Chinese Housewife Faked Hundreds Of Wikipedia Articles On Russian History Over 10 Years, And Nobody Noticed

If spreading misinformation was a competition, a Chinese housewife who wrote several million words and hundreds of articles of totally fake 14th-century Russian history on Wikipedia and got away with it for over a decade might be the top contender.

Hundreds of Chinese Wikipedia articles on Medieval Russian history in one way or another related to a non-existent great silver mine in the town of Kashin have been discovered to be totally made up by a single user in a massive hoax that went unnoticed since 2010.

The user, known as "Zhemao" (折毛 ) has been using at least four puppet accounts to heavily falsify a period of Russian history on Chinese Wikipedia, creating an elaborate alternative reality one could hardly distinguish from the truth unless they tried to dig deeper or check the sources, which is ultimately what happened.

A now-deleted entry on the "Tver-Moscow War" created by Zhemao.

On her Wikipedia profile, Zhemao claimed to have a degree in Russian history and live in Russia but revealed that she was a full-time housewife with only a high-school education after her jig was up.

She started her journey into the world of historic fiction and spreading misinformation in 2010 when she wrote false stories related to Helsen, a famously corrupt Qing Dynasty official, spinning her attention to Russian history in 2012. Since then, Zhemao created more and more entries and edited exciting ones to fill the holes in her plot, often fusing reality with fiction.

As the saying goes, in order to tell a lie, you must tell more lies. I was reluctant to delete the hundreds of thousands of words I wrote, but as a result, I wound up losing millions of words, and a circle of academic friends collapsed.

A map made made by Zhemao, now deleted.

According to the investigation, Zhemao also edited a number of articles on English Wikipedia, while one of her articles in Chinese getting translated first into English, and eventually into Russian.

While Zhemao's contributions probably landed more than one Chinese student in trouble, many people found Zhemao's writing skills and worldbuilding praiseworthy. According to Sixth Tone, some Chinese netizens are calling her China's Borges, while others have encouraged Zhemao to publish a novel in the future.

As of now, Zhemao and her alternative accounts have all been banned from Wikipedia, and all discovered false contributions have been erased.