Jar'Edo Wens was a deliberately fictitious Wikipedia article which existed for almost 10 years before being spotted in November 2014 and deleted in March 2015. At the time, it was the longest-lasting hoax article discovered in the history of Wikipedia.
The "Jar'Edo Wens" article was created on May 29, 2005. It was only two sentences in length and cited no sources. It claimed to be about an Australian Aboriginal god "of earthly knowledge and physical might, created by Altjira to ensure that people did not get too arrogant or self-conceited" that "is associated with victory and intelligence." It was likely simply the name "Jared Owens", with different spacing, punctuation, and casing. [1] [2] [3] [4] [5]
The author, an unregistered user at an Australian IP address, [4] was active for eleven minutes in May 2005; their only other contribution was to also add "Yohrmum" (likely being a re-spelling of "Your Mum") to a list of Australian deities. This was more quickly spotted and removed, but it was almost a decade before the "Jar'Edo Wens" article was detected and deleted.
During its nearly decade-long existence, the "Jar'Edo Wens" hoax article was translated into other language editions of Wikipedia, including French, Polish, Russian, and Turkish. Two language editions additionally included the shorter-lived "yohrmum" page. An entry was also created on Wikidata.
The hoax was unwittingly copied into a book on atheism in 2012, as part of a list of 500 "gods and religions in history that have fallen out of favour". [5] [6]
The hoax lasted nine years, nine months, and three days on Wikipedia. [7] New article creation was later restricted to registered users after the Seigenthaler incident in September 2005; although this made new fake articles more difficult to establish, existing hoax articles (especially low-trafficked ones) could more easily go unnoticed. [8]
In 2009, the article was tagged with the classification "multiple issues", including a lack of sources. [9] However, it was only in November 2014 that the article was flagged as a possible hoax. It was finally proposed for deletion on March 1, 2015, and the deletion was confirmed two days later by an administrator. Wikipediocracy , a website for Wikipedia criticism, publicised the hoax on March 15, 2015, [10] after which it was widely reported by more general news sites. [4]
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In May 2005, an unregistered editor posted a hoax article onto Wikipedia about journalist John Seigenthaler. The article falsely stated that Seigenthaler had been a suspect in the assassinations of U.S. President John F. Kennedy and U.S. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy.
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Volunteer editors of Wikipedia delete articles from the online encyclopedia regularly, following processes that have been formulated by the site's community over time. The most common route is the outright deletion of articles that clearly violate the rules of the website. Other mechanisms include an intermediate collaborative process that bypasses a complete discussion, and a whole debate at the dedicated forum called Articles for deletion (AfD). As a technical action, deletion can only be done by a subset of editors assigned particular specialized privileges by the community, called administrators. An omission that has been carried out can be contested by appeal to the deleting administrator or on another discussion board called Deletion review (DRV).
From 2012 to 2022, Zhemao, an editor of the Chinese Wikipedia, created over 200 interconnected articles about falsified aspects of medieval Russian history in one of Wikipedia's largest hoaxes. Combining research and fantasy, the articles were fictive embellishments on real entities, as Zhemao used machine translation to understand Russian-language sources and invented elaborate detail to fill gaps in the translation. She started this practice as early as 2010 on Chinese history topics, but turned to Russian history in 2012, and the political interactions of medieval Slavic states in particular. Many of her hoax articles were created to fill detail in her initial fabrications. Zhemao eluded detection for over a decade by obtaining the community's trust: faking a persona as a Russian history scholar, using sockpuppet accounts to feign support, and exploiting the community's good faith that her obscure sources matched the article content.
