Zhemao hoaxes

Common card · No. 474597

The Zhemao hoaxes were over 200 interconnected Wikipedia articles about falsified aspects of medieval Russian history written from 2012 to 2022 by Zhemao (Chinese: 折毛; pinyin: Zhémáo), a pseudonymous editor of the Chinese Wikipedia. The articles were fictive embellishments on real entities; Zhemao used machine translation to understand Russian-language sources and invented elaborate detail to fill gaps in the translation. The incident is one of Wikipedia's largest hoaxes. Zhemao started this practice as early as 2010 on Chinese history topics but turned to Russian history, and the political interactions of medieval Slavic states in particular, in 2012. Many of her hoax articles were created to enhance her initial fabrications. Zhemao eluded detection for over a decade by faking a persona as a Russian history scholar, using sockpuppet accounts to feign support, and exploiting the community's good-faith assumption that her obscure sources matched articles' content. Chinese novelist Yifan...

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