Wickedpedia by Chris Van Etten

Van Etten, Chris.  Wickedpedia. Scholastic.  $9.99pb  June 24, 2014. 0545415873.  Grades 5 to 8.   OK, is this the season of social media scare for tweens or maybe warn you against poor source evaluation choices.  This is the second book to debut on the same day where an online site has been hacked.  This time it’s the open source site Wikipedia.  What starts off as a prank turns to reality real quick when our protagonist hacks into the bios of historical figures and does the ultimate, revises the info to be factually WRONG, but after all, isn’t that the reason why most librarians encourage students to use Wikipedia only for pop culture but not as a resource for your school research project.   Being high of the power from successfully opening up a new page on an enemy from school and predicting the death of this person turns sour when the student’s death becomes reality.  Now our protagonist has a bio page opened with his name along with his predicted death, but he doesn’t know who made the post!  OMG!  Sounds familiar to “The Followers” by Anna Davies (see review below).