8 votes

She spent a decade writing fake Russian history. Wikipedia just noticed.

2 comments

  1. skybrian
    Link
    From the article:

    From the article:

    “Chinese Wikipedia entries that are more detailed than English Wikipedia and even Russian Wikipedia are all over the place,” Yifan wrote on Zhihu, a Quora-like Q&A platform. “Characters that don’t exist in the English-Russian Wiki appear in the Chinese Wiki, and these characters are mixed together with real historical figures so that there’s no telling the real from the fake. Even a lengthy Moscow-Tver war revolves around the non-existent Kashen silver mine.”

    An investigation by Wikipedia found that a contributor had used at least four “puppet accounts” to falsify the history of the Qing Dynasty and the history of Russia since 2010. Each of the four accounts lent the others credibility. All have now been banned from Chinese Wikipedia.

    Over more than 10 years, the author wrote several million words of fake Russian history, creating 206 articles and contributing to hundreds more. She imagined richly detailed war stories and economic histories, and wove them into real events in language boring enough to fit seamlessly into the encyclopedia. Some netizens are calling her China’s Borges.

    5 votes
  2. cmccabe
    Link
    This reminds me of the case a few years ago of a non-Scots-speaking U.S. teenager who compulsively wrote half of the Scots language Wikipedia entries. Nobody was comparing him to Borges though....

    This reminds me of the case a few years ago of a non-Scots-speaking U.S. teenager who compulsively wrote half of the Scots language Wikipedia entries. Nobody was comparing him to Borges though.

    Shock an aw: US teenager wrote huge slice of Scots Wikipedia
    https://amp.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/aug/26/shock-an-aw-us-teenager-wrote-huge-slice-of-scots-wikipedia

    The Scots Wikipedia entry on the Canada goose – or “Canadae guiss” – was at first honest about its provenance. A tag warned: “The ‘Scots’ that wis uised in this airticle wis written bi a body that’s mither tongue isna Scots. Please impruive this airticle gin ye can.”

    But, as the author grew in confidence, so he removed the caveat, and continued on his Scots-writing spree.

    Now an American teenager – who does not speak Scots, the language of Robert Burns – has been revealed as responsible for almost half of the entries on the Scots language version of Wikipedia.

    4 votes