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]
 | This section needs editing to comply with Wikipedia's Manual of Style/Layout#"See also" section.(May 2024) |
The German Wikipedia is the German-language edition of Wikipedia, a free and publicly editable online encyclopedia.
The Russian Wikipedia is the Russian-language edition of Wikipedia. As of May 2024, it has 1,978,367 articles. It was started on 11 May 2001. In October 2015, it became the sixth-largest Wikipedia by the number of articles. It has the sixth-largest number of edits (137 million). In June 2020, it was the world's sixth most visited language Wikipedia.
Henryk Batuta was a hoax article on the Polish Wikipedia from November 2004 to February 2006, the main element of which was a biographical article about a nonexistent socialist revolutionary, Henryk Batuta.
The free online encyclopedia Wikipedia has been criticized since its creation in 2001. Most of the criticism has been directed toward its content, community of established volunteer users, process, and rules. Critics have questioned its factual reliability, the readability and organization of its articles, the lack of methodical fact-checking, and its political bias. Concerns have also been raised about systemic bias along gender, racial, political, corporate, institutional, and national lines. Conflicts of interest arising from corporate campaigns to influence content have also been highlighted. Further concerns include the vandalism and partisanship facilitated by anonymous editing, clique behavior, social stratification between a guardian class and newer users, excessive rule-making, edit warring, and uneven policy application.
The reliability of Wikipedia and its user-generated editing model, particularly its English-language edition, has been questioned and tested. Wikipedia is written and edited by volunteer editors who generate online content with the editorial oversight of other volunteer editors via community-generated policies and guidelines. The reliability of the project has been tested statistically through comparative review, analysis of the historical patterns, and strengths and weaknesses inherent in its editing process. The online encyclopedia has been criticized for its factual unreliability, principally regarding its content, presentation, and editorial processes. Studies and surveys attempting to gauge the reliability of Wikipedia have mixed results. Wikipedia's reliability was frequently criticized in the 2000s but has been improved; it has been generally praised in the late 2010s and early 2020s.
Conservapedia is an English-language, wiki-based, online encyclopedia written from a self-described American conservative and fundamentalist Christian point of view. The website was established in 2006 by American homeschool teacher and attorney Andrew Schlafly, son of the conservative activist Phyllis Schlafly, to counter what he perceived as a liberal bias in Wikipedia. It uses editorials and a wiki-based system for content generation.
Atheism, in the broadest sense, is an absence of belief in the existence of deities. Less broadly, atheism is a rejection of the belief that any deities exist. In an even narrower sense, atheism is specifically the position that there are no deities. Atheism is contrasted with theism, which in its most general form is the belief that at least one deity exists.
Deletionpedia was an online archive wiki containing articles deleted from the English Wikipedia. Its version of each article included a header with more information about the deletion such as whether a speedy deletion occurred, where the deletion discussion about the article can be found and which editor deleted the article. The original Deletionpedia operated from February to September 2008. The site was restarted under new management in December 2013.
Deletionism and inclusionism are opposing philosophies that largely developed within the community of volunteer editors of the online encyclopedia Wikipedia. The terms reflect differing opinions on the appropriate scope of the encyclopedia and corresponding tendencies either to delete or to include a given encyclopedia article.
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.
On Wikipedia, vandalism is editing the project in an intentionally disruptive or malicious manner. Vandalism includes any addition, removal, or modification that is intentionally humorous, nonsensical, a hoax, offensive, libelous or degrading in any way.
Censorship of Wikipedia by governments has occurred widely in countries including China, Iran, Myanmar, Pakistan, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Tunisia, Turkey, Uzbekistan, and Venezuela. Some instances are examples of widespread Internet censorship in general that includes Wikipedia content. Others are indicative of measures to prevent the viewing of specific content deemed offensive. The duration of different blocks has varied from hours to years.
Wikipediocracy is a website for discussion and criticism of Wikipedia. Its members have brought information about Wikipedia's controversies to the attention of the media. The site was founded in March 2012 by users of Wikipedia Review, another site critical of Wikipedia.
National Report is a fake news website that posts fictional articles related to world events. It is described by Snopes.com as a fake news site, by FactCheck.org as a satirical site, and by The Washington Post as part of a fake-news industry, making profits from "duping gullible Internet users with deceptively newsy headlines." The National Report describes itself as a "news and political satire web publication" and provides a disclaimer that "all news articles contained within National Report are fiction".
Pizza Rat is an internet meme based around a viral video of a brown rat carrying a slice of pizza down the steps of a New York City Subway station in Manhattan. The video was first uploaded to Instagram on September 21, 2015, and a copy was uploaded to YouTube later. As of September 2023, the YouTube video has more than 12.35 million views.
Loser.com is a domain name that has existed as a URL redirect to several different web pages during most of its existence.
Various publications and commentators have predicted the end of Wikipedia since it rose to prominence. Multiple potential dangers have been proposed, such as poor quality control and inconsistent editors/administrators.
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).
The Zhemao hoaxes were a series of over 200 interconnected Wikipedia articles about falsified aspects of medieval Russian history written from 2012 to 2022 by an editor of the Chinese Wikipedia. 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. It has been described as one of Wikipedia's largest hoaxes.
