A housewife from China spent 10 years writing Wikipedia articles about fictional events in Russia: it turned out exciting

A Chinese housewife spent 10 years writing a fictional history of Russia on Wikipedia. Moscow and Tver fought there for centuries over a non-existent mine in Kashin, reports Meduza.

In China, one of the biggest hoaxes in the history of Wikipedia was revealed: an unknown woman from four fake profiles supplemented the real Russian history with a fictional one for more than 10 years and created an entire alternative universe of millions of words - characters that never existed, battles and inventions were associated with a mysterious mine in the city of Kashin where 30 slaves worked.

How a mine with 30 thousand slaves quarreled Moscow and Tver

The Chinese writer Yifan was browsing Chinese Wikipedia articles for inspiration when he stumbled upon information about the great silver mine in the city of Kashin. The mine, discovered on the territory of the Tver Principality, an independent Slavic state that existed from the XNUMXth to the XNUMXth centuries, turned out to be one of the largest industrial structures of the late Middle Ages.

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The Kashinsky mine allegedly was a whole city in which 30 thousand slaves and 10 thousand free citizens mined the precious metal. The inexhaustible reserves of silver became a source of fabulous wealth for the princes of Tver and, naturally, aroused the envy of their neighbors - the Moscow principality, which claimed leadership in the region.

From 1305 to 1485, bloody wars continued between Moscow and Tver for the right to own a silver mine. They ended with the victory of Moscow. “After the fall of the Principality of Tver, silver continued to be mined by the Grand Duchy of Moscow and its successor (the Russian Empire), until the mine was closed in the middle of the XNUMXth century due to exhaustion,” read a surprised writer on the Chinese Wikipedia.

Yifan was sucked into the rabbit hole of this obscure episode of Russian history, reading hundreds of related articles about great battles, the Slavic overlords who claimed ownership of the mine, and the engineers who worked on it. All of them were written in the typical dry language of Wikipedia. Gradually, however, Yifan began to notice some oddities.

First, the articles in the Russian-language Wikipedia that related to the events around the mine were significantly shorter than the Chinese ones or were absent altogether. Secondly, footnotes sometimes led to the wrong place: for example, a footnote about medieval methods of silver mining for some reason led to an article about automated mining from the XNUMXst century. Having tried to discover the story in other sources, the writer was forced to admit that the Kashinsky mine never existed.

“Characters that are not in the English or Russian Wikipedia suddenly appear in the Chinese one, where they are mixed with real historical figures, so that reality cannot be distinguished from a fake. Even the protracted Moscow-Tver war revolves around the non-existent Kashin silver mine,” Yifan wrote on the Chinese Q&A platform Zhihu. So the whole world learned about this hoax.

“The daughter of a diplomat” and “the wife of a Russian” wrote hundreds of articles (and made changes to hundreds more)

Wikipedia conducted an investigation and found out that for a large-scale stuffing, which has been carried out since 2010, the author of the hoax used four fake accounts, each of which verified the identity of the other. The falsifications related mainly to Russian history and the history of the Qin Empire. According to the results of the check, Wikipedia banned all four accounts.

For more than 10 years, the author has written millions of words, creating 206 original articles and making edits to hundreds of others.

Imaginary and highly detailed military and economic episodes were skillfully woven into real events and described in the standard dry language of an online encyclopedia - it was impossible to distinguish them from real articles.

Surprised users called the counterfeiter "Chinese Borges". The author, named after one of her accounts, became known as Zhemao. According to her now-deleted profile, she was the daughter of a diplomat who worked in Russia, studied Russian history at the university, and even, having married a Russian, received Russian citizenship.

Zhemao began her “career” on Wikipedia in 2010, at first embellishing with false details the real figure of a well-known corrupt official from the Qin dynasty named Heshen, and in 2012 she switched to Russian history, editing articles about Tsar Alexander I. From here, her fabricated stories spread throughout the segment Chinese Wikipedia about the history of Russia.

After the exposure, Zhemao posted an apology letter on her English-language Wikipedia profile. According to her, her real motivation was to study history. She has no diplomat father and no ties to Russia at all. In fact, all these hundreds of articles were written by a housewife with a secondary education.

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Zhemao admitted that the whole universe of her hoaxes arose only because she wanted to eliminate gaps and inconsistencies in several passages that she inserted into other people's articles. “As they say, in order to tell a lie once, you must continue to lie all the time. I didn't want to delete the hundreds of thousands of words I had written, but as a result, I lost millions of written words and my scientist friends," she wrote, promising to "learn a trade" and "work honestly" in the future.

Zhemao's story evoked controversy in China. While some say that she undermined the credibility of the Chinese Wikipedia, others admire the tenacity and imagination of a woman who invented an entire universe around a non-existent mine. And they advise her to write a book. As of June 17, most of Zhemao's entries on Wikipedia have been deleted, but some remain - errors in them have been corrected by other moderators of the service.

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