Edit: Edited out the source in the link. Screw the link tracker.
🤓: Source?
:sicko-fem: : It came to me in a dream.
I’ve always been fascinated by the idea that you can create a person by adding them to our body of historical knowledge. Also, I wondered if I could leave America and then immigrate under a new name. Written facts can only contain so much about reality after all. My new identity would only be as real as the records that exist of me.
the substance of the article seems to be ‘chinese articles are weirdly longer than english or russian equivalents. this is because they make shit up.’ ummm maybe they just have a plethora of different primary and secondary sources than us?
It was only when he tried to go deeper that something started to seem off. Russian-language versions of articles related to the period were shorter than the Chinese equivalents, or nonexistent. The footnote supporting a passage on medieval mining methods referred to an academic paper on automated mining in the 21st century. Eventually, he realized that there was no such thing as the Kashen silver mine. Yifan had uncovered one of the largest hoaxes in Wikipedia’s history.
“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.
It wasn’t just that they were longer, it was that a lot of the added stuff was simply made up. Zhenmao, the woman responsible, has admitted this and apologised.
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.
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.”
Sixth Tone is in English and pitched to a Western Audience, but it’s still a CPC outlet based in Shanghai, I would be very surprised if they started putting out that sort of sinophobia.
So in other words, this is exactly what whitapedia in english is, except I imagine her stories about Russia were generally positive and exploratory rather than racial/political propaganda.
