Comment by nemo1618 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nemo1618 | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if any of these are actually not hoaxes, but simply unverifiable or insufficiently notable. Quite a few of the hoax articles are bands, for example; isn't it more likely that they were real, and only played a show or two in some backwater town, rather than being invented whole-cloth? Maybe someday there will be a "List of Wikipedia articles that were considered hoaxes but were actually true."

This one is pretty hilarious though:

"Fictitious claim that the founder of Orange Julius invented auto-cleaning spectacles, an inflatable shrimp trap, and a portable pigeon-bathing unit. Dairy Queen, which now owns Orange Julius, was fooled; the company based an entire ad campaign around the hoax and produced this video[1] about Julius Freed's supposed inventions."

[1] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Rj1Ts1X6Vt0

And this one seems to explain the origins of a lot of hoax articles:

"After being repeated tens of times, sometimes by journalists and academics, the hoax was identified by EJ Dickson, one of its authors, turned journalist, who had written it as a joke with a friend while 'stoned'."

> isn't it more likely that they were real, and only played a show or two in some backwater town, rather than being invented whole-cloth?

I only briefly paged through that page, but in the sommary for almost all of those bands it says that they were credited with some nonexistent hit song, or had released albums, or all died in an airplane accident.

In all those cases there would have been verifiable records if the whole article wasn't a hoax. I.e. those articles were not simply about some obscure bands that didn't look all that notable, but had a long list of made-up "facts" in them.

That video does not seem like the work of someone who was fooled.

Indeed; looks very much like they’re leaning into the hoax.

I wonder how many undetected hoaxes are still up. The median uptime seems to be half a decade.

I wonder if the Lindy effect applies to undetected hoaxes, and what the longest uptime might be.

Indeed, the article mentions this explicitly:

>While most hoaxes on Wikipedia are short-lived (90% of discovered hoaxes are flagged within one hour of creation and only 1% of hoaxes persist for more than a year), those that make it past this initial screening have an increased probability of continuing to "survive" and remain a part of Wikipedia for much longer (if a hoax survives past its first day, it has an 18% probability of lasting for a year or more).

in a similar vein, i was also wondering how many are still on there and yet to be determined hoaxes. Someone with more time than me could see if you can use the existing hoax data to create an algorithm to flag hoax potential and run it on randomly scraped wiki articles...

> but simply unverifiable or insufficiently notable

I presume the internet archive or wayback machine would have them saved?

My girlfriend and l I wrote a completely fictitious wiki article about a non existent musician after watching this is spinal tap when we were bored and stoned one day years and years ago because we thought it would be funny and the movie inspired. We wrote a whole life story and everything. I'm pretty sure it's long gone.

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