Praise be to the Wikipedia scraper sites!
http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/ent ... m_conflict
Edit: Hmmm... the page history only goes back to 2009 though. Darn.

Praise be to the Wikipedia scraper sites!

http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/ent ... m_conflict

Edit: Hmmm... the page history only goes back to 2009 though. Darn.

Don't forget to thank the Moonies, for doing this--I doubt they were paid to do it.

Anyone save a copy of it?

And of course, they obliterated the edit history, so we can't see who did it.

Anyone save a copy of it?

And of course, they obliterated the edit history, so we can't see who did it.

...I've been looking at the Tauroctony article and rescuing whatever seemed actually reliable. That means checking every reference, which, I have found, almost nobody does. When I used to give a reference, I quoted the source, so readers could see that I wasn't faking. After all, anyone can claim to have seen a reference; but word-for-word quotes are harder to fake, and easier to check.

A claim that a monument, CIMRM 593, dates to 100 AD caught my eye. That's a very precise date - monuments are often undateable. And the claim is given 4 references. I'm paranoid, so I looked up #1 (Clauss). The page number is wrong (nothing on p.118). When I search the book for CIMRM 593, he refers to it twice, both times as dating to "first quarter of 2nd century".

So I look up #2 (Beck). The page seems reasonable, but I don't see the statement there.

Somehow I didn't bother with the other 2 references, which even I don't have access to.

Yet how many people could do that checking? Funnily enough the editor who added that material gave the impression (to me anyway) of having some idea.

References seem increasingly to be used as a way to "pin" material in an article and deter edits, rather than to inform the reader.

A 17th Century international conflict has finally been laid to rest, nearly 400 years after it never happened. Wait a second. Are you feeling confused?

That story has become really big; it's all over Twitter, Facebook and Reddit. Now also in Yahoo News.

That's nothing, Gaius Flavius Antoninus was around for over 8 years! See Wikipedia:List of hoaxes on Wikipedia. In the case of Chen Fang, present for over 7 years, the author was a Harvard student attempting to expose the limitations of Wikipedia. There are many hoaxes on Wikipedia, both found and unfound, and we do our best to deal with them as we find them, but it is very difficult to combat a determined and smart hoax author, who is not above fabricating hard-to-access source materials. On the plus side, hoaxes generally do little harm, other than mislead people into thinking something exists when in fact it does not. The best way to fight hoaxes I think is just plain old fact-checking - experts read articles in their area and can smell when something is off. See for example this discussion about Bunaka, in which the claims of implausible water temperatures quickly drew suspicion from experts. Dcoetzee 00:05, 4 January 2013 (UTC)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk: ... n_the_news

I owe the discovery of Uqbar to the conjunction of a mirror and an encyclopedia. The mirror troubled the depths of a corridor in a country house on Gaona Street in Ramos Mejia; the encyclopedia is fallaciously called The Anglo-American Cyclopaedia (New York, 1917) and is a literal but delinquent reprint of the Encyclopedia Britannica of 1902. The event took place some five years ago. Bioy Casares had had dinner with me that evening and we became lengthily engaged in a vast polemic concerning the composition of a novel in the first person, whose narrator would omit or disfigure the facts and indulge in various contradictions which would permit a few readers - very few readers - to perceive an atrocious or banal reality. From the remote depths of the corridor, the mirror spied upon us. We discovered (such a discovery is inevitable in the late hours of the night) that mirrors hare something monstrous about them. Then Bioy Casares recalled that one of the heresiarchs of Uqbar had declared that mirrors and copulation are abominable, because they increase the number or men. I asked him the origin of this memorable observation and he answered that it was reproduced in The Anglo-American Cyclopaedia, in its article on Uqbar. The house (which we had rented furnished) had a set of this work. On the last pages of Volume XLVI we found an article on Upsala; on the first pages of Volume XLVII, one on Ural-Altaic Languages, but not a word about Uqbar. Bioy, a bit taken aback, consulted the volumes of the index. In vain he exhausted all of the imaginable spellings: Ukbar, Ucbar, Ooqbar, Ookbar, Oukbahr... Before leaving, he told me that it was a region of Iraq of or Asia Minor. I must confess that I agreed with some discomfort. I conjectured that this undocumented country and its anonymous heresiarch were a fiction devised by Bioy's modesty in order to justify a statement. The fruitless examination of one of Justus Perthes' atlases fortified my doubt.
... The contact and the habit of Tlön have disintegrated this world. Enchanted by its rigor, humanity forgets over and again that it is a rigor of chess masters, not of angels. Already the schools have been invaded by the (conjectural) "primitive language" of Tlön; already the teaching of its harmonious history (filled with moving episodes) has wiped out the one which governed in my childhood; already a fictitious past occupies in our memories the place of another, a past of which we know nothing with certainty - not even a that it is false. Numismatology, pharmacology and archeology have been reformed. I understand that biology and mathematics also await their avatars... A scattered dynasty of solitary men has changed the face of the world. Their task continues. If our forecasts are not in error, a hundred years from now someone will discover the hundred volumes of the Second Encyclopedia of Tlön.

... The contact and the habit of Tlön have disintegrated this world. Enchanted by its rigor, humanity forgets over and again that it is a rigor of chess masters, not of angels. Already the schools have been invaded by the (conjectural) "primitive language" of Tlön; already the teaching of its harmonious history (filled with moving episodes) has wiped out the one which governed in my childhood; already a fictitious past occupies in our memories the place of another, a past of which we know nothing with certainty - not even a that it is false. Numismatology, pharmacology and archeology have been reformed. I understand that biology and mathematics also await their avatars... A scattered dynasty of solitary men has changed the face of the world. Their task continues. If our forecasts are not in error, a hundred years from now someone will discover the hundred volumes of the Second Encyclopedia of Tlön.

Then English and French and mere Spanish will disappear from the globe. The world will be Tlön. I pay no attention to all this and go on revising, in the still days at the Adrogue hotel, an uncertain Quevedian translation (which I do not intend to publish) of Browne's Urn Burial.

It was voted a 'good article' - a Wikipedia badge of honor - and sat happily on the online encyclopedia for more than half a decade. But editors have lately discovered a small issue with the site's meticulously written 4,500 word article detailing the 17th century Bicholim Conflict.
It was entirely made up.

At all other times than this, it's praise for the way that mistakes are removed within seconds, Wikipedia is better than Britannica etc etc. And when there is a hoax, " hoaxes generally do little harm". You cannot win.

One needs to remind them that the process that allows a notified mistake to be fixed in minutes, is the same process that allows 100 extra mistakes to be added in the same time frame.

This story still has legs ... it's now reached India and Indonesia, and has made an appearance in TechCrunch and The Daily Caller. Twitter is still ablaze with the thing.

The problem is that you can't publicise a story like that. The evidence is too far-flung and spread out. People's eyes will glaze over as you delve into the detail, and they will wonder whether perhaps you are the problem, and a dangerous obsessive: after all – so they'll think to themselves – you seem to be very hung up about some pretty obscure stuff.

You are mistaken. In the past there were a whole raft of websites with 'good' information, from a variety of sources, that made you smile, or made you think, there still are if you look beyond the first google page.