A Chinese Wikipedia Editor Spent Years Writing Fake Russian Medieval History
upstart writes:
A Chinese Wikipedia editor spent years writing fake Russian medieval history:
Chinese Wikipedia had a robust collection of detailed and authoritative articles on medieval Russia, thanks to a user called Zhemao who claimed to be the daughter of a diplomat assigned in the country. Zhemao wrote 206 articles for the website since 2019 [...] The articles she contributed were so well-written and well-regarded, until it was revealed that she'd pulled off one of the largest hoaxes ever seen on the platform.
[...] A group of volunteer editors combed through her work as a response and found that her citations didn't add up or that she fabricated information from legitimate sources that were too obscure to be fact-checked by casual users. As a crowd-sourced online encyclopedia, Wikipedia trusts its contributors to self-regulate. In an article about its reliability, Wikipedia said it maintains an inclusion threshold of "verifiability, not truth."
A volunteer editor who's been helping clean up articles Zhemao contributed to told Vice News that they only typically check articles for blatant plagiarism and to ensure that they're properly cited. That is why vandalism is a common occurrence on the website and why its reputation as a legitimate source of knowledge is frequently challenged.
Zhemao, in a post on her profile, has admitted to making up her whole identity and to fabricating information. She came clean that she's not based in Russia and that her husband is not Russian but Chinese. She also doesn't have a doctoral degree in world history from the Moscow State University like she claimed, but is instead a housewife with a high school diploma.
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