Jar'Edo Wens hoax on:
[Wikipedia]
[Google]
[Amazon]
Jar'Edo Wens was a deliberately fictitious
Jar'Edo Wens was a deliberately fictitious Wikipedia
Wikipedia is a multilingual free online encyclopedia written and maintained by a community of volunteers, known as Wikipedians, through open collaboration and using a wiki-based editing system. Wikipedia is the largest and most-read refer ...
article which existed for almost 10 years before being spotted in November 2014 and deleted in March 2015. At the time, it was the longest-lasting hoax article discovered in the history of Wikipedia
Wikipedia began with its first edit on 15 January 2001, two days after the domain was registered by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger. Its technological and conceptual underpinnings predate this; the earliest known proposal for an online encyclo ...
.
Origin
The "Jar'Edo Wens" article was created on May 29, 2005. It was only two sentences in length and cited no sources. It claimed to be about anAustralian Aboriginal
Aboriginal Australians are the various Indigenous peoples of the Australian mainland and many of its islands, such as Tasmania, Fraser Island, Hinchinbrook Island, the Tiwi Islands, and Groote Eylandt, but excluding the Torres Strait I ...
god ("of earthly knowledge and physical might, created by Altjira
The Dreaming, also referred to as Dreamtime, is a term devised by early anthropologists to refer to a religio-cultural worldview attributed to Australian Aboriginal beliefs. It was originally used by Francis Gillen, quickly adopted by his c ...
to ensure that people did not get too arrogant or self-conceited. He is associated with victory and intelligence."), and was likely simply the name "Jared Owens", with different spacing, punctuation, and casing.
The author, an unregistered user at an Australian IP address
An Internet Protocol address (IP address) is a numerical label such as that is connected to a computer network that uses the Internet Protocol for communication.. Updated by . An IP address serves two main functions: network interface ident ...
, was active for eleven minutes in May 2005; their only other contribution was to also add "Yohrmum" (likely being a re-spelling of " Your Mum") to a list of Australian deities. This was more quickly spotted and removed, but it was almost a decade before the "Jar'Edo Wens" article was detected and deleted.
Spread
During its nearly decade-long existence, the "Jar'Edo Wens" hoax article was translated into other language editions of Wikipedia, including French,Polish
Polish may refer to:
* Anything from or related to Poland, a country in Europe
* Polish language
* Poles
Poles,, ; singular masculine: ''Polak'', singular feminine: ''Polka'' or Polish people, are a West Slavic nation and ethnic group, w ...
, Russian
Russian(s) refers to anything related to Russia, including:
*Russians (, ''russkiye''), an ethnic group of the East Slavic peoples, primarily living in Russia and neighboring countries
*Rossiyane (), Russian language term for all citizens and peo ...
, and Turkish. Two language editions additionally included the shorter-lived "yohrmum" page. An entry was also created on Wikidata
Wikidata is a collaboratively edited multilingual knowledge graph hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation. It is a common source of open data that Wikimedia projects such as Wikipedia, and anyone else, can use under the CC0 public domain license ...
.
The hoax was unwittingly copied into a book on atheism in 2012, as part of a list of 500 "gods and religions in history that have fallen out of favour".
Discovery
The hoax lasted nine years, nine months, and three days on Wikipedia. New article creation had already been restricted to registered users since theSeigenthaler incident
In May 2005, an unregistered editor posted a hoax article onto Wikipedia about journalist John Seigenthaler. The article falsely stated that Seigenthaler had been a suspect in the assassinations of U.S. President John F. Kennedy and U.S. Attorney ...
in September 2005. Although this made new fake articles more difficult to establish, existing hoax articles (especially low-trafficked ones) could more easily go unnoticed.
In 2009, the article was tagged with the classification "multiple issues", including a lack of sources. However, it was only in November 2014 that the article was flagged as a possible hoax. It was finally proposed for deletion on March 1, 2015, and the deletion was confirmed two days later by an administrator. ''Wikipediocracy
Wikipediocracy is a website for discussion and criticism of Wikipedia. Its members have brought information about Wikipedia's controversies to the attention of the media. The site was founded in March 2012 by users of Wikipedia Review, another s ...
'', a website for Wikipedia criticism, publicised the hoax on March 15, 2015, after which it was widely reported by more general news sites.
See also
* Archived Jar'Edo Wens hoax on Wikipedia * Deletion discussion on Wikipedia * List of hoaxes on WikipediaReferences
{{Wikipedia 2005 hoaxes Internet hoaxes Wikipedia controversies Fictional gods Fictitious entries