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Comment by MBCook | Hacker News Reader

That’s existed for a long time, if somewhat unintentionally.

Someone edits a factoid into a Wikipedia entry or posts it on a forum somewhere. People see it, believe it, and spread it. Then maybe the mainstream media cites it.

Well at that point it’s officially “real”. And if you try to argue against it people will use those “real” sources to “prove” the made up factoid.

I remember reading about someone, an actor or an author. Wikipedia had their birthday wrong. But writers had used Wikipedia to find the date and included it in articles. Wikipedia now uses those articles as proof that the incorrect birthday is correct.

An ouroboros of proof.

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> Someone edits a factoid into a Wikipedia entry or posts it on a forum somewhere. [...] Then maybe the mainstream media cites it.

That kind of thing happened to the former German minister of defence Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg, whose full name is

Karl-Theodor Maria Nikolaus Johann Jacob Philipp Franz Joseph Sylvester Buhl-Freiherr von und zu Guttenberg[0]

and not

Karl-Theodor Maria Nikolaus Johann Jacob Philipp Wilhelm Franz Joseph Sylvester Buhl-Freiherr von und zu Guttenberg

which the Wikipedia article claimed and the news magazine Der Spiegel cited in an article. This article then in turn became the source for the slipped-in surname Wilhelm on his Wikipedia entry.

While his real full name already sounds totally made up Der Spiegel actually published a correction regarding his name.[1]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl-Theodor_zu_Guttenberg

[1] https://www.spiegel.de/politik/deutschland/in-eigener-sache-...

A few guys in my PhD office 15 years ago used to have a hobby of doing something similar.

They’d invent a “fact”, spin up a webpage with that fact, add the fact to Wikipedia and cite the webpage to add plausibility.

Then one of them would occasionally Google to see if any “reputable” sources were repeating that “fact” (after reading it on Wikipedia) and add/swap their references in to strengthen the Wikipedia text.

As long as the “facts” were trivial enough, it worked.

When i was a kid i thought the Pacific Northwest tree octopus was real.

Reminds me there was a woman who made up wholly fictional histories, it was featured on HN not too long ago.

Another example would be the fake roads atlas makers used to insert to catch their competitors copying.

They did get copied, and they didn't always get caught, and poof, the fake road is now real since it exists in multiple "independent" sources.

Oh, yes, another great example. I think I heard a story once about an island people actually thought was real because it was created for that reason but people forgot.

This was also done with towns. IIRC, more than one town was founded where a fake town was placed on a map.

Haha, I can see how that could happen.

Planning officer: you want to build 20 houses on the outskirts of [town Google made up]. Looks legit to me.

Planning officer: you want to build 20 new houses in the middle of an agricultural area. Let me think on that.

Citogensis- https://xkcd.com/978/

Relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/978/ (From 2011, I think.)

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