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.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Mykl on Wednesday July 20 2022, @03:44AM (2 children)
What I find most surprising about this story is that, when confronted with the evidence, Zhemao confessed. This is becoming increasingly rare in stories of this kind these days. Usually the perpetrator will either gaslight, move the goalposts, claim it was a joke (how stupid of you to take me seriously!), claim victimhood, blame someone else or literally anything other than admitting that they lied.
It's a shame that this author chose fake Wikipedia entries as her creative outlet - there would probably have been a market for her writing if it were just tweaked a little. According to TFA, her writing style and quality were excellent.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by arslan on Wednesday July 20 2022, @06:31AM (1 child)
Well that's probably why she confessed and maybe even her original motivation - to get caught and seize the opportunity for publicity. After all its not like there's a negative consequence that can cause a worse outcome from where she's sitting
(Score: 5, Funny) by kazzie on Wednesday July 20 2022, @07:27AM
On the plus side, she's now notable enough to warrant having her own Wikipedia article.
(Score: 3, Flamebait) by inertnet on Wednesday July 20 2022, @08:34AM (1 child)
If she's so good at faking history, she should start working for the Russian government.
(Score: 3, Touché) by Opportunist on Wednesday July 20 2022, @10:51AM
I'm kinda expecting that this is her plan. Consider that work part of her resume.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Freeman on Wednesday July 20 2022, @03:43PM (2 children)
I imagine that the articles they wrote, made about as much sense as this google translation of their apology letter.
https://en-m-wikipedia-org.translate.goog/wiki/User:%E6%8A%98%E6%AF%9B?_x_tr_sl=auto&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=en&_x_tr_pto=wapp [translate.goog]
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 3, Interesting) by mcgrew on Wednesday July 20 2022, @07:28PM (1 child)
Thirty five years ago when I was first learning how computers work and how to program them, I read of a program the US government had written to translate Russian to English and back. To test it, they fed it the English phrase “the spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak.” Then they fed the Russian translation back in. The re-conversion to English read “The wine is good, but the meat is spoiled.”
I figured that in the decades since their first efforts at machine translation, it would do a better job.
I figured wrong. What came out of Google Translate was gibberish. It does a good job of translating single words; paper dictionaries have done this well for centuries. But for large blocks of text, it was worthless.
Impeach Donald Palpatine and his sidekick Elon Vader
(Score: 3, Funny) by kazzie on Wednesday July 20 2022, @08:28PM
Twenty-or-so years ago, when Google Translate was still pretty new, my friends and I had fun piping song lyrics through a circuit of translations. The sequence was something like English - French - Spanish - English - German - English (many languages only supported to/from English at first).
Some results were hilarious, usually moreso if the lyrics included punctuation. One line I still recall was from a verse of Bat out of Hell:
which came back as:
Bohemian Rhapsody was interesting, as one of the translation stages conflated "mama" with mammaries, with slightly NSFW results.