The Internet Is Your Friend When You Want Information,

or is it?

it all started with a researcher looking into the great silver mine of Kashin, once mined by some 30,000 slaves and 10,000 freedmen, and the epic war and economic stories surrounding it,the stories fascinated Yifan so much he kept digging for more information about it. But there was only so much he could find on Chinese Wikipedia, so he turned to the Russian version, but he was surprised to see that the Russian Wikipedia either had much shorter variants of the Chinese articles or none at all. That seemed weird, considering that this was Russian history, at one point, he became so intrigued by the mine of Kashin and its history that he started talking about it to his friends, none of whom had even heard about it. Some knew of a town in Tver Oblast, Russia by that name, but it had no mine, not even a long-closed one. Something didn’t add up, and after doing some thorough research, Yifan was shocked to learn that there was never any Kashin silver mine and that the articles on Chinese Wikipedia were all fictitious entries written by the same person, 

images Chinese Wikipedia, “Chinese Wikipedia entries that are more detailed than English Wikipedia and even Russian Wikipedia are all over the place,” Yifan wrote on Zhihu, a Quora-like Q&A platform. “Characters that don’t exist in the English-Russian Wiki appear in the Chinese Wiki, and these characters are mixed together with real historical figures so that there’s no telling the real from the fake. Even a lengthy Moscow-Tver war revolves around the non-existent Kashin silver mine.” The writer revelation soon went viral, prompting Wikipedia to launch an investigation into the matter. It revealed that over more than 10 years, a single person operating several author accounts wrote several million words of fake Russian history, creating over 200 articles and contributing to hundreds more. They featured intricate stories, made-up wars and characters, all woven into boring enough entries to pass as historic accounts.

The author of all these fake entries came to be known in China as ‘Zhemao’, after one of her aliases on Wikipedia. On the platform, she claimed to be the daughter of a diplomat stationed in Russia and to have a degree in Russian history, but after her decade-long hoax was revealed, she confessed to being a housewife with a high school degree and a rich imagination.

“The trouble I’ve caused is hard to make up for, so maybe a permanent ban is the only option,” Zhemao wrote. “My current knowledge is not enough to make a living, so in the future I will learn a craft, work honestly, and not do nebulous things like this anymore.” According to Chinese news sources, Zhemao began her activity on Wikipedia in 2010, writing false stories about Heshen, a real and famously corrupt Qing Dynasty official, before moving on to Russia in 2012. She started by editing existing articles on Czar Alexander I of Russia, and then started writing full-fledged made-up articles, literally creating her own version of Russian history. “It is really awesome to invent a self-contained historical logic with details like all kinds of clothing, money, and utensils,” one Weibo user said, so is the Internet really your friend when looking up facts and figures?