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Comment by cammikebrown | Hacker News Reader

I’ve browsed weird Wikipedia articles for over 15 years now, and Tarrare still stands out to me as one of the strangest people in history. Can anyone name anyone stranger?

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If you're not aware, Wikipedia itself has an article on unusual Wikipedia articles: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Unusual_articles

Some of them can be quite... weird.

If that's not enough, I made a small little site, where I aggregate and curate good Wikipedia articles and their respective discussions on HN.

It's for those curious hours where you want to read something interesting.

https://www.mostdiscussed.com/popular

Excellent work, sir, thank you.

Goodbye, evening.

well there was just this post https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29960105 the subject of which was also a related article at the bottom of this one, seems more Tarrare was Domery lite.

Yes, it's about Charles Domery. I find his wikipedia article rather unbelievable. The mostly likely explanation by a mile seems that it's a joke or a hoax. It seems everything "known" about him comes from this[0] letter to a journal in 1799, purporting to quote another letter. The Tarrare story, likewise, seems to spring from a single article, in that case 1804 - those dates seem strangely close, if they're the two purported weirdest eaters in history—and both supposedly fought on the French side in the War of the First Coalition! I find it strange that the veracity of those reports isn't questioned or mentioned on those wikipedia pages.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Domery

[0] https://books.google.com.au/books?id=An-we0KnG78C&pg=PA209&r...

How curious that both of the most incredibly voracious people ever both served Napoleon in the same time frame and their stories come from few isolated documents..

Slightly pedantic, but Napoleon wasn't France's leader yet during that time.

No, but I still have a soft spot for their article about the outhouse. It used to be bordering on the humorous, but over time it has become pretty dry.