Dude! Young Americans Trust Business Magazines More Than Wikipedia!

I suspect business magazines get a much lower score among people that were reading them 25 years ago. When Forbes was published by Malcolm Forbes, and edited by James W. Michaels, it was a brilliant magazine, that demanded similar efforts by other business magazines to not be left in the dust. There's nobody out there, these days, inspiring competition. Similarly, I suspect Wikipedia gets much higher scores from people who aren't very familiar with it. In theory, they don't aspire to truth, but only to repeating what can be found in reliable sources, which would be adequate if you could follow their statements of fact back to the original source to verify them. In practice, much of Wikipedia is controlled by individuals who have too much time on their hands, and too much tinfoil in their hats.

The company I founded, MyWikiBiz.com, sought to assist both companies of noteworthy status and Wikipedia (lacking articles about such companies) to create freely-licensed content about such companies that was "ready for scraping" into Wikipedia by unpaid, independent editors. Jimmy Wales in fact endorsed this business plan; however, after about 6 weeks of successful operation, I e-mailed a question to Jimmy Wales, asking if the Wikipedia community's recently developed "Conflict of Interest" guideline superceded our agreement. Jimbo's response was to go bat-fruit insane on my Wikipedia account, block it, write a defamatory screed on my User page, and then trash an article I had written about the company Arch Coal. Wales called that article a "PR puff piece" and "a travesty of neutral point of view". Fortunately, the rest of the Wikipedia community saw that the article was just a simple, helpfully descriptive stub of an article about a coal-mining company, and the article was restored. But not before an overzealous administrator plagiarized the original, then introduced his version as "his own work, ab initio". Fifteen months later, that administrator even went so far as to DELETE the original version, so that there would be no evidence of his plagiarism! It is a mixed-up, corrupt, upside-down world at Wikipedia, when it comes to paid editing. They have a Reward Board which pays cash for edits, but when an outside firm tries to duplicate a similar process -- in the bright sunlight of full disclosure -- they're run out of Wikipedia on a rail. Meanwhile, Jimbo makes $100,000 a pop for speaking engagements about Wikipedia. It would seem the primary rule about money and Wikipedia is: "Jimbo is the only one allowed to profit from Wikipedia."

Josh, where did you obtain that chart, which is isolated on the US data only? I've looked at the Edelman PDF report, and they only show this data in the global aggregate, where Wikipedia ranks 7th -- noticeably lower than in the US.

Your are correct that Edelman is Global survey, but this chart is clearly a subtabulation. The chart was buried deep in the report. YOu can find it by going to this link: http://www.edelman.com/TRUST/2008/TrustBarometer08_FINAL.pdf Now scroll all the way down to page 14.

Second, just because young people find the editorial trustworthy in magazines doesn't mean they actually read them with any degree of frequency.