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Institutional Authority Has Vanished. Wikipedia Points to the Answer

NextGov: “What the United States needs if it hopes to combat misinformation is a better system for communicating with the public—a system that keeps up with continuous changes in scientific knowledge; that incorporates expertise from people in a variety of fields, not just those anointed with official titles at well-known institutions; and that weaves dissenting perspectives into a larger narrative without overemphasizing them. Fortunately, the internet has produced a model for this approach: Wikipedia. The crowdsourced reference site is the simplest, most succinct summary of the current state of knowledge on almost any subject you can imagine. If an agency such as the CDC launched a health-information site, and gave a community of hundreds or thousands of knowledgeable people the ability to edit it, the outcome would be far more complete and up-to-date than individual press releases. The same model—tapping distributed expertise rather than relying on institutional authority—could be useful for other government agencies that find themselves confronting rumors…” [h/t Pete Weiss]

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