I imagine that this subject will be of interest and concern to educators, including those who teach in the Wikipedia in Education Program. Here is a thought-provoking newspaper column about a University of Washington professor's troubling findings: http://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/politics/uw-professor-the-information-war-is-real-and-were-losing-it/

Quoting briefly from the article:

"Starbird is publishing her paper as a sort of warning. The information networks we’ve built are almost perfectly designed to exploit psychological vulnerabilities to rumor."

"Your brain tells you ‘Hey, I got this from three different sources,’ ” she says. “But you don’t realize it all traces back to the same place, and might have even reached you via bots posing as real people. If we think of this as a virus, I wouldn’t know how to vaccinate for it.”

Pine

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