Ben Mulry
As much as I hate to admit this, our teachers might have been right. No, not about weed turning you into a murderer, but their warnings that sometimes the credibility of the stuff you find on Wikipedia is… Questionable.
The reason I say this is a Chinese lady has spent the past DECADE turning the history of Medieval Russia into a piece of historical fiction on the Chinese Wikipedia. She made up historical figures, and battles, and even made stuff about small things like tools and money.
Zhemao, a stay-at-home wife whose farthest education is a high school degree, created her masterpiece using four separate Wiki accounts to corroborate and create her fiction. She claims her lies started small, but she kept having to spin more and expand her web of lies to back up her claims.
Her stories were centered around an enormous silver mine in Russia called Kashen, a very important point of interest for various groups of Russians and princes of Tver. A Chinese author doing research for a novel of his own stumbled upon the Wikipedia entries and began to uncover the lie.
It turns out Kashen never existed, and neither did some of the major historical figures referenced in Zhemao’s posts. She wrote over a million words, created over two hundred posts, and edited/contributed to hundreds more.
Unfortunately, the vast majority of her work was deleted by Wikipedia, effectively burning the last copy of one of the greatest pieces of internet fiction.
I highly recommend you guys look more into this story, it’s hilarious shit.
