All the comments here are positive, the range is from slightly amused to comparing her to Borges (rofl).<p>I didn't like it the moment I heard this, but now contrarian mode has kicked in:<p>Why isn't this destruction of essential information infrastructure?
Why isn't this a 'fuck you' to the millions of volunteer hours W is based on?
Why isn't this potentially infecting millions of minds with lies?<p>Why isn't this absolutely deplorable?<p>(COI Statement: i am a wikipedia editor for 15+ years, I am a member of my local wikimedia chapter)
This false history is a literary achievement. Writing such a plausible pseudo-account and convincing so many for so long is impressive. I guess they should take it all down but I'm kind of sad that there aren't any comparable projects (note: I'm aware that there are wikis devoted to creating fictional worlds, but these worlds are rarely historically grounded or plausible)
> Zhemao published an apology letter on her English Wikipedia account, writing that her motivation was to learn about history. She also wrote that she is in fact a full-time housewife with only a high-school degree.<p>This is not the full story, she originally said the motive was to win online debates with wikipedia references (created by her alias account)
There was a similar scandal for the Scots wikipedia:<p><a href="https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/aug/26/shock-an-aw-us-teenager-wrote-huge-slice-of-scots-wikipedia" rel="nofollow">https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/aug/26/shock-an-aw-...</a>
It’s hard to not see this as Borges’ “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” come to life. For a hoax, it’s still an impressive feat of fictional world building.<p>cf. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tl%C3%B6n,_Uqbar,_Orbis_Tertius" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tl%C3%B6n,_Uqbar,_Orbis_Tertiu...</a>
Michael Scott: "Wikipedia is the best thing ever. Anyone in the world can write anything they want about any subject, so you know you are getting the best possible information."
Borges, Umberto Eco, Thomas Pynchon, and Danilo Kiš would be proud; what else is the world's historical narrative but an edit war?<p>Such a fantastical lie wrapped around such utter banality; surely this will warrant her own Wikipedia article.
I gave up on wikipedia after adding beautiful photos of relevant chemical reactions I performed during University and watching random accounts remove them for no reason and replace them with... nothing.
I hope these articles are just mirrored onto a separate wiki site where more people can jump in and elaborate on the alt-world history that Zhemao started. Unfortunately I can't read Chinese, but I do for some reason find fake but entirely real feeling historical accounts very compelling.
Wikipedia has an article on Magyaráb people.<p>They do not exist. First a Hungarian aristocrat was hoodwinked by some locals for money in Egypt in the 1930s, then a Hungarian student spending two semesters Cairo in the 1960s rewarmed the issue to prove his worth and successfully sold himself as an expert of all things Arabic in Hungary -- he never managed to get even a degree -- then finally in the nineties a far right weekly dug up the story for nationalistic purposes.<p>Finally an expedition was sent in 2006-2007 which have found with absolute surety these people do not exist. Their report is linked from wikipedia.<p>I tried to correct the article, I tried to delete the article, it was refused saying it's notorious enough to have an article on Wikipedia ... ... ... seriously?<p>Similarly, Hungarian prehistory on Wikipedia is completely outdated. Most of the "primary sources" it lists are completely unreliable, they were not even written with the intent of being reliable history wise (the The Annals of Fulda and The Annals of St-Bertin being remarkable exceptions). It notes "their reliability ... is suspect" ignoring Tamás Hölbling absolutely tearing them apart in 2010 in his two volume massive source criticism book. They are much closer to a comic book today than a historical book. It completely omits all the remarkable archaeogenetic findings since 2008. It completely ignores an absolutely groundbreaking symposium held in 1999 (they brought together researchers Indo-European and Uralic both archeological and linguistic, this was never done before), second edition can be found at <a href="https://www.sgr.fi/sust/SUST242.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://www.sgr.fi/sust/SUST242.pdf</a> . Overall, the Wikipedia article reflects the scientific consensus of the 1970s or so.<p>I tried to fix <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abu_Abdallah_Jayhani" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abu_Abdallah_Jayhani</a> because Gayhani is incorrect, one spelling which could be used is Ğayhānī (eg <a href="https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/islm.1998.75.2.259/html" rel="nofollow">https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/islm.1998.75....</a>) it got reverted with "The other names in the lead are not supposed to have custom alphabets or whatever they're called." Whatever, eh? But hilariously enough, Wikipedia itself has an article on the romanization of Persian and you can check that article and see for yourself that "G" in itself is never used to transliterate a persian letter no matter which scheme you pick... but whatever!<p>I gave up on trying to fix Wikipedia.
This person should get together with the random brony who messed with the Scottish language Wikipedia.<p><a href="https://www.google.com/search?q=scots+Wikipedia+brony&oq=scots+Wikipedia+brony&aqs=chrome..69i57.7308j0j7&gs_lcrp=EgZjaHJvbWUyBggAEEUYOdIBCDczMDhqMGo3qAIAsAIA&sourceid=chrome-mobile&ie=UTF-8" rel="nofollow">https://www.google.com/search?q=scots+Wikipedia+brony&oq=sco...</a>
<i>Launched on April 6 [2016], garnering some immediate attention from the Western China-watching community, Sixth Tone is a Chinese invention: a media start-up under party oversight that features a slick, attractive website and appealing headlines designed to entice Western readers.</i><p>It's working.<p><a href="https://foreignpolicy.com/2016/06/03/china-explained-sixth-tone-is-chinas-latest-party-approved-outlet-humanizing-news/" rel="nofollow">https://foreignpolicy.com/2016/06/03/china-explained-sixth-t...</a>
How beautiful is her apology . From the article:<p>Zhemao said she made most of her fake entries to fill the gaps left by her first couple of entries she edited. “As the saying goes, in order to tell a lie, you must tell more lies. I was reluctant to delete the hundreds of thousands of words I wrote, but as a result, I wound up losing millions of words, and a circle of academic friends collapsed,” she wrote. “The trouble I’ve caused is hard to make up for, so maybe a permanent ban is the only option. My current knowledge is not enough to make a living, so in the future I will learn a craft, work honestly, and not do nebulous things like this any more.”
A "fictional Wikipedia" seems like a nice project. Something that could grow organically from contributors with an effort to cross-link and cross-reference.<p>Is there anything like this?
"This Tweet links to a China state-affiliated media website. Find out more".<p>This is what I am seing on Twitter linking the above article. A good additional information.
When I was a kid, I enjoyed making up fake history and fake world political map just for fun lol, I also designed flags for each county I came up with. Great time.
all history is narrative, with a greater or lesser degree of fidelity to reality. This example should be preserved in some way to remind us of this important fact
I don't think it's too surprising that stuff like can happen on a non-English Wikipedia. The English one has superb moderation and reliability, but other languages range in quality from pretty good to complete garbage. It's a shame because often the only comprehensive article written about something will be in another language.
I wonder if you could extract all of her contributions as a patch and use one of the deep learning language models to fill in the gaps. Maybe there's a great work hidden in there.
It's worth noting that sixthtone is a Chinese state-affiliated website. But the link to the community investigation on Chinese Wikipedia bears them out.
While it is admittedly amusing, methinks it's not harmless at all. Vandalism of this sort undermines the legitimacy of information sources more broadly. It was in fact a deliberate tactic of (incidentally Russian) propaganda outlets like RT to mix actual facts with fairly obvious lies and the appearance of a "mainstream" news source. The resulting effect that it had on consumers was that they'd say things like 'yeah, some things there are lies, but there are lies on both sides, you can't really trust any of them'. Or remember QAnon, which also derived its original success from blending authentic information sources with fabrications.<p>I'm not implying that she intended anything of that sort (although some of the other comments suggest that she may have used the fabrications to her advantage in smaller settings), but that her actions could have ended up producing similar results.<p>This is decidedly different from deliberate world-building that takes inspiration from the real and mixes it with the fictional, like what Tolkien did. It would have been exponentially harder to get anyone to care about her stories if they hadn't come with the wikipedia veneer (somewhat sadly, it might be easier for her now that she got global media attention).
> some Wikipedia editors warned that the incident had “shaken the credibility of the current Chinese Wikipedia as a whole<p>That might have been the goal all along.
America has probably rewritten history more times than we'd like to acknowledge. There are some countries that will jail you for questioning the official narratives. I have a feeling America is headed in that direction, one ideology or another.. eventually if you question it you will be labeled some sort of name to elicit the worst reactions from people towards you.