presentation of knowledge than the flat Wikipedia model. But they have not been tested by mass acceptance.

(I've considered that if two people know a thing and agree on it, that is "human knowledge;" below that level knowledge is purely personal, which has a place, as a primary source, but it's not encyclopedic. However, that only two agree would not place the knowledge high in the hierarchy. It would be down in the basement, ask the librarian....)

I don't agree that there is no such thing as neutrality. Wales actually expresses the concept of neutrality reasonable well, but the fly in the ointment is that the process to make it possible was not constructed, it was assumed that it would magically appear. They were fooled by the natural unity at the beginning.

Neutrality, when the scale has increased, requires consensus process, which is often difficult, and, when it doesn't arise naturally through shared goals and a sense of unity, requires skilled facilitation.

Would it be possible for Citizendium to build efficient consensus process, that efficiently reviews and incorporates Wikipedia content whenever the Wikipedia content is superior? But that doesn't when a Wikipedia article slides back?

I don't know. But it is about the only kind of thing that would work. It must be efficient.

All I know is that, indeed, Wikipedia is murder on experts. And it is not about experts believing that people should defer to them. It is about experts being trampled on, and about Wikipedia simply not caring when this happens. It all boils down to defective process, vulnerable to participation bias, without any active review process. If an editor sees POV-pushing with violation of policies, but it isn't immediately visible to someone who doesn't know the topic, the editor is expected to jump through difficult hoops to do something about it. Those who will actively investigate are rare.

You need to be not only an expert or have the necessary knowledge, you also need to know how to write effective polemic to convince a mob of distracted and impatient Wikipedians.... who are not going to investigate, unless they have an axe to grind.

And that will never happen, until/unless those projects arrange their own servers.

It's becoming increasingly clear that the hiveminders consider both projects to be "lost", as in "we can't control and push them around anymore". And if they ever get integrated watchlists that work across wikis, they will really be screwed.

http://wikipediareview.com/index.php?s=&sh...ndpost&p=235825

I personally would have an interest in any elaboration of either of these points, possibly in another thread if desired. I've seen that some don't pay them much heed while others see them as a place to foster new endeavors.

Reviewing Truth in Numbers is Wikipedia's own Fred Bauder:



As long as we're reviewing gravely flawed performances:

Now, that is a very interesting and realizable goal. Very simple to implement, voluntarily.

All it takes is an app you'd install to download the watched data and present it, as-is. The app could also have some facility for prioritizing. Do you really want to watch every article that you touched on RCP? That's secure, because you'd not disclose your password(s) to anyone else. You just need to trust that the app won't send your password to Greg, though I'm sure he'd make good use of it if it did.

It could and should be implemented within MediaWiki for the affiliated wikis.

[quote name='thekohser' date='Fri 29th October 2010, 5:49am' post='257458']
Reviewing Truth in Numbers is Wikipedia's own Fred Bauder:

[quote]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. -- Fred Bauder[/quote]Lovely. These people would not recognize a neutral film if it bit them in the ass.

They prefer, I'm sure, that it bite them on the tongue.

And what does this say about the capacity of people like Bauder to recognize a neutral article on any subject where they might have an opinion?

I noticed immediately upon becoming active that the core believes that nobody else could possibly understand Wikipedia. Critics are, ipso facto, ignorant. Clueless, even when they do understand how Wikipedia works. If they get uppity, they are blocked.

From their POV, to understand Wikipedia, you must have become thoroughly involved in the mess, and, indeed, you must have stayed involved even when it became obvious. Essentially, you must be crazy.

So, they discount the opinions of people who have made a major study, long-term, of Wikipedia. They reject the very people they should be listening to the most. Not to worship, not to knee-jerk accept these 'experts,' but to understand them and to apply that understanding.

They won't. To fix Wikipedia, if it is possible at all, will involve bypassing these people and making them irrelevant. Except, of course, as they contribute their experience and understanding to a sane process.

Typical reaction from the core

. . . or it did, until Cirt decided to take an interest. Why I have no idea. Cirt managed to dig up some Jimbo quotes in reaction to the film. His response was predictable: