Oldest hoax yet, discovered

[tarantino]

Thomas Forbes.

It lasted almost 18 years.

[Paragon Deku]

I feel like these "niche artist/author/athlete" article types are the easiest to allow to fly under the radar despite being completely fake. Wikipedia's got thousands of permastubs about technically notable subjects whose online documentation is practically nil, so I suppose people just figured it must've been real given its age.

[The Blue Newt]

I feel like these "niche artist/author/athlete" article types are the easiest to allow to fly under the radar despite being completely fake. Wikipedia's got thousands of permastubs about technically notable subjects whose online documentation is practically nil, so I suppose people just figured it must've been real given its age.

Yeah, there’s somethng to that, but the article cries out “Lies!” with every outward breath. Art dealer and dishwasher? Maybe on Wigan Pier that would fly.

[Paragon Deku]

I feel like these "niche artist/author/athlete" article types are the easiest to allow to fly under the radar despite being completely fake. Wikipedia's got thousands of permastubs about technically notable subjects whose online documentation is practically nil, so I suppose people just figured it must've been real given its age.

Yeah, there’s somethng to that, but the article cries out “Lies!” with every outward breath. Art dealer and dishwasher? Maybe on Wigan Pier that would fly.

My favorite piece of "inane vandalism I'm shocked stayed up so long" was the inspiration section of Blue Man Group (T-H-L) which artfully described a fictitious sketch in which the members of the group asked for Halal Kebabs and engaged in fellatio, mixed together with a bunch of European satirists and surrealist artists.

EDIT: Here it is link

[lonza leggiera]

Thomas Forbes.

It lasted almost 18 years.

Its entry on the List of hoaxes on Wikipedia rather confusingly characterises its demise as "Speedy deleted as G3: Blatant hoax". That seems like an inordinately long time for its deletion to be characterised as "speedy". In fact, an earlier version of the article was speedy deleted in February 2006 within 10 minutes of its creation. It was recreated in February 2008 in a form that was not quite so obviously a hoax. Its claim to the title of Wikipedia's longest running hoax article would thus appear to me to be rather dubious.

[Konveyor Belt]

I feel like these "niche artist/author/athlete" article types are the easiest to allow to fly under the radar despite being completely fake. Wikipedia's got thousands of permastubs about technically notable subjects whose online documentation is practically nil, so I suppose people just figured it must've been real given its age.

I think creative types specifically would be the easiest since nobody has kept good track of them over the years. Athletes, politicians, academics etc. usually leave behind traces of their exitence through some sort of public record, typically box scores, legislative records, and citations respectively. People write about artists and authors, but there's no easily searchable database of them like there might be with the other three.

[No Ledge]

Thomas Forbes.

It lasted almost 18 years.

Its entry on the List of hoaxes on Wikipedia rather confusingly characterises its demise as "Speedy deleted as G3: Blatant hoax". That seems like an inordinately long time for its deletion to be characterised as "speedy". In fact, an earlier version of the article was speedy deleted in February 2006 within 10 minutes of its creation. It was recreated in February 2008 in a form that was not quite so obviously a hoax. Its claim to the title of Wikipedia's longest running hoax article would thus appear to me to be rather dubious.

You're right. It did not set a new record. Sloppy restoration work by another admin. I fixed it.

[No Ledge]

It lasted 16 years to the day, making it barely crack the top ten, at #10 on the list.

Actually it was killed about ten hours shy of its sixteenth birthday.

[No Ledge]

You gotta wonder though, when the modern bar is set so high at Articles for Creation, why the community still tolerates 16-year-old biographies which have been tagged as being completely unsourced.

I might could understand if the article had cited at least one source, albeit a hoax source.

[Kraken]

You gotta wonder though, when the modern bar is set so high at Articles for Creation, why the community still tolerates 16-year-old biographies which have been tagged as being completely unsourced.

I might could understand if the article had cited at least one source, albeit a hoax source.

There is an ongoing effort somewhere, and last I saw it was making more headway than such things usually do. So perhaps they finally got to this one as a result of systemic effort rather than dumb luck. But it did appear that all it was doing was quite literally checking if it has no source at all.

[No Ledge]

Yes, this is out of the scope of my range of work on the wiki.

Requests for comment/Deletion of uncited articles

Currently, there are over 114,000 articles on Wikipedia that contain no citations or sources, making it one of the largest clean up categories on the site. WP:WikiProject Unreferenced articles has been one of the main WikiProjects attempting to dig through this giant haystack in order to give as many articles proper sources. Unfortunately, a main obstacle to cleanup has been how stringent deletion policy is.

This discussion finds consensus against creating a new PROD category (or other deletion process) for completely unreferenced articles. Despite some support for the idea, general consensus held that such a process would contradict our verifiability principles and not necessarily be of benefit to readers. In-depth discussion resulted in a number of productive ideas for dealing with the backlog of unreferenced articles, including a backlog drive, which is now in process. Further proposals to reduce the backlog are welcome.

WikiProject Unreferenced articles/Backlog drives/February 2024

At the start of the drive, there were 111,643 articles tagged as entirely without references on Wikipedia. At the end of the drive, there were 97,343, a net decrease of 14,300 articles.

That is a pretty impressive-sized crew they recruited to that task. Quite different, compared to the stuff I do, in relative isolation. Fortunately I only work tasks with more manageable backlogs, but even those wear me out, as new work keeps piling up, the moment you take your foot off the gas.

[Kraken]

I think it's still technically possible to create an article without a reference even now. Begging the question, why? Assuming the answer isn't, Bureaucrats gotta eat. The flaw of these things being that a plain url is technically a reference. Even if it's a page on the Hemelein Publications website.

[ArmasRebane]

Yes, this is out of the scope of my range of work on the wiki.

Requests for comment/Deletion of uncited articles

Currently, there are over 114,000 articles on Wikipedia that contain no citations or sources, making it one of the largest clean up categories on the site. WP:WikiProject Unreferenced articles has been one of the main WikiProjects attempting to dig through this giant haystack in order to give as many articles proper sources. Unfortunately, a main obstacle to cleanup has been how stringent deletion policy is.

This discussion finds consensus against creating a new PROD category (or other deletion process) for completely unreferenced articles. Despite some support for the idea, general consensus held that such a process would contradict our verifiability principles and not necessarily be of benefit to readers. In-depth discussion resulted in a number of productive ideas for dealing with the backlog of unreferenced articles, including a backlog drive, which is now in process. Further proposals to reduce the backlog are welcome.

WikiProject Unreferenced articles/Backlog drives/February 2024

At the start of the drive, there were 111,643 articles tagged as entirely without references on Wikipedia. At the end of the drive, there were 97,343, a net decrease of 14,300 articles.

That is a pretty impressive-sized crew they recruited to that task. Quite different, compared to the stuff I do, in relative isolation. Fortunately I only work tasks with more manageable backlogs, but even those wear me out, as new work keeps piling up, the moment you take your foot off the gas.

I didn't realize there was a way (or maybe they added it) of random-articling just these types of unreferenced articles, and I had to click a bunch of times until I found something you could reasonably expect to be able to reference. Lots of foreign villages where there's no chance of English sources, obscure mathematical nonsense that requires an expert to care, let alone source it, and decades-old footballers and the like. Clearly no one actually cares about these things outside of their bare existence, if they've never been updated, but once again the gradualism people win out in these RfCs, despite the fact that if someone came along and wrote about them fresh they'd have to do a better job than these articles did, which is a net positive.

[The Garbage Scow]

I think it's still technically possible to create an article without a reference even now. Begging the question, why? Assuming the answer isn't, Bureaucrats gotta eat. The flaw of these things being that a plain url is technically a reference. Even if it's a page on the Hemelein Publications website.

Creating an unsourced article is probably not that difficult. All you need is an obscure topic, preferably one not well represented on Wikipedia and something that doesn't meet a category for speedy deletion. Do it at a time when NPP isn't very active. Niche BIOs of non-living subjects are an easy one because people are lazy and won't want to do someone else's source research for them (and I agree with them, I wouldn't either), and if you pick someone who doesn't fit neatly into specific categories, then potential experts probably won't notice the article either. You write it well enough that it's entertaining and faux-informative and both those who appreciate good writing and those who want facts will probably be satisfied.

[Mojito]

Creating an unsourced article is probably not that difficult. All you need is an obscure topic, preferably one not well represented on Wikipedia and something that doesn't meet a category for speedy deletion. Do it at a time when NPP isn't very active. Niche BIOs of non-living subjects are an easy one because people are lazy and won't want to do someone else's source research for them (and I agree with them, I wouldn't either), and if you pick someone who doesn't fit neatly into specific categories, then potential experts probably won't notice the article either. You write it well enough that it's entertaining and faux-informative and both those who appreciate good writing and those who want facts will probably be satisfied.

Perhaps this is an indirect result of WP:BEFORE (T-H-L) being such an effective defence in AfD discussions.

[The Garbage Scow]

Perhaps this is an indirect result of WP:BEFORE (T-H-L) being such an effective defence in AfD discussions.

Which directly conflicts with WP:BURDEN (T-H-L). People love BEFORE though, for some reason.

[C&B]

Well. The Davidsons etc do. But BEFORE is part of the AfD information page, while BURDEN (and ONUS, too?) is policy.

[Randy from Boise]

I've added first references to a couple of football bios in the past month. I think I did one yesterday, in fact, or the day before... There are a fair number of stubs that just got slammed up with nothing or the barest of sourcing.

I think under the current WP rules, all BLPs must have at least 1 source but it is technically possible to throw up an unsourced article outside of that. Whether people can do that without the thundering herd running all over their lawn is another matter.

I presume this hoax was caught as part of the "add a reference" campaign.

With AI hallucination, I suspect that hoax bios of this type might wind up being a growth industry in the near future.

t


P.S. Yeah, here it is: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?ti ... 1178804603

Now: Ed Klewicki (T-H-L)

I was just dropping in a photo originally, didn't really work much on this.

[rnu]

You gotta wonder though, when the modern bar is set so high at Articles for Creation, why the community still tolerates 16-year-old biographies which have been tagged as being completely unsourced.

I might could understand if the article had cited at least one source, albeit a hoax source.

The community still tolerates new articles that are completely unsourced. An attempt to end this is going down in flames of stupid as we speak:
VPP: Deprecating new unsourced articles (permanent)