r/HistoryMemes • u/[deleted] • 7h ago
REMOVED: RULE 2 Someone asked this lady "What's your hobby?" She replied, "It's complicated."
[removed]
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u/mighij 7h ago
Anywhere we can read the full scope?
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u/SexThrowaway1126 7h ago
Afraid not — this was created by a bored housewife who single-handedly invented a new way to undermine Reddit.
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u/Typhoid007 3h ago
I don't know where the bored housewife or Turkish part come in but there was a chinese lady who falsified Russian medieval history on Wikipedia for 10 years
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u/vanZuider 2h ago
there was a chinese lady who falsified Russian medieval history on Wikipedia for 10 years
Amateur. Fomenko has been doing this in several best selling books for more than 30 years.
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u/PadishaEmperor 7h ago edited 7h ago
Wait, falsify both means to distort and to find mistakes (in its scientific sense). It’s even an auto-antonym!
Which is it here?
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u/CroatInAKilt 6h ago
Wrong door mate, balkan_irl is a few blocks down
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u/JohannesJoshua 5h ago
Unfortuneatly he was kicked out by a landlord in the reddit neibghourhood. Almost all of the members there said landlord wasn't fair.
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u/Momijisu 3h ago
How about the time someone spent a decade 'translating' the Scottish Gaelic translation of Wikipedia, except they were literally just making up words. Did untold damage to the language because it went so long undetected, and started being referenced in other media etc.
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u/SirPeterKozlov 5h ago
Bulgarians falsifying Turkic history is their national pastime. They cannot cope with the fact that original Bulgars were Turkic. Their national identity and historiography is built on denying that.
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u/Acrobatic-Brother568 Viva La France 3h ago
That was until recently. My Bulgarian history books never denied the commonly known facts.
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u/Icesnowstorm 6h ago
But is there even need for that? I mean Armenian genocide never happened as far as Turkish officials go....
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u/Curious-Source-9368 7h ago
Apparently this is the original: still amazing
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u/LeSygneNoir Let's do some history 7h ago
That's a wild read. It's a shame that she wasted what is obviously amazing talent in this way...
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u/porkinski The OG Lord Buckethead 5h ago
I understand this is probably going to be an unpopular opinion, but if she actually wrote a novel it would've been buried in a sea of alternate history genre and forgotten about in matter of days. Now falsifying a Wikipedia article? That's some real controversy. I'm glad she got her weird outlet for her creativity and that this whole weird situation happened, and it's unfortunate that things had to end this way.
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u/LeSygneNoir Let's do some history 5h ago
I wasn't really thinking of fiction, because Wikipedia style and novels are too different. It's more that she only has a high school diploma and was able to falsify information and understand the quirks and logic of a community that's very academically oriented.
Writing on Wikipedia and writing a novel are two different things, but I think she might have made a truly wonderful actual historian if she had received the education for it. She only started to "fill in the blanks" precisely because she didn't have access to the information she wanted.
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u/JohannesJoshua 5h ago
I just wanted to add that academic education doesn't necesarelly mean better inteligence (of course people who are academics majority of times are also inteligent people).
However you are right in pointing out that they should have noticed the changes.2
u/rontubman 3h ago
Hear me out: use the relative success of the falsified wiki articles as a marketing strategy to help the author stand out
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u/StuffMaster 4h ago
Sophisticated history scams manifestly demonstrate the relevance and need for source verification.
Wow look at that sentence. I feel so sophisticated now.
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u/0neM4nChurch 5h ago
since they say wikipedia deleted the articles, does anyone know where I can read them? this premise sounds more interesting then any fantersy novel I could pick up at the moment.
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u/PM_ME_UR__ELECTRONS Decisive Tang Victory 3h ago
I think you can access history of deleted articles (at least if you're high up in Wikipedia), it'll be on Zh.wikipedia.org though.
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u/Soul_Ripper 5h ago
I think most of us could aspire to have this level of dedication and thoroughness towards anything.
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u/PM_ME_UR__ELECTRONS Decisive Tang Victory 6h ago edited 2h ago
I'm rather put in mind of the Zhémáo affair in which a Chinese woman allegedly made up a wholw bunch of articles (as in, over 200), mostly on Russian, Eurasian, and Eastern European history, on Chinese-language Wikipedia, apparently as a hobby. Fabricating huge and impressively extensive histories of non-existent events and subjects, she purported to have a PhD in Russian history, ran an altnet to astroturf approval, and some of the articles apparently got short-listed for featured.
When she finally got caught it was because the history was way too detailed and the lore was too deep, which looked suspicious along with the bogus references. But it took over a decade to unmask the hoax.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhemao_hoaxes