6 ms·

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

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)

f38zf5vdt 4y ago
They are preserved in Wikipedia and ranked according to their longevity: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:List_of_hoaxes_on_Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:List_of_hoaxes_on_Wi... There's more or less a competition for them.
- dbtc 4y ago
  I suppose the real way to win would be to add a fake hoax to that page...
chaostheory 4y ago
I’m surprised that she doesn’t publish adapted novels based on her Wikipedia entries. Might be wrong, but both the Twilight series and 50 Shades of Gray series were initially fan fiction pieces by housewives who published their work on blogs. Alternate historical fiction is a very popular genre.
- semanticist 4y ago
  50 Shades of Grey was Twilight fanfic with the 'serial numbers filed off'. I don't think Twilight itself has fanfic in its origin.
  - memsom 4y ago
    I think Twilight was the first novel from the author and she pretty much wrote a transcript, and got a book deal off the back of it. She had little previous experience in writing novels and was just very, very lucky that it happened to all fall in to place... some first time novelists spend years trying to do what she did.
    - ghaff 4y ago
      Not to take away from hard work and talent but breaking into the arts in a big way--after which it's at least somewhat easier--must be, what, 90% luck.
- chaostheory 4y ago
  Forgot to add that Orson Welles started his Hollywood career pulling a much worse public deception.
  - staticman2 4y ago
    If you are referring to "War of the worlds " the radio broadcast indicates it is a audio drama. He couldn't have intended for people to think it is real just because the audio drama is in the form of a news broadcast.
    - chaostheory 4y ago
      The broadcast began with the usual announcement: "The Columbia Broadcasting System presents Orson Welles and his Mercury Theatre Players in a dramatization of H.G. Wells' novel, 'The War of the Worlds.'" Listeners heard a dance band playing languid Spanish numbers in the "Park-Astoria Hotel". The music was interrupted suddenly by a flash. It was announced that a professor in a university observatory in the Southwest had noticed a series of gas explosions on the planet Mars. They may have covered themselves legally, but it’s highly likely they intended to fool people https://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/war-worlds-broadcast-caos-1938-article-1.2406951 https://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/war-worlds-broadca...
      - staticman2 4y ago
        I'm not sure how that quote is supposed to show it was a prank? I think you are missing the nuance that radio was a young medium and the radio program was unrealistic and introduced as fiction, so it wouldn't have occurred to anyone what effect it would have on the audience. The people who were panicking for the most part heard the part about it being a radio production of war of the world' but their brain didn't process those words. Nobody could have expected that. The audience would have also been less media savvy than they would be today, so would react more naively than the producers might have expected to an early experimental example of a "found footage" program.
d0mine 4y ago
"false history" -- is there any other kind? It is like the difference between a cult and established religions: the main difference is scale and time.
- eru 4y ago
  If you have trouble with the concept of 'truth', just go by what's useful. That's eg why financial newspapers often stick closer to the truth: their readers want to be able to play the markets, so need something with a bit of a reality check, instead of just playing to their ideological preferences only.
  - robocat 4y ago
    > financial newspapers often stick closer to the truth Are you sure? From my limited experience, there is a huge amount of fictitious narrative in financial news. I just had a look at https://www.barrons.com/ https://www.barrons.com/ - hard to say how much is just opinions of the journalist, but not much looked fact based.
    - Kinrany 4y ago
      Older articles are easier to check for correctness.
      - robocat 4y ago
        If a journalist made random predictions, how would you know? If a journalist made a random prediction, and market participants believed the prediction, so the market then did what the journalist predicted, how would you know?
        eru 4y ago
        > If a journalist made random predictions, how would you know? If they consistently randomly get lucky, that's fine. Just check multiple stories to get a sense of the distribution. > If a journalist made a random prediction, and market participants believed the prediction, so the market then did what the journalist predicted, how would you know? If all you care about whether the prediction is accurate (so you can trade on it), you don't need to worry about the philosophical differences between an accurate prediction and a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Blikkentrekker 4y ago
> Writing such a plausible pseudo-account and convincing so many for so long is impressive. I find that in practice, the scary part is that it is not so impressive and that the thousand eyes are largely a lie. All too often have I seen such things go on for a long time without anyone noticing, or perhaps many noticing, but not being motivated to investigate and call out, or perhaps many even calling out, but their calls going unanswered.
- eru 4y ago
  And perhaps scarier: Wikipedia is one of the better policed places. If you work in a commercial publisher, there's less oversight.
  - ArnoVW 4y ago
    Well they don't have the same threat model. Teenagers and grifters can't edit as easily in the case of a commercial publisher. That's not to say that they don't have their flaws, or that they are superior to Wikipedia. Just that the analysis is off the mark.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- denton-scratch 4y ago
  I routinely find spam, vandalism and heavy POV-pushing in English WP. In general, I check the sources, and if they are absent or fail to support the article text, I correct them[0], or challenge them on the talk page. Do you? When you say you see such things going on without anybody noticing, presumably you noticed? [0] I don't generally edit articles on politically-sensitive topics. They are wargrounds, patrolled by tough gatekeepers. I take any information in WP about current affairs with a bushel of salt. But it's still better than, for example, mainstream media.
  - Blikkentrekker 4y ago
    I often notice after the fact when it blows up. Consider the situation with XScreenLock in Debian when it was found that the code had a timer in it that bugged people to update when using an unsupported version. Once the timer reached this point and many received this update, Debian immediately patched it to remove it as many found it annoying and it was a controversial move, but to me the most interesting part was that it was in the code, publically; it was added at one point,and no one at Debian knew. This timer that merely annoyed users into updating could just as easily been serious malware that no one would have noticed that lay dormant to awaken at a set date.
iforgotpassword 4y ago
Exactly my thoughts. This whole story is wild. Putting over 10 years of effort into this is mind bending. Some people really love to write. She must have gotten incredibly lost in her fictional world. I can only imagine it must have been the case here, and at some point it just happened to be that the medium she used was Wikipedia becuase that's where it all started for unrelated reasons.
- prox 4y ago
  She made a statement that she should learn a craft, but she already has one. She could definitely start writing a novel in her fictional world.
simula67 4y ago
The Assassins' Creed video game franchise weaves real history to it's fictional story line. Playing the game or watching the game movies on YouTube can yield interesting Wikipedia rabbit holes.
paulpauper 4y ago
It was the Chinese Wikipedia. It's not like it would be vetted as closely as the English version, so not that surprising it stayed up so long.
- hombre_fatal 4y ago
  Dunno. In uni I vandalized Wikipedia (oops, I mean created a hoax) with large, believable edits to generic/major articles like "Tree". My edits stayed up until I grew up years later, felt bad, and took them down. I don't think Wikipedia is as closely vetted as we assume. For one, it's just so much cheaper to create content than it is to verify it. It's pretty amazing that Wikipedia is generally as high quality as it is with this in mind. And one reason why is that I imagine these types of bad actors (vandals making convincing edits just to be a jerk) are relatively rare. I reckon most of Wikipedia's bad edits come from low-effort vandals and people trying to game high-value articles that have lots of eyeballs.
  - akolbe 4y ago
    Kozierok's Law accounts for much of this: "The apparent accuracy of a Wikipedia article is inversely proportional to the depth of the reader's knowledge of the topic."
  - thaumasiotes 4y ago
    > I don't think Wikipedia is as closely vetted as we assume. I keep finding gross errors in random pages that I visit for other reasons. For example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_toast https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_toast All of this article's references to French toast being described in the Roman Empire are straight-up lies. Interestingly, this is already noted on the talk page, but that has had no effect on the text of the article. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chen_Shimei_and_Qin_Xianglian https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chen_Shimei_and_Qin_Xianglian In the "History" section of this article, we see that the characters appeared in a book in 1595, and that they are based on a real-life official (and his wife) of the Qing dynasty, which began in 1644.
    - 4y ago
t_mann 4y ago
While I understand your initial reaction, I implore you to think again about the potential consequences of her actions. As a not-so-far-fetched example, remember that QAnon started out as a similar sort of 'blended reality fiction' (before it was likely overtaken by state-level propaganda agents). The only difference is that QAnon was based on giving a new interpretation to reputable third-party texts, while this goes one step further to actually fabricate seemingly original texts by a reputable source - I'd argue that's even worse.

f38zf5vdt 4y ago

They are preserved in Wikipedia and ranked according to their longevity: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:List_of_hoaxes_on_Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:List_of_hoaxes_on_Wi... There's more or less a competition for them.

dbtc 4y ago
I suppose the real way to win would be to add a fake hoax to that page...

chaostheory 4y ago

I’m surprised that she doesn’t publish adapted novels based on her Wikipedia entries. Might be wrong, but both the Twilight series and 50 Shades of Gray series were initially fan fiction pieces by housewives who published their work on blogs. Alternate historical fiction is a very popular genre.

semanticist 4y ago
50 Shades of Grey was Twilight fanfic with the 'serial numbers filed off'. I don't think Twilight itself has fanfic in its origin.
- memsom 4y ago
  I think Twilight was the first novel from the author and she pretty much wrote a transcript, and got a book deal off the back of it. She had little previous experience in writing novels and was just very, very lucky that it happened to all fall in to place... some first time novelists spend years trying to do what she did.
  - ghaff 4y ago
    Not to take away from hard work and talent but breaking into the arts in a big way--after which it's at least somewhat easier--must be, what, 90% luck.
chaostheory 4y ago
Forgot to add that Orson Welles started his Hollywood career pulling a much worse public deception.
- staticman2 4y ago
  If you are referring to "War of the worlds " the radio broadcast indicates it is a audio drama. He couldn't have intended for people to think it is real just because the audio drama is in the form of a news broadcast.
  - chaostheory 4y ago
    The broadcast began with the usual announcement: "The Columbia Broadcasting System presents Orson Welles and his Mercury Theatre Players in a dramatization of H.G. Wells' novel, 'The War of the Worlds.'" Listeners heard a dance band playing languid Spanish numbers in the "Park-Astoria Hotel". The music was interrupted suddenly by a flash. It was announced that a professor in a university observatory in the Southwest had noticed a series of gas explosions on the planet Mars. They may have covered themselves legally, but it’s highly likely they intended to fool people https://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/war-worlds-broadcast-caos-1938-article-1.2406951 https://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/war-worlds-broadca...
    - staticman2 4y ago
      I'm not sure how that quote is supposed to show it was a prank? I think you are missing the nuance that radio was a young medium and the radio program was unrealistic and introduced as fiction, so it wouldn't have occurred to anyone what effect it would have on the audience. The people who were panicking for the most part heard the part about it being a radio production of war of the world' but their brain didn't process those words. Nobody could have expected that. The audience would have also been less media savvy than they would be today, so would react more naively than the producers might have expected to an early experimental example of a "found footage" program.

d0mine 4y ago

"false history" -- is there any other kind? It is like the difference between a cult and established religions: the main difference is scale and time.

eru 4y ago
If you have trouble with the concept of 'truth', just go by what's useful. That's eg why financial newspapers often stick closer to the truth: their readers want to be able to play the markets, so need something with a bit of a reality check, instead of just playing to their ideological preferences only.
- robocat 4y ago
  > financial newspapers often stick closer to the truth Are you sure? From my limited experience, there is a huge amount of fictitious narrative in financial news. I just had a look at https://www.barrons.com/ https://www.barrons.com/ - hard to say how much is just opinions of the journalist, but not much looked fact based.
  - Kinrany 4y ago
    Older articles are easier to check for correctness.
    - robocat 4y ago
      If a journalist made random predictions, how would you know? If a journalist made a random prediction, and market participants believed the prediction, so the market then did what the journalist predicted, how would you know?
      - eru 4y ago
        > If a journalist made random predictions, how would you know? If they consistently randomly get lucky, that's fine. Just check multiple stories to get a sense of the distribution. > If a journalist made a random prediction, and market participants believed the prediction, so the market then did what the journalist predicted, how would you know? If all you care about whether the prediction is accurate (so you can trade on it), you don't need to worry about the philosophical differences between an accurate prediction and a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Blikkentrekker 4y ago

> Writing such a plausible pseudo-account and convincing so many for so long is impressive. I find that in practice, the scary part is that it is not so impressive and that the thousand eyes are largely a lie. All too often have I seen such things go on for a long time without anyone noticing, or perhaps many noticing, but not being motivated to investigate and call out, or perhaps many even calling out, but their calls going unanswered.

eru 4y ago
And perhaps scarier: Wikipedia is one of the better policed places. If you work in a commercial publisher, there's less oversight.
- ArnoVW 4y ago
  Well they don't have the same threat model. Teenagers and grifters can't edit as easily in the case of a commercial publisher. That's not to say that they don't have their flaws, or that they are superior to Wikipedia. Just that the analysis is off the mark.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
denton-scratch 4y ago
I routinely find spam, vandalism and heavy POV-pushing in English WP. In general, I check the sources, and if they are absent or fail to support the article text, I correct them[0], or challenge them on the talk page. Do you? When you say you see such things going on without anybody noticing, presumably you noticed? [0] I don't generally edit articles on politically-sensitive topics. They are wargrounds, patrolled by tough gatekeepers. I take any information in WP about current affairs with a bushel of salt. But it's still better than, for example, mainstream media.
- Blikkentrekker 4y ago
  I often notice after the fact when it blows up. Consider the situation with XScreenLock in Debian when it was found that the code had a timer in it that bugged people to update when using an unsupported version. Once the timer reached this point and many received this update, Debian immediately patched it to remove it as many found it annoying and it was a controversial move, but to me the most interesting part was that it was in the code, publically; it was added at one point,and no one at Debian knew. This timer that merely annoyed users into updating could just as easily been serious malware that no one would have noticed that lay dormant to awaken at a set date.

iforgotpassword 4y ago

Exactly my thoughts. This whole story is wild. Putting over 10 years of effort into this is mind bending. Some people really love to write. She must have gotten incredibly lost in her fictional world. I can only imagine it must have been the case here, and at some point it just happened to be that the medium she used was Wikipedia becuase that's where it all started for unrelated reasons.

prox 4y ago
She made a statement that she should learn a craft, but she already has one. She could definitely start writing a novel in her fictional world.

simula67 4y ago

The Assassins' Creed video game franchise weaves real history to it's fictional story line. Playing the game or watching the game movies on YouTube can yield interesting Wikipedia rabbit holes.

paulpauper 4y ago

It was the Chinese Wikipedia. It's not like it would be vetted as closely as the English version, so not that surprising it stayed up so long.

hombre_fatal 4y ago
Dunno. In uni I vandalized Wikipedia (oops, I mean created a hoax) with large, believable edits to generic/major articles like "Tree". My edits stayed up until I grew up years later, felt bad, and took them down. I don't think Wikipedia is as closely vetted as we assume. For one, it's just so much cheaper to create content than it is to verify it. It's pretty amazing that Wikipedia is generally as high quality as it is with this in mind. And one reason why is that I imagine these types of bad actors (vandals making convincing edits just to be a jerk) are relatively rare. I reckon most of Wikipedia's bad edits come from low-effort vandals and people trying to game high-value articles that have lots of eyeballs.
- akolbe 4y ago
  Kozierok's Law accounts for much of this: "The apparent accuracy of a Wikipedia article is inversely proportional to the depth of the reader's knowledge of the topic."
- thaumasiotes 4y ago
  > I don't think Wikipedia is as closely vetted as we assume. I keep finding gross errors in random pages that I visit for other reasons. For example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_toast https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_toast All of this article's references to French toast being described in the Roman Empire are straight-up lies. Interestingly, this is already noted on the talk page, but that has had no effect on the text of the article. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chen_Shimei_and_Qin_Xianglian https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chen_Shimei_and_Qin_Xianglian In the "History" section of this article, we see that the characters appeared in a book in 1595, and that they are based on a real-life official (and his wife) of the Qing dynasty, which began in 1644.
  - 4y ago

t_mann 4y ago

While I understand your initial reaction, I implore you to think again about the potential consequences of her actions. As a not-so-far-fetched example, remember that QAnon started out as a similar sort of 'blended reality fiction' (before it was likely overtaken by state-level propaganda agents). The only difference is that QAnon was based on giving a new interpretation to reputable third-party texts, while this goes one step further to actually fabricate seemingly original texts by a reputable source - I'd argue that's even worse.