Remeber when the quality of Newsweek fell?

[Mr Bean]

It might have something to do with the fact that Newsweek does not even have a fact checking department anymore
NYmag
So there's an unrelated story about Paul Krugman taking Niall Ferguson to task for his pretty blatant propaganda front page story for Newsweek. And Dylan Byers chimes in to point out that Krugman is correct that Newsweek did not fact check Niall Fergusons story, but not for the reason you think.

Krugman is correct — the magazine, like many others, does not have a fact-checking department. "We, like other news organisations today, rely on our writers to submit factually accurate material," Newsweek spokesman Andrew Kirk told POLITICO.

I am a news junky, if ever I have down time the second thing I do is typically pull out my phone to start browsing news websites and yet I have remained ignorant of this fact that the media world has gotten so bad as to fire it's fact-checking departments. That's... well... that rather defies description. I can understand a fly by night or some guy's blog not having a fact checking looking over it. But the idea of having a research department and a fact-checking department is what makes a news organization from a blog. The idea that Newsweek would take a piece and put it on it's front cover without having anyone do more that simple editor copy cleaning is unbelievable to me. And so I looked into it and what the hell, Dylan Byers is right, since the downfall of newspaper lots of news agencies have been cutting non-essential staff which happens to include the people who's only job is to make sure your not publishing made up bullshit with the name and prestige of Newsweek attached.

So while the Krugman/Niall story is interesting in and of itself the main reason I'm posting is well.... Newsweek what the hell you put something on the front page and no one checks it anymore? Do you not see the problem with this? Tina Brown head Editor of Newsweek do you understand exactly what you have?

[Mr Bean]

Because I'm out of it here's two links and pasted text to the story and the Atlantic take down of it.

Obama Must go

Why does Paul Ryan scare the president so much? Because Obama has broken his promises, and it’s clear that the GOP ticket’s path to prosperity is our only hope.

I was a good loser four years ago. “In the grand scheme of history,” I wrote the day after Barack Obama’s election as president, “four decades is not an especially long time. Yet in that brief period America has gone from the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. to the apotheosis of Barack Obama. You would not be human if you failed to acknowledge this as a cause for great rejoicing.”
Newsweek

Despite having been—full disclosure—an adviser to John McCain, I acknowledged his opponent’s remarkable qualities: his soaring oratory, his cool, hard-to-ruffle temperament, and his near faultless campaign organization.

Yet the question confronting the country nearly four years later is not who was the better candidate four years ago. It is whether the winner has delivered on his promises. And the sad truth is that he has not.

In his inaugural address, Obama promised “not only to create new jobs, but to lay a new foundation for growth.” He promised to “build the roads and bridges, the electric grids, and digital lines that feed our commerce and bind us together.” He promised to “restore science to its rightful place and wield technology’s wonders to raise health care’s quality and lower its cost.” And he promised to “transform our schools and colleges and universities to meet the demands of a new age.” Unfortunately the president’s
In an unguarded moment earlier this year, the president commented that the private sector of the economy was “doing fine.” Certainly, the stock market is well up (by 74 percent) relative to the close on Inauguration Day 2009. But the total number of private-sector jobs is still 4.3 million below the January 2008 peak. Meanwhile, since 2008, a staggering 3.6 million Americans have been added to Social Security’s disability insurance program. This is one of many ways unemployment is being concealed.

In his fiscal year 2010 budget—the first he presented—the president envisaged growth of 3.2 percent in 2010, 4.0 percent in 2011, 4.6 percent in 2012. The actual numbers were 2.4 percent in 2010 and 1.8 percent in 2011; few forecasters now expect it to be much above 2.3 percent this year.

Unemployment was supposed to be 6 percent by now. It has averaged 8.2 percent this year so far. Meanwhile real median annual household income has dropped more than 5 percent since June 2009. Nearly 110 million individuals received a welfare benefit in 2011, mostly Medicaid or food stamps.

Welcome to Obama’s America: nearly half the population is not represented on a taxable return—almost exactly the same proportion that lives in a household where at least one member receives some type of government benefit. We are becoming the 50–50 nation—half of us paying the taxes, the other half receiving the benefits.

Niall Ferguson discusses Obama's broken promises on ‘Face the Nation.’

And all this despite a far bigger hike in the federal debt than we were promised. According to the 2010 budget, the debt in public hands was supposed to fall in relation to GDP from 67 percent in 2010 to less than 66 percent this year. If only. By the end of this year, according to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), it will reach 70 percent of GDP. These figures significantly understate the debt problem, however. The ratio that matters is debt to revenue. That number has leapt upward from 165 percent in 2008 to 262 percent this year, according to figures from the International Monetary Fund. Among developed economies, only Ireland and Spain have seen a bigger deterioration.

Not only did the initial fiscal stimulus fade after the sugar rush of 2009, but the president has done absolutely nothing to close the long-term gap between spending and revenue.

His much-vaunted health-care reform will not prevent spending on health programs growing from more than 5 percent of GDP today to almost 10 percent in 2037. Add the projected increase in the costs of Social Security and you are looking at a total bill of 16 percent of GDP 25 years from now. That is only slightly less than the average cost of all federal programs and activities, apart from net interest payments, over the past 40 years. Under this president’s policies, the debt is on course to approach 200 percent of GDP in 2037—a mountain of debt that is bound to reduce growth even further.

That's only page 1, pages 2-5 are at the link

Krugram's Response

Unethical Commentary, Newsweek Edition

There are multiple errors and misrepresentations in Niall Ferguson’s cover story in Newsweek — I guess they don’t do fact-checking — but this is the one that jumped out at me. Ferguson says:

The president pledged that health-care reform would not add a cent to the deficit. But the CBO and the Joint Committee on Taxation now estimate that the insurance-coverage provisions of the ACA will have a net cost of close to $1.2 trillion over the 2012–22 period.

Readers are no doubt meant to interpret this as saying that CBO found that the Act will increase the deficit. But anyone who actually read, or even skimmed, the CBO report (pdf) knows that it found that the ACA would reduce, not increase, the deficit — because the insurance subsidies were fully paid for.

Now, people on the right like to argue that the CBO was wrong. But that’s not the argument Ferguson is making — he is deliberately misleading readers, conveying the impression that the CBO had actually rejected Obama’s claim that health reform is deficit-neutral, when in fact the opposite is true.

More than that: by its very nature, health reform that expands coverage requires that lower-income families receive subsidies to make coverage affordable. So of course reform comes with a positive number for subsidies — finding that this number is indeed positive says nothing at all about the impact on the deficit unless you ask whether and how the subsidies are paid for. Ferguson has to know this (unless he’s completely ignorant about the whole subject, which I guess has to be considered as a possibility). But he goes for the cheap shot anyway.

We’re not talking about ideology or even economic analysis here — just a plain misrepresentation of the facts, with an august publication letting itself be used to misinform readers. The Times would require an abject correction if something like that slipped through. Will Newsweek?

Here's the first part of the Atlantic Takedown
The Atlantic

A Full Fact-Check of Niall Ferguson's Very Bad Argument Against Obama
By Matthew O'Brien

Celebrity historian Niall Ferguson doesn't like President Obama, and doesn't think you should either.

That's perfectly fine. There are plenty of legitimate reasons to disapprove of the president. Here's the big one: 8.3 percent. That's the current unemployment rate, fully three years on from the official end of the Great Recession. But rather than make this straightforward case against the current administration, Ferguson delves into a fantasy world of incorrect and tendentious facts. He simply gets things wrong, again and again and again. (A point my colleague James Fallows makes as well in a must-read.)

Here's a tour of some of the more factually challenged sections of Ferguson's piece.

"Certainly, the stock market is well up (by 74 percent) relative to the close on Inauguration Day 2009. But the total number of private-sector jobs is still 4.3 million below the January 2008 peak."

Did you catch that little switcheroo? Ferguson concedes that stocks have done very well since January 2009, but then says that private sector payrolls have not since January 2008. Notice now? Ferguson blames Obama for job losses that happened a full year before he took office. The private sector has actually added jobs since Obama was sworn in -- 427,000 of them, to be exact. For context, remember that the private sector lost 170,000 jobs during George W. Bush's eight years.

PrivateSectorPayrolls3.png

Of course, it's not really fair to blame Obama -- or Bush -- for jobs lost in their first few months before their policies took effect. If we more sensibly look at private sector payrolls after their first six months in office, then Obama has created 3.1 million jobs and Bush created 967,000 jobs.

"Meanwhile real median annual household income has dropped more than 5 percent since June 2009."

I can't replicate this result. It's difficult, because Ferguson does not cite his source. The Census Bureau only has data on real median household incomes through 2010 -- and it shows them falling 2.28 percent from 2009. The Bureau of Labor Statistics has numbers on real median weekly earnings that go through 2012, but those only show a 3.7 percent decrease from June 2009.

"Welcome to Obama's America: nearly half the population is not represented on a taxable return--almost exactly the same proportion that lives in a household where at least one member receives some type of government benefit. We are becoming the 50-50 nation--half of us paying the taxes, the other half receiving the benefits."

It is true that 46 percent of households did not pay federal income tax in 2011. It is not true that they pay no taxes. Federal income taxes account barely account for half of federal taxes, and much less of total taxes, if you count the state and local level. Many of those other taxes can be regressive. If you take all taxes into account, our system is barely progressive at all.

But why do almost half of all households pay no federal income tax? Because they don't have much money to tax. Here's the breakdown from the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center. Half of these households are simply too poor -- they make under $20,000 -- to have any liability. Another quarter are retirees on tax-exempt Social Security benefits. The remaining households have no liability because of tax expenditures like the earned-income tax credit or the child credit.

In other words, the poor, the old, and children. Not exactly the "50-50 nation" of makers and takers -- or "lucky duckies" -- that Ferguson imagines.

"By the end of this year, according to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), [debt-to-GDP ratio] will reach 70 percent of GDP. These figures significantly understate the debt problem, however. The ratio that matters is debt to revenue. That number has leapt upward from 165 percent in 2008 to 262 percent this year, according to figures from the International Monetary Fund."

This is incorrect. Ferguson had it right the first time -- the number that matters is debt-to-GDP, not debt-to-revenue. The former reflects our capacity to pay; the latter our willingness to pay right now. Moving on.

"Not only did the initial fiscal stimulus fade after the sugar rush of 2009, but the president has done absolutely nothing to close the long-term gap between spending and revenue."

Ferguson wasn't always a critic of the stimulus. Back in August 2009, he wrote that "the stimulus clearly made a significant contribution to stabilizing the U.S. economy." Perhaps he thinks the stimulus should have been bigger so the "sugar rush" would last lasted longer? It's not clear. What is clear is that Obama has tried to close long-term deficits -- several times! And the sequester scheduled for next January is his deal with Republicans to rein in spending. More on that in a bit.

"The most recent estimate for the difference between the net present value of federal government liabilities and the net present value of future federal revenues--what economist Larry Kotlikoff calls the true "fiscal gap"--is $222 trillion."

That's a lot of trillions! But if our fiscal gap is "really" this many trillions, why can we borrow for 30 years for a real rate of 0.64 percent? It's because this number is meaningless. First of all, it seems to project many decades of growth figures and budget decisions that we simply don't know will happen. It assumes the Bush tax cuts never ever expire and that the healthcare cost curve never ever bends. This is like projecting, in 1942, that the Empire of Japan will rule the entire Asian continent for 70 years based on a few years of battle outcomes. It's an interesting prediction, but it's not an empirical vision of the future.

"The country's largest banks are at least $50 billion short of meeting new capital requirements under the new "Basel III" accords governing bank capital adequacy."

This would be damning if we had already fully implemented the Basel III bank rules. We have not. As this handy timeline from Deloitte shows, the bank capital ratios don't take effect until January 2013. And even if they had -- which again, they have not -- it would be a bad idea to change risk-weighted capital too much too soon. Europe's banks have done just that, and the results have left something to be desired. The IMF projects their banks will deleverage some $2.6 trillion over the next year and a half -- starving their economies of credit when they most need it. In other words, Ferguson not only get the facts wrong; he gets the economics wrong too.

"The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) of 2010 did nothing to address the core defects of the system: the long-run explosion of Medicare costs as the baby boomers retire, the "fee for service" model that drives health-care inflation, the link from employment to insurance that explains why so many Americans lack coverage, and the excessive costs of the liability insurance that our doctors need to protect them from our lawyers."

There are reasons to think the ACA will fail to address the core defects of the health care system. But it's wrong to say it does nothing to address them. Here's a partial list of the things Obamacare does. It tackles the long-run explosion of Medicare costs. It tries to move away from the fee-for-service model that drives healthcare inflation. And it cuts the link between employment and insurance. In other words, Obamacare does everything Ferguson says it doesn't do, with the exception of tort reform. Matt Yglesias of Slate has a good explainer on how Obamacare tries to do these things -- everything from IPAB, to Accountable Care Organizations and guaranteed issue. Read it.

"The president pledged that health-care reform would not add a cent to the deficit. But the CBO and the Joint Committee on Taxation now estimate that the insurance-coverage provisions of the ACA will have a net cost of close to $1.2 trillion over the 2012-22 period."

Maybe Ferguson doesn't understand the meaning of the word "deficit"? The only other explanation is that he is deliberately misleading his readers. The CBO is quite clear about Obamacare's budgetary implications. It reduces the deficit. Here's what the CBO said exactly:

[T]he effects of the two laws on direct spending and revenues related to health care will reduce federal deficits by $210 billion over the 2012-2021 period.


In other words, the law is more than paid for. As Paul Krugman pointed out, it does spend $1.042 trillion covering people, but it pays for this coverage by finding savings in Medicare and levying a surtax on investment income for high-earners. That Ferguson looked up the CBO's estimate of the bill's cost and didn't notice that those costs are paid for is peculiar indeed. Even more peculiar is that he is apparently doubling down on this falsehood. And yes, it is a very deliberate falsehood.

"Having set up a bipartisan National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, headed by retired Wyoming Republican senator Alan Simpson and former Clinton chief of staff Erskine Bowles, Obama effectively sidelined its recommendations of approximately $3 trillion in cuts and $1 trillion in added revenues over the coming decade. As a result there was no "grand bargain" with the House Republicans--which means that, barring some miracle, the country will hit a fiscal cliff on Jan. 1 as the Bush tax cuts expire and the first of $1.2 trillion of automatic, across-the-board spending cuts are imposed. The CBO estimates the net effect could be a 4 percent reduction in output."

Now, Obama did not push Congress to adopt Simpson-Bowles, but neither did Congress adopt it. Among those who voted against it? Paul Ryan, who Ferguson later lauds for his fiscal courage. Although that wasn't the last attempt at a so-called "grand bargain". That came during the debt ceiling standoff the Republicans forced. Obama offered a long-term deal heavily tilted towards Republican priorities -- read: spending cuts -- that the Republicans spurned. Among those who pushed the Republicans to reject it? Paul Ryan, who worried that a deal would burnish Obama's bipartisan credentials and make his re-election a foregone conclusion.

And then there's the cognitive dissonance of it all. Noah Smith points out that Ferguson reproaches Obama for both running big deficits and for closing them.

"The failures of leadership on economic and fiscal policy over the past four years have had geopolitical consequences. The World Bank expects the U.S. to grow by just 2 percent in 2012. China will grow four times faster than that; India three times faster. By 2017, the International Monetary Fund predicts, the GDP of China will overtake that of the United States."

China has 1.3 billion people. The United States has 300 million people. China's GDP will pass ours when they are only four times poorer than us. That might happen in 2017; it might happen later if China's current slowdown is more than a blip. It doesn't really matter if and when this happens. There's nothing Obama can do to prevent China from catching up -- nor should Obama want to! Economics isn't zero sum. The more money China has, the more money they have to buy things from us and other countries. This is good news, and yet Ferguson treats it like a modern-day equivalent of "losing China".

"In his notorious "you didn't build that" speech, Obama listed what he considers the greatest achievements of big government: the Internet, the GI Bill, the Golden Gate Bridge, the Hoover Dam, the Apollo moon landing, and even (bizarrely) the creation of the middle class. Sadly, he couldn't mention anything comparable that his administration has achieved."

It's bizarre that Ferguson thinks government policies didn't help create America's middle class. America was the first country to make high school compulsory. It was also the first country to make college widely accessible with the G.I. bill. This democratization of education went a long way towards laying the foundation for broad-based prosperity. And as for big things the government has achieved lately, surely moving to near-universal healthcare coverage counts?

***
In the world as Ferguson describes it, Obama is a big-spending, weak-kneed liberal who can't get the economy turned around. Think Jimmy Carter on steroids. But the world is not as Ferguson describes it. A fact-checked version of the world Ferguson describes reveals a completely different narrative -- a muddy picture of the past four years, where Obama has sometimes cast himself as a stimulator, a deficit hawk, a health care liberal and conservative reformer all at once. And it's a world where the economy is getting better, albeit slowly.

It would have been worthwhile for Ferguson to explain why Obama doesn't deserve re-election in this real world we actually live in. Instead, we got an exercise in Ferguson's specialty -- counterfactual history.

[Darth Wong]

I don't know exactly when Newsweek went to shit, but I know the moment I realized that Newsweek had gone to shit. It was their post-9/11 issue, and they were "explaining" the causes of Al-Qaeda fanaticism to their readers. They actually used the phrase "hate our freedoms", and claimed that Al-Qaeda might not hate America so much if America became a fundamentalist theocracy.

Those statements were not just right-wing propaganda: they represented monumental idiocy of the highest order. For an editor to approve such drivel indicated that the standards at Newsweek had fallen to somewhere around the level of the Sun newspaper.

Of course, they weren't alone: a lot of media personalities (and ordinary people) seemed to completely lose their shit after 9/11. But as with Newsweek, I suspect that it was more a matter of 9/11 revealing an underlying idiocy that had been there for quite a while.

[thejester]

To be fair, this particular story says a lot more about Niall Ferguson and his current employer(s) than it does Newsweek. Is it unreasonable to expect a sitting Harvard Professor to be accurate with his facts?

[Simon_Jester]

When the claims made by that professor are so obviously favoring one political faction over another, yes.

This should be a general principle in journalism- if someone makes a self-serving statement, you check it. If Obama says he created jobs, you check it. If Romney says Obama destroyed jobs, you check it. If someone writes a long essay that sums up as "I am a Cosmocratican and you should be too!" you check it with a fine-toothed comb. Because the more of that kind of stuff you publish, the more you stake out a political position. And if you're staking out a political position for any reason other than "I am pro-truth," you're doing something wrong as a journalist.

As it is, the general decay of facts and fact-checking in politics is doing a lot to screw up American politics. Both parties get away with lying and exaggerating more safely. Neither party feels much urge to propose serious, major changes to anything. And why should they? Those proposals will just get swift-boated to death by professional liars and wind up doing more harm than good.

[Eframepilot]

Newsweek is just the print version of Tina Brown's Daily Beast now. Having a lead story that incites controversy by it being fact-free propaganda isn't a bug, it's a feature.

[Flagg]

I remember an article where they called Alan Grayson "The worst congressman". That's when I realized how utterly devoid of integrity they were.

[Thanas]

Oh man Ferguson. His earlier works are a bit interesting, especially considering his one about WWI, but he has been on a huge decline after that.

[General Mung Beans]

Oh man Ferguson. His earlier works are a bit interesting, especially considering his one about WWI, but he has been on a huge decline after that.

I just ordered his Ascent of Money on Amazon. But this article is rather disappointing...

[Thanas]

^I would not spend money on his books at the moment.

If you want a much better book in the same vein I would suggest this book.

[General Mung Beans]

^I would not spend money on his books at the moment.

If you want a much better book in the same vein I would suggest this book.

Thanks I'll be purchasing it the next time.

[Adam Reynolds]

Something I couldn't help thinking with this story is that it would make the next Stephen Glass, a reported at the New Republic in the 90s that flat out fabricated many of his stories, much harder to detect. In his case he actually got past the fact checkers but without them it would make that job effortless. Interestingly, this was made into a movie called Shattered Glass staring Hayden Christensen and he actually played the role of a somewhat charming sociopath quite well.

[Thanas]

Indeed.

And even news organizations like the Times have had their own version of Glass by now. It puzzles me that fact-checking departments get laid off - they are IMO the most important part of a news organization.

[Lord Revan]

Indeed.

And even news organizations like the Times have had their own version of Glass by now. It puzzles me that fact-checking departments get laid off - they are IMO the most important part of a news organization.

they are, unless you want to breed a horde of unthinking zealots which is what this seems to be.

[Flagg]

Who needs fact checkers when you can just cross refference Wikipedia?

[Zaune]

Who needs fact checkers when you can just cross refference Wikipedia?

At this point I think I trust Wikipedia further than some newspapers. At least they still have a fact-checking process!

[Simon_Jester]

The nice thing about Wikipedia isn't that it's reliable, it's that it gives references. If you really want to know the truth, you have a much better idea of where to start looking for it than you would with the newspaper.

A proper encyclopedia is still vastly better, of course.

[Jub]

The nice thing about Wikipedia isn't that it's reliable, it's that it gives references. If you really want to know the truth, you have a much better idea of where to start looking for it than you would with the newspaper.

A proper encyclopedia is still vastly better, of course.

I thought studies had shown that wikipedia was actually as reliable as a set of encyclopedias? I could be off though.

[Thanas]

It depends on the article.

[Simon_Jester]

Wikipedia taught me a lot about the difference between reliable reliability and unreliable reliability.

Real encyclopedias have the first. Wikipedia has the second.

[General Mung Beans]

http://www.straightdope.com/columns/rea ... britannica

Is Wikipedia more reliable than the Encyclopaedia Britannica?
July 13, 2012

Dear Cecil:

In a column a while back, you told your assistant Una to “quit with the Wikipedia” because “from the standpoint of reliability, Wikipedia might as well be written by gorillas.” The weekly science journal Nature reports Wikipedia contains less erroneous material than the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Are you willing to withdraw your sensational claim?

— Conrad

Cecil replies:

Yes, I’ll withdraw it. From a reliability or any other standpoint, Wikipedia is considerably better than could be accomplished by gorillas. Put a gorilla in front of a keyboard and there’s a good chance he’ll crap on it. Few Wikipedia articles descend to this level. On the contrary, for settling bar bets, satisfying idle curiosity, or, truth be told, getting an initial fix on a serious research subject, Wikipedia is an indispensable resource. The problem is when even those who know better rely on Wikipedia as the last step rather than the first in finding the facts.

For example, in a recent piece on Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas in the New York Review of Books critic Martin Filler made several factual errors. When the architect complained, Filler petulantly replied, “I am surprised that for someone so concerned about his image and the spread of misinformation, neither Koolhaas nor his office has bothered to correct his Wikipedia entry.”

In other words, it’s not my fault for relying on a flaky source. It’s your fault for not correcting my flaky source. How’s that for brass balls?

Wikipedia is the premier example of the Internet phenomenon known as crowdsourcing, in which people spontaneously cooperate for the greater good. By many measures it has become the world’s leading reference resource, with 22 million articles in 285 languages, including four million articles in English. According to the Alexa tracking service, Wikipedia is the sixth most visited website in the world. All articles are contributed by volunteers, who are free to muck up the contributions of everybody else. The enterprise is supported at some remove by the Wikimedia Foundation, which employs a staff of about 140. I get much of this from the Wikipedia article about Wikipedia, meaning that if I submitted this column as a scholarly paper to any properly run institution of higher learning, I would get and deserve an F.

The question isn’t whether Wikipedia is reliable. No one with a grasp of the situation contends it is, including co-founder Jimmy Wales. Wales justly observes that serious researchers would be foolish to rely on any encyclopedia. (My assistant Little Ed once contributed articles to the Encyclopaedia Britannica, which tells you a lot right there.) Producing a compendium of human knowledge (e.g. the one you’re reading) is inherently messy. Given the staggering mass of what’s knowable, only wikimethodology offers a hope of getting a real handle on it. But the collective result is a tip sheet at best.

Not saying it’s a bad tip sheet. In 2006 Nature asked experts to compare articles on 42 topics at Wikipedia and Britannica and concluded … well, not that Wikipedia had “less erroneous material,” Conrad; you’re hallucinating. The magazine said “the difference in accuracy was not particularly great.” Each source had four serious errors. Britannica fared better on minor errors, with 123 versus 162 for Wikipedia. Affronted Britannica editors felt that was a big difference; Nature evidently didn’t.

But counting up random errors misses the point. No doubt some Wikipedia articles are sterling examples of the encyclopedist’s art; others suck. The difficulty is it’s not always obvious which is which. The saving grace of Wikipedia in this respect is its often wretched prose. If an article appears to have been translated from the Magyar by robots, even credulous readers won’t take it too seriously.

The more serious concern is smoothly-written crap. Writers for prestigious journals are sometimes taken in. The misinformation Martin Filler got was inconsequential, but that’s not always true, particularly in the case of controversial subjects. Nature notes the long-running “edit war” over Wikipedia’s global warming article, in which an expert on the subject spent months fending off idiotic emendations by anonymous opponents.

OK, few world leaders look to Wikipedia for policy guidance. But on everyday matters, authentic-sounding nonsense can do real harm. A 2008 study comparing the accuracy of drug information on Wikipedia and Medscape found Wikipedia’s answers were less complete, contained more errors of omission, and provided no correct dosing information. (In fairness, Wikipedia made fewer factual errors.)

This isn’t to say nobody should use Wikipedia; quite the contrary. At the Straight Dope it’s often the first thing we look at, first for a quick fill on subjects of interest and second to get cites for dependable sources. Providing a starting point for further investigation is all nondelusional Wikipedia editors aspire to accomplish.

Many Wikipedia articles are now wisely prefaced with warnings about dubious aspects of what lies below. Probably it would be helpful if all popularizers, including Wikipedia, Britannica, and us at the Straight Dope, permanently emblazoned at the top of our pages BELIEVE NOTHING YOU READ HERE. IT MAY ALL BE LIES.

— Cecil Adams

Published encyclopaedias in addition have several disadvantages: costs (if you get a copy for your home), convenience (if you just look it up in the library), the comparative shortness of articles, little information on obscure topics, and lack of constant updates. For most research I'd just look up Wikipedia and then go to the actual books or articles on the subject for more info.

[Simon_Jester]

Personally- I prefer to skip the middleman if I'm serious.

I only use Wikipedia heavily when I'm not serious. In which case I expect to be corrected by any expert who shows up, especially on higher-order interpretation of what the article says, as the articles' tone is often a bit misleading to me.

Or when I simply need a reminder of something I already 'know,' but cannot easily recall. Say, "look up this trigonometric identity."

[mr friendly guy]

Oh man Ferguson. His earlier works are a bit interesting, especially considering his one about WWI, but he has been on a huge decline after that.

I just ordered his Ascent of Money on Amazon. But this article is rather disappointing...

A while ago entire episodes were uploaded on youtube. If you search enough you can find videos of his other series in case you are also thinking of buying the books.

Who needs fact checkers when you can just cross refference Wikipedia?

Its actually worse than that. Some news don't even bother to check wikipedia. For example Australian news continued to report the lie that its only us trying to tax carbon emissions, then grudgingly admitted Europe did it, but continued to lie that big emitters like India and China did not. Wiki says otherwise, and its easy to cross check wiki's own references by following to the source.

Personally- I prefer to skip the middleman if I'm serious.

I only use Wikipedia heavily when I'm not serious. In which case I expect to be corrected by any expert who shows up, especially on higher-order interpretation of what the article says, as the articles' tone is often a bit misleading to me.

Or when I simply need a reminder of something I already 'know,' but cannot easily recall. Say, "look up this trigonometric identity."

Yeah. I use wiki for those things as well. However its sad when news channels are less accurate than wikipedia. Its one of the reasons I have become more jaded and suspicious of news articles even from so called respected media.

[Ultonius]

I thought Ferguson's 'The War of the World' (the book, not the series, which I haven't seen) was very good.