Wikipedia, as we know, it is afree encyclopedia and therefore it can sporadically happen that some user writes inside it some false information. Among all the hoaxes that have ever circulated on this platform, however, one is particularly noteworthy: we are talking about Jar’Edo Wensan entire page dedicated to a fake aboriginal deity which has remained online for almost ten yearsbefore anyone noticed the prank.
Jar’Edo Wens’ invention: the hoax
There Jar’Edo Wens page appeared on Wikipedia at May 2005: was created in about ten minutes by an unregistered user from Australia. As confirmed by Wikipedia itself in an in-depth article, this page was without sources and told the story of a Australian Aboriginal deity whose name – if you think about it – is nothing more than “Jared Owens” with a different spacing. In any case, this alleged deity would have been that “of worldly knowledge and physical strength, created by Altjira to ensure that people did not become too arrogant or conceited. It is associated with victory and intelligence“.
Think that the news became so “authoritative” that not only was it translated into other languages (including French, Polish, Russian and Turkish) but even the philosophy professor Matthew S. McCormick will mention this deity in a book on atheism entitled Atheism And The Case Against Christ.
Moreover, it was discovered only later that the same author, in previous years, had already modified other Wikipedia pages by inserting the term Yohrmum (a probable distortion of Your mom“your mother”) in the lists of Australian deities. These changes, however, were soon identified and removed.
The problem of controlling fake news on Wikipedia
In 2009, four years after the article was created, a user reported that the page contained “multiple problems“, including the lack of sources. However, the actual removal of the content will take place on March 1, 20159 years, 9 months and 3 days after its creation, thanks to the intervention of a site administrator.
This news quickly made the rounds of the newspapers and one wonders as if it were possible something like that. Andreas Kolbea blog contributor Wikipediasaid that at the moment there are hundreds of thousands of articles on marginal topics that the system is not able to handle, even though there are both software that sifts through Wikipedia looking for hoaxes and user-supervised review procedures to limit the spread of fake news.
