Bittersweet Infamy - #65 - Wikid Games

Episode Date: March 5, 2023

Josie tells Taylor about the many fabricated histories of Chinese Wikipedia editor Zhemao (折毛). Plus: the extravagantly wealthy ruler of Mali, Musa I, and his opulent pilgrimage to Mecca.

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Wyndham rewards membership may be required. The options apply. Welcome to Bitter Sweden. I'm Taylor Basso. And I'm Josie Mitchell. On this podcast, we share the stories that live on and indeed. The strange and the familiar. The tragic and the comic.

The bitter. And the sweet. It's great to be here, Taylor. Thanks for having me. It is great to be here. You're welcome. Please put up your feet. Get in this massage chair. Cool. I'm so impressed you have a massage chair in here.

You're home. In here. You're home. I was a spring cleaning find. Look, you found it under the couch, kind of thing? Bag of the Clown. No, like side of the road. Oh, yeah. The old Barca lounger out next to the hockey net and the yada yada. Well, that's how you get bed bugs. That's for sure.

That's how you get bed bugs and you're getting the chair. How you doing? 65 and still alive. 65. Episode 65. Still alive. Doing good, yeah. Did you think when we were doing this in November 2020 that we would get to 65? Dude, not after the witch talk episode.

I thought we were going to go down in flames. I feel like, I feel like only retrospectively do we think at the time. We love all our children equally, but some more than others. Yeah, yeah. We've been having ads on the show recently. Yeah. It's been going great. As far as I know, nobody's complained.

I really want to make sure that our advertisers get their bang for their buck. So I just want to draw attention to the fact that the last time I turned on bittersweet infamy, the way that I sometimes do to just play in the background because now it makes me money, makes me like zero point. I don't even know. I don't even want to think about how little money it will probably make me. But if the fact that I listened to my own voice and then there was an ad for lozen between that did something for me, maybe the secret works.

So the last time I booted up bittersweet infamy, it was an avatar, the way of water for your consideration campaign. What do you mean for your consideration campaign? Like, it's Oscar season. Have you considered, look over here at these blue people, have you considered it? Have you considered any of this? No. Okay.

Did you ever watch Avatar OG? No. Never seen Avi. Never either. Shit. Do you ever see Avi 2? I went to go see Puss in Boots. Puss in Boots.

I think that like shares a canon with Avatar. No, it is much better. Not that I've seen Avatar, but Puss in Boots. Oscar voters do not listen to her. Sorry. Go ahead. It's fantastic. I'm also nominated for an Oscar.

Please and thank you. Wow. Yeah. It's great. It's really cute. My family, we split up. Half of us went to go see Avatar, Sookers, and the other half went to go see Puss in Boots. And those of us who went to see Puss in Boots, we laughed.

We cried. We ate candy. We yelled in the theater. My mom clapped when the credits rolled. Bravo, bravo. And then we went home and we were home within two hours of the movie starting while Avatar, they were there for hours on end. We didn't see them again.

Oh my God. Look at that evening. Did they bring flasks? Did they bring like torches and lanterns? What became of them? My niece just fell asleep. She did not stay awake for that. Wow.

So that's really interesting. I don't think that we will get them as a sponsor if we say that their movie sucks and to actually consider Puss in Boots instead. The Oscar voters. Not only is Avatar not good, do not consider it. Yeah. Puss has watched it and we don't feel that. You know, I feel like we gave James Cameron an excellent little cameo when we cycled through

his PCP episode on Titanic. His PCP incident. Yeah, that was, I remember I was excited to cover that one. I was like, no, I have known about this for some time that somebody spiked the shout out with PCP. I have nobody to talk to about it. And that's kind of what this podcast started as. Listen to me.

Yeah. I have a PCP story. Too good. What do you think about him infamous? I'm ready. I'm feeling good. Josie, who was the wealthiest person ever to live? Oh, wasn't it like a pharaoh king, king pharaohs, czar, sultan, person of power?

You're trying to cover a lot of bases here. Nailed it. Yep. Because you did that. You're right. It's basically that. It was a pharaoh sultan czar king, emperor ruler, president, etc. In the current context, if you ask someone who are the big names and big money now, you'll

probably get the standard answers. Oh, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, other men from outer space. What, you had some finger guns there. He was an African king. Yes. Yes. Well, if you try to measure historical wealth, it becomes a much murkier discussion. And I will tell you outright that while I am about to tell you about this one, fabulously

wealthy African king, as Josie intuited from a long time ago, I could not swear on a stack of Bibles, or in this case, the Koran, that he is in fact the richest person ever to live. What is wealth? We talked about this in the Ching-Yee Sau episode. What if wealth is the laughter of a child? Oh, I'm a hug. Yes. I'm not cocoa.

You know, these things. A fresh little drop of dew on a perfectly-opened flower at sunrise. Mm-hmm. That's wealth. Blooming next to the severed head of somebody who owed you money. Yeah. Mm. But I will say this.

After 700 years, historians still talk about the unfathomable wealth of Mansa Musa of the Mali Empire. Mansa Musa! So, Mansa is a title, a Maninka and Mandinka word equivalent to ruler or king. Tsar emperor. I got it. Tsar emperor. I got it.

Sultan. I got it. Yes. Yes. The man's name was Musa I and he was the Mansa of the Mali Empire for the beginning of the 14th century AD, so that's 1300s. Okay. Yeah.

Thank you. I hate that. So much. You're subtract one. I know. Or do I add one? I don't know. The pressure is on me.

Does the sunset in the west or the east? These are hard things. I'm trying to feed my family. You know what gets me? When you say the latter, it's like this and this. Which one is it? Oh, the latter. I'm like, relative to warrior.

Warrior is the latter. And what point is the, what? The former and the latter. The former and the latter. But is the former closer to what you said or is it further from what you said? No, it's like there's two, we're not, this, this could go on. Also departures and arrivals at the airport. You're arriving at the airport?

This person, are they arriving or are they departing? No, no, no. Departing from the plane? No, no, no, no. That one is quite clear. No, it is not, my sir. No. Oh, no.

When we're on amazing race, this is going to be good then. The Mali Empire was comprised of parts of what are now Mali, Senegal, the Gambia, Guinea, Niger, Nigeria, Chad, Mortania, and Burkina Faso. So essentially a huge swath of land in West Africa. Yeah, very large. That is so big. Musa was of royal lineage. He came into power in 1312 when the previous Mansa Abu Bakr II set sail in the Atlantic Ocean with a fleet of ships and disappeared forever. Yeah, he's just chilling somewhere.

He's plotting his return. You just wait. Musa is generally well regarded as a ruler. He elevated the empire in its cities to great havens of Islamic art and architecture and culture and scholarship. But what he is primarily remembered for in modern cultural shorthand is being a very rich bitch. Girl boss extraordinaire. The peak girl boss of his era. Why was he so GD wealthy?

As I said, he was of royal lineage, so he will have already been quite well off before inheriting the throne. As Mansa, he expanded trade, mined salt, and gold, trafficked in ivory, and human slaves. As Mali got richer, Musa got richer, and vice versa. How rich was he? We don't know, but historians and contemporaries alike depict him as inconceivably wealthy. However rich you think he was, multiply it. Okay. He was richer.

And never was this more evident than during the most infamous event of Musa's reign and the event for which his wealth and generosity are best remembered in the modern context. His 1324 hodge or pilgrimage to Mecca. Rotten. He had a big old pilgrimage to Mecca where he was just making it rain on every fucking community that he passed through. Every random person that he passed in the desert would get the full treatment. Very nice. Every Muslim is encouraged to make a pilgrimage called the Hodge to the Holy Land Mecca at least once in their adult lifetime. And of course, if you're the unthinkably wealthy ruler of a large empire in West Africa,

this is also a great opportunity to immortalize your own legacy as well as your countries by introducing yourself to the many communities you'll be passing through in the most opulent manner imaginable. Musa traveled through many of the major cities of the day from Niani to Wallata to Tuat to Cairo. And he treated the inhabitants of all of these cities to a lavish, brilliant spectacle. He traveled on horseback accompanied by 60,000 men, 12,000 of whom were enslaved, all of whom were clad in beautiful brocade and Persian silk. Says Gus Kaslihafer, director of the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of African Art Fine Institution, the Smithsonian. Each night when they stopped, it was like a whole town de-camping in the desert. They took with them everything they needed in the desert, including a mobile mosque they would construct so the emperor could pray. Whoa, that's tight.

And that's like not infrequent prayer. That's like we need to be constantly deconstructing and reconstructing this mosque that we're packing with us. That is wild. According to Arab writers of the era, Musa's horse was preceded by 500 slaves with gold-adorned staffs and followed by a baggage train of 80 camels each carrying 300 pounds of gold. Chibis. Let me break that down. I did some quick math and by which I mean I typed it into the Google search bar. There's a few calculations in there. That's 24,000 cumulative pounds of camel gold and as of February 17th, just when I did that research, the amount of gold would be worth $707,481,600 to just hand out to people.

Hey, buddy. You're so lemonade. Give me a glass. Here's a bar of gold. Exactly. What? I know. Prior to this, despite being such a large West African nation, the Empire of Mali was not that well known outside of its own sphere of influence. Like they didn't know about it that well in Europe or in Eastern Africa, etc. And this really put them on the map. Oh, I bet. Yeah. Yeah.

They gave away so much gold that the price of gold in Egypt collapsed for at least 12 years. Oopsie. Oopsie doodle. This one particular scholar went to go talk to folks in Cairo to kind of get their perceptions of him. And they were like, yeah, it's been 12 years and the gold market hasn't been the same because we all have so much of it. Oh my gosh. What is money? How did gold, because it's shiny, because it's the shiniest one.

It's the shiniest and it's very malleable too, right? So maybe like you can make more shit. I don't know. Looks like the sun. It's got a lot going for it. Yeah. With that said, it wasn't all drama-free when Musa came to Egypt for all his reputation of wealthy benevolence. He was still very much a king. You may have noticed that he has a lot of fucking slaves. He carried himself like a king and he wanted to be treated like a king.

People who were greeting him had to kneel down and scatter dust over themselves. Like a little bird. If you appeared in the king's presence with sandals on, that was punishable by death. Geebies. No one was allowed to sneeze in the king's presence. So, you know, he's got a lot of rules, a lot of very ornate rules about who he is in relation to others. David spayed in The Emperor's New Groove. Act one. Before he turns into the llama, right, yes.

So imagine Musa's shock when informed in Cairo that he would have to greet the Sultan of Egypt for their diplomatic shenanigans by bowing and kissing the ground in front of him. Woo! This is a classic, like, real housewives, like, Portia won't come back into Kenya's party unless she apologizes. Like, we're in the same realm here. Oh, totally, yeah, yeah. Someone has to kiss the ring here and let's see who it is.

Yeah, yeah. And so, so Musa couldn't do it, he hemmed, he hawed, he made many excuses. There was a new rider like, oh, you know, the fucking, the weather and my passport and the dog and like all of it. He's just doing the works. And then finally he compromises by declaring that if he had to go to the Sultan's court, if he had to prostrate, it would be before Allah only. So he did it, he bowed, but he was very clear that it was for Allah. So jot that down.

It's a tenographer in the corner. Eye contact, you understand? Okay. The hajj ended up being a fantastic advertisement for Mali, for Islam, and for Musa himself, who sealed his reputation as one of the wealthiest rulers of all time. He was depicted by cartographers in the Catalan Atlas of 1375 CE, about 40 years after his death as the symbol for West Africa, sitting on a throne and pondering a golden orb in one hand.

Hey. So now 40 years later, previously a big ass and impressive empire, but not that well known in like Europe. Now he's in the Catalan Atlas, right? So the word has spread. Yeah, he's made it. TMZ knocking on the door constantly. The Mali Empire fell in 1670 as empires do.

Bitter sweet infamy started in 2020, and if you want to enrich our empire with your generosity, you can leave us some money at coffee.com slash bittersweetinfamy. That's ko-fi.com slash bittersweetinfamy. Or pass this episode along to a buddy. That's a weird transition. I couldn't figure out a way to end it, and so my new resolution is when I don't know how to end it, just like hard sell, pivot into an ass. Cool, cool, cool.

I mean, I feel like that's what you would have done, so. You don't get $700 million worth of walking around gold by not hustling, folks. It's true. Wake up 5 a.m. cold shower. Rise and grind. Don't kneel for nobody. That's men's amuse. It's a story I always remember because it was one of the chapters in Where in Time is Carmen San Diego,

a fantastic piece of children's educational software. From my day. Yeah. And I remember being like, wow, that's a rich motherfucker. He seems so rich. So much salt. Look how much salt this man has. Look at that.

Look at that salt. Look at that. Everyone here has a golden staff. What is going on? Where can I get one of those? And so now I bring this story of wretched access somewhat ironically deployed in the context of a religious pilgrimage to you. Yay! You know, I think I read about it in this context of an article that was like the richest man in the history of the world.

He comes up in a lot of articles like that. Yeah. Yeah. Ten richest in history. He's in a lot of those. Yeah. And it's like, as I always try to go out of my way to say, it's all apocryphal, right? Like you can't really peg that this guy is the richest guy ever.

Right. He's always in the combo. He'll always come up top 10. He had a lot of gold. Yeah. And a gold, like gold jewelry and stuff. I don't know. Is that a sponsor too?

Are you trying to shit on them too? Yeah. Big gold is trying to really get the podcast audience. We're going to be left with like cash for gold hustles because you're going to scare away avatar. It's going to be all the like, well, I'm sorry your grandma died. Come give us her ring and we'll melt it. It's going to be all of those. It's very funny that you brought like a 14th century story.

That was it, right? 14th century. We've done it again. We've done it again, baby. We've done it again. We've done it again. But I'm taking you, I am taking you to the 14th century, but I'm taking you to a different reality of the 14th century.

Okay. So we're moving out of Western Africa, are we? We're moving out of Western Africa and we're moving into what is now known as Russia. At the time it was called Kyiv and Luce. Come again? Yeah. But let me say it again. Kyiv and Luce.

How would you... Ruth? What are the letters of the word that you're trying to say? Oh, fine then. Oh, but that's fair enough because they're being Cyrillic, wouldn't they, too? Well, the Romanized K-I-E-V-A-N space. Yeah? Ruth, R-U-S.

Kyiv and Luce. That's what I said. I wonder if it is. Kyiv and Luce. Okay, I'm fucking with you. In my head I had a very strong and perfect Russian accent, but then when it came out it wasn't. I think that we're both good here.

I think we're both doing great. So, Russia, 14th century medieval times. The restaurant. We're going to start in the mines, Taylor. We're in the mines. Okay, okay. You might want to grab a fur coat. It's chilly.

You might want to pack your pockets with some penicillin because the shit is most likely extremely sickly. The ancient city of Kashin is 225 kilometers north of what is now modern-day Moscow. In the 14th century, the area was ruled by the grand duchy of Ivor. Love a duchy. It kept auto-correcting to ducky. So, if I say sea, oh, I'm going back. Just outside of Kashin in 1344, a vein of silver was accidentally discovered by local peasants

and dutifully, probably on the pain of death, they told the prince Vasily Mikhailovich about this vein of silver and what could potentially be underneath all this land. And the prince began an extensive excavation operation. You got that out flawlessly. That's a hard run of words there. Good job. Thank you. An extensive excavation operation.

Oh, it feels nice drilling off the top. Good for you. Thank you. Thank you. Kievan Rus, yeah. Kievan Rus, motherfuckers. So, the silver from the Kashin mine funded the grand duchy of Ivor and then the duchy of Moscow until the silver was exhausted in the mid-18th century, forcing the mines to

close. So, we're talking mid-1300s to the 1800s. This Kashin silver mine was churning a profit. The geology of the place was unique. It's this special bedrock of marble, rock strata. That's how the silver formed there. The labor needed to extract the silver, of course, as you can imagine, is extensive and extremely dangerous.

In the 1300s, the mine was mainly worked by slave labor. Free workers would be able to keep only three-fifths of their extracted silver, and they had to give over two-fifths to the duchy. So, of course, powers that be definitely wanted slave labor to extract the silver because they didn't have to pay them anything. In 1370, there were about 40,000 laborers working on this mine, the majority of whom were slaves. Of course, at the time, all of this extraction work was done with pure manpower, and it was

open pit mining, which is very scary, especially if there's a lot of rains coming into the area. The pits would fill with water, and many countless people would drown. Ooh, how depressing. Yes. I know, medieval Russia drowning in a silver mine pit. In an open pit, silver mine, even if it's piss and rain, it's probably not a very nice time of year.

And you're a slave. Yeah, most likely. And you're a slave, and this is, you know, God, that's a lot of humanity. That's really sad. As time went on, new technologies made it so more animals were used in the mining process, and eventually an elaborate water pump system was installed to drain pooling water. In terms of the refining methods used in the Middle Ages, it was a process called ash blowing method, where the ore that was extracted, the raw ore, would be heated in kilns, creating

a dust around it. As you can imagine, very bad for your lungs. Yeah, don't inhale that. At a certain point, production declines. Peter the Great steps in in 1695, because he brings in a Spanish mining expert to introduce a special method of extraction and refining that was made famous at the Potosi Silver Mine in South Africa. So, it reduced the death toll and it upped the production back to its highest levels.

Win-win. Yeah, great. Problem solved. And all that happened, of course, until the silver ran out, the whole thing could put. Sure. The Cation Silver Mine. So, and that was mid-18th century, so quite a run there. As you can imagine, the historical record of a mine like that, and the way that it was

connected to the Duchy of Ivor, the Duchy of Moscow, the creation of the Russian nation state in and of itself, right? Pretty pivotal location. It's a pretty interesting stuff, especially if you're looking to set a novel in ancient Russia. Okay. And that is exactly what web novelist Ye Fan was looking to do this past summer, 2022. Great.

Yeah, good for him. It's summer, it's 2022, so you can take your penicillin fur coat off Taylor, leave it at the door. So, when Ye Fan, web novelist, stumbled upon this extremely detailed description of the Cation Silver Mines on Chinese Wikipedia, he was absolutely stoked. His book set in medieval Russia, it was just writing itself at this point. Silver is glitzy, the mining is dangerous, hazardous, throw in a protagonist or two. We already discussed the, oh, the humanity, ba-da-bing, ba-da-boom, novel, selling like

hotcakes. It's perfect. It's too perfect. Per chance. It's a little too perfect, isn't it? Our boy Ye Fan, even though he's writing fiction, he wants to dig into the research just a tad more, probably because he's procrastinating his writing. Let's be real.

But it's always good to verify that what you're reading is true. It, this, yes, this is, this is true. He went to the Cation Silver Mines entry on the English Wikipedia page and he noticed that the entry was considerably shorter and it had different sources from the Chinese one. Then he went to the Russian Wikipedia page for the Cation Silver Mines and it was even shorter than the English one with, again, not the same source entries as the Chinese one.

Now of course, sources will vary, especially in different languages, especially, you know, if you're looking at the Russian Wikipedia page on this Russian Silver Mines, that might look a little different. You would expect it to be longer, have a little bit more detail because the source information, the primary source information, would be in Russian? Not the case here. The Chinese one is much longer, much more detailed. Yeah, bizarre.

In fact, the entry is like precise. It's elaborate. There's whole narratives. There's geology, the mining, the refining, Peter the Great makes a cameo, like. Right. It's got everything. There's probably like a little vodka shot in there too. Yes.

Yifan, he asks some friends of his who know Russian, they speak Russian, to follow up for him and check out some of the cited sources on the Chinese Wikipedia page. You can't, once you've noticed the thread hanging off the sweater, you can't not pull it. It's true. I think on a human level, you've noticed that something is a skew and it compels you to go to all your friends and you're like, listen, I know that you're gonna think I'm fucking crazy, but there's something happening.

Can you, can you just check on those sources? Can you just? I don't speak Russian. Listen, I know I've been hanging around the Russian studies department a lot lately and you don't know who I am, but Dostvedanya, the question mark. These kind friends who know Russian, they do that. They follow up, they look at some of the sources on the Chinese Wikipedia page. Nothing, nothing substantial comes up.

They can't seem to find these textbooks that have been cited. In fact, besides the Wikipedia pages, meaning the Chinese, the English and the Russian, besides those Wikipedia pages, there are no credible sources, no credible information about the cash in silver mines. That's because, Taylor, those goddamn mines never existed, never existed. Even though the Chinese Wikipedia entry details all the little tidbits I just shared with you, every single boring little tidbit I shared, right?

None of those, none of those. You faked me out. Did I shake you out? Oh, just wait. Oh, no, I know. Listen, I know of this story, OK, delighted to hear the full story, because this was kind of on my radar as a very amusing thing that ticked a lot of my boxes. And it initiates a very timely discussion about

considering the credibility of your sources always. Oh, yeah, big time. So do you remember who was the one who created this entry? All I remember is that it was an ambitious female Wikipedia editor with a world in her head kind of vibe. More or less, yeah, yeah. It was just some writer who was kind of doing some like a little fiction experiment on Wikipedia and was a little too good at it.

That's that's what I remember it as. Yeah, I mean, that's the outline for sure. She was at the time, I suppose, was not a fiction writer, though. She just needed the outlet. She's needed the outlet. Her username, which is the only way that we know her, her real world name has not been shared. She's a young woman from mainland China, and her username is Zhimao. Zhimao wrote over one million characters, falsifying some 200 articles on Chinese Wikipedia

on ancient Russian history, but also some more recent Russian history entries. She fabricated intricate details. She created maps of battles that never existed. She co-opted photos from Russian archaeological digs and attributed them to her own scholarly work as a PhD of Russian history. She does not have a PhD in Russian history. Oh, my God. Zhimao is banned from Wikipedia.

Well, you live by the sword, you die by the sword. Yeah, it's true. We're gonna learn a little bit why. Oh, I can't believe I thought you were doing this mind. I knew there was a swerve coming. Like, I did it some level, I was like, I noticed that you were advancing ahead in time. And then I thought, OK, well, perhaps something is going to happen in this mind in the present. Lil Natasha is going to fall down the well and we're going to have to get her out.

Another Russian hole. Oh, my God. I thought I had all of these thoughts. But you were delivering it with such a straight face that I did at some level was like, this is going to pivot. I didn't know what the pivot was going to be. I'm already going to tell you folks, I will probably end up fawning over this young woman. She's my exact profile. She's my exact profile to imprint on and decide that actually she's very misunderstood and this is very good art.

I love it. Because this is a story about Wikipedia. Taylor, what is your relationship to Wikipedia? We run a nonfiction podcast. We use Wikipedia in our sources quite often. How do you use it? How do you come to it? How do you see it?

How do you inhabit the Wikipedia? Well, I only read Vicky Pedro, which is the Esperanto language Wikipedia. I use Wikipedia quite often, although I will only cite Wikipedia as a source outright if it is an especially outstanding and well accredited Wikipedia article. Or it is something that I am using for a fairly minor piece of the information. Yeah. And even in that case, I will, like I'm one of the micro nations I covered in the Esperanto episode, for example. I didn't actually need that much information. I just needed the quick gloss, but I still didn't include information from those pages that wasn't properly sourced.

Yeah. However, sometimes I will use sources and then prune out, like when I was doing that Russian roulette article, I noticed that often people would cite a source named Thomas Radecki. I was like, Thomas Radecki, where do I know that name? Like I've heard that name before. I looked him up. Do you remember Night Trap, the D&D guy who molested all of his patients for like oxycodone? Like he was the guy who was like D&D is evil and Christians against blah, blah, blah.

And then he ended up, it was him. I was like, this seems like a very alarmist statistic about the impact of Russian roulette. Who is this guy giving it? Thomas Radecki. Oh, it was this guy. And so, and I still use those articles as sources with the stuff that I could verify a bit more, that I could double check. Cross-reference, yeah.

But I've wondered like, should I have used that source? Because it cited something from a source that I knew to be inaccurate, but its other sources seem to be good. And in the end, I went with yes, because like I've got to write them infamous here and like, these sources, believe it or not, were the best of what I could find on the history of Russian roulette. Yeah. And it wasn't that much kind of to pull about it for such a cultural touch point. There you go. Thank you.

Yeah. Yes. My short answer is basically that I try to be sparing in my use of Wikipedia and I never make a Wikipedia article my main source, unless it is like an incredibly good and well-documented Wikipedia article. And I will, you will usually know that because I will actually go out of my way to say it. Yeah. We had our own little brush with Wikipedia fame. I don't know if you remember when our episode number 16 and when the sky was opened.

So that story was told to us by Mitchell Collins, professional fiance. Yeah. And he did a really good job. The story is about the... Fantastic. ...negligent deaths of two children, two child actors, caused by a helicopter crash on the set of a horribly written Twilight Zone movie, written and directed by John Landis. Fuck him forever and always.

So the episode with Mitchell's story aired May 30th, 2021. And then we got a mention on the Wikipedia page for the event, which is entitled Twilight Zone Accident. We got that mention the very same day that it came out. Someone put us on there. Yeah. Thank you. So cool.

Thank you. That's cool. Very tenuous, but we appreciate it. Yeah. We got stuck up under the in popular culture heading. In pop culture? Yeah. Which we are.

It said, the filming of John Landis' segment of the Twilight Zone, as well as the events of the accident, are the subject of and when the sky was opened, 16th episode of the podcast, which are sweet and for me. Yeah. Sure. It was right next to the line that is still there. The accident and criminal trial were the subjects of an episode of E, exhibition point, true Hollywood story in 2000, as well as the 2020 docu series, Cursed Films.

So we had our little moment in the sun on Wikipedia there. And then July 3rd, 2021. So we got, we had June. We had all, we had a glorious June of 2021. Beautiful month. Where it was up. And then the beginning of July, a user removed it. And the reasoning for the removal was not noteworthy.

Fair enough. Which totally fair enough. Yes. Yes. It was like a feather in our cap and not much of a feather for the Wikipedia cap. Yes. I was pretty surprised to be on there. And especially then we were quite small.

Yeah. Now we're huge. So what was really interesting for me because I've used Wikipedia, of course, is like just a very general framework to get an understanding, to get like the initial foothold on information. But I've also, I think we talked about this. I've had an assignment in a college class where I had to enhance Wikipedia articles on authors that we were reading or on works of literature that we were reading. So I've seen kind of the back end of things, but it's been a long time since I've peeked

at the back end of Wikipedia. And it was just interesting to see how the posting for our episode went up and then how it got taken down, the length of time, like the conversation that ensued. I mean, it wasn't a lengthy conversation because it's pretty easy to just say not noteworthy. We were punching above our weight. Way above our weight. I mean, we weren't. Somebody was on our behalf.

But. And thank you and keep fighting God for us, folks. Yeah. And God in this case is Jimbo Wales. Yes. Thank you. So yeah, let's talk a little bit about all Jimbo, affectionately known as Jimbo. Oh dear.

We're going into Jimbo now. This is TMZ to the ultimate. I just think a short history of Wikipedia is helpful to get a sense of where it's coming from. Our bud Jimbo graduated with a degree in finance and he began a PhD in the same subject. But in 1994, he decided to not pursue the PhD. Academia was not really for him. About four years after that, he moved to San Diego.

Okay. Okay. Go pods. Beautiful. Go pods. He used his savings to start an internet site. According to Jimmy Wales Wikipedia, it was a site of erotic photography. Which is porn.

He had a porn site. He ran a porn site. Good for him. Yeah. A pretty good porn site, I think. I didn't look at it. So listen, this isn't an endorsement. We have sponsors now.

We need to be really careful. We want Avatar to get that Oscar. Well, no, actually the calculus in my head was like, this is a story about sources and I didn't look at the Wikipedia founders pornography site. Like I didn't do my due diligence. God, I should have looked at the porn. You know what? I'm not going to tell you how to do your job.

I would have looked at the porn. You're a better man than I. No, I don't think that's what that says. So Jimmy Jimbo, he has gotten a foothold in the business of the internet. And again, this is like late 90s. So things are kind of snapping together. The internet is really, you know, picking up. It's all going to crash in 2000, but we're still excited.

Right. This is when you could buy domain names and shit and just sit on them till someone like you noticed that Nabisco hadn't bought Nabisco.com yet. Whoopsie. So around this time, Jimmy Wales is getting interested in the open source movement. It's this idea of software spread through the internet that is free, always free and includes collaborative code. Like everybody can take part, add their own edit in certain ways. Right.

So he's really fascinated by that. And so in 2000, he creates an online general interest encyclopedia called Newpedia. Wikipedia. No. What? Newpedia. Whoa. Yeah.

I'm sick of you jerking my chain on this one, Josie. I was, yes, yes, this is your favorite. You're keeping me on my toes here. Yeah. I don't like it. I can't get comfortable. I'm not going to wear point shoes on baby because you're staying your toes. So you're right.

Nobody's heard of Newpedia because it sucked. It was designed to solicit articles from credentialed academics in their specific fields and it had a pretty lengthy review process, but everything would be free. Right. So it had this like collaborative software aspect and it was free, but it still was cemented by credentialed academics and scholars. Okay. After a year, Newpedia had a grand total of 21 entries.

So that's not very much. People.com has that in a week. More. So a colleague of Jimmy Wales, he starts hearing about this simple software tool that again is, it's designed specifically for collaborative writing and editing and it's called Wiki. Jimbo is very interested. So Jimmy and his colleague at the time, they adopt the Wikipedia software and they start creating pages that includes a history page.

So like what changes have been made to the entries as well as a talk page. So Alk the collaborators can have a discussion page about why they've made the changes they've made, what changes that we might work together to achieve and so on. So the site Wikipedia goes live January 15th, 2001 and the rest is kind of history. The fucker took off much more than 21 articles in a year. The editing process, arbitration around it is still a work in progress. How exactly things make it to a Wikipedia page get taken off of Wikipedia page. It's all done by collaborative work that is not couched in verified credentials.

So unlike Newpedia, Wikipedia has it so that anybody, no matter what their experience, lived experience or their academic experience, whatever they bring to the table can make it onto a Wikipedia page as long as it gets through the gauntlet of editing that volunteers do on Wikipedia. There are quite a few pranks that occur on Wikipedia of course. At one point some like high schooler goes in and changes all these famous names in, you know, in like the president of the Coca-Cola company for, you know, 25 years. Yeah. Like just kind of like small names that you might not really know.

He changes them. Put a U in there. Yeah. No, no, he changes them to his friend's name. Some vice president of a dress store. Yes, yes. Who said one thing about one piece of fabric once in the 40s? Yeah, yeah.

And now it's his buddy from third-party biology and it's all over Wikipedia, right? It's a perfect crime. It's a perfect crime. Yeah. You know, it's got, who will ever suspect this? No one. No one. Of course there's multiple conflicts that are termed death by Wikipedia where famous

people have been reported to be dead, but they're very much alive. Paul Reiser had this issue, still very much alive. And this happens in a lot of different journalistic encounters. False information gets out there and then it has to be retracted. Editors notes, you know, no human endeavor is perfect. Journalism included. None of that is going to be always perfect. There's always a margin of error.

And that's included for printed tertiary sources. Other encyclopedias. Encyclopedia Britannica is kind of held up as this echelon of encyclopedic knowledge. I just sourced them from Ansemusa. Yeah, that's right. And certainly a very credible source. Peer reviewed. It's written by talented and expert writers, but like I said, it's a human endeavor.

It doesn't always get all the facts right. Saying in the words of Countess Luanne, even Louis Vuitton makes mistakes. Even Louis Vuitton makes mistakes. Wow. One conflict, we'll say, conflict of credibility. Early on in Wikipedia history. Are you familiar with the story of S.J.? No.

Okay. So there was a tenured professor of theology and religion who worked at a small private American college, and he was a very active contributor, turn administrator for Wikipedia. And this was the early 2000s. So like right, right at its nasancy, Wikipedia's nasancy. This professor who only went by his username, which was S.J. E-S-S-J-A-Y. Okay.

It was important for him to keep his anonymous status because he was fearful of any retribution that might result from his editing and moderation practices because people would be crazy. Sure. Fair enough. Considering his education and what he taught, which was again theology and religion, he was very active on religious articles, arbitrating issues, and once he became an administrator, making the hard decisions that needed to be made about what stays up and what doesn't. He was also very diligent about keeping articles concise and free from obvious errors, you

know, misplace, comma, or... You're not telling me this story because this guy was a good Wikipedia editor. You're not telling me this because he was good with participles, okay? You're good. Taylor, you're good. I'm not buying it. I'm not buying you fool me once. Shame on you.

Fool me twice, which you have. Shame on me. Fool me thrice. Not gonna happen. He was such a mainstay of the Wikipedia community that when Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Stacy Schiff was writing an article for The New Yorker, she was referred to SJ as a reliable source to interview by the Wikipedia big wigs themselves, by like Jimmy Wales. By Big Wickey.

Yes, exactly. Okay. So, concerned about his safety, as he has always kept his anonymity, SJ wanted to keep his anonymous status even if he was going to be interviewed for this New Yorker article. Got you. He still answered all her questions willingly and in detail. The article was published July 23rd, 2006, with the title Know It All. It has the tagline, Can Wikipedia Conquer Expertise?

I don't know. Is that a helpful way to frame this? When are we? 2006. Okay, so like idiocracy. Yeah, okay. Yeah. Sure.

Yeah. I feel like the rap on Wikipedia for a long time, and still is to a degree, is that like anybody can post anything they want done there, which I think that they've gotten better about making it visible, what is sourced, and adding different citations and flags and shit. Yeah. But that has evolved over kind of years. Yeah.

As opposed to like when it was still Wild Wild West Wikipedia, I remember. All them W's. In high school, we were like told, stay away from that website. Oh yeah. It's lies. Yeah, it's all lies. They go on there and they lie, they lie to you about Lincoln. Like okay.

But to follow that to its logical conclusion, my argument would be like, do you really think someone's gonna go there and make up thousands and thousands of words about some Russian mind that never even existed? Like legitimately, right? Yeah. That's the argument. And the answer it turns out is, yeah, someone would. Oh yeah.

Someone totally would. Yeah. So this article, no at all, it gives a general overview of Wikipedia's history. In fact, it's the source from which I got our information about Jimmy Wales. I said it. There it is. What? What?

Does anyone have anything to say about it? Okay, moving on. So it has general history and it minds these little factoids that are fun to read about to demonstrate the width and the quirk of Wikipedia's knowledge. So things like cap grass delusion, which is the unnerving sensation that an imposter is sitting in for a close relative. Don't do salvia, folks. No.

Steve, you don't want fucking cap grass delusions? Don't do salvia is my advice. It's good advice. Come here for the advice. And vote for avatar. I took the best picture. It's not a public vote. I don't understand.

What do you think it is? You're wrong. You're wrong. You're mistaken. Josie, I seldom tell you to shut up, but you're out of line. Vote for avatar, folks. So the article, it's from the New Yorker. It's smart.

It's very well written. And it gives a conclusion that's like a critical side eye glance at Wikipedia. And then it ends with like this expansive, progressive look into the future. It's like, there is a certain point where I read a long form article from the New Yorker, and it feels like I have stared into the sun for too long. It's just like... Yeah. Yeah.

Thanks. You're like, I'm really glad that I learned about the inner workings of this like ostentatious private school in Brooklyn, but like at what cost to my soul. Yeah. Exactly. I got that. In the narrative of the article, SJ serves as a peek into the creation of the Wikipedia article.

So he's a bit of a behind the curtain source. So in the article, when Stacy Schiff is describing SJ, she says, and I quote, he is serving a second term as chair of the mediation committee. He is also an admin, a bureaucrat, and a check user, which means that he is one of 14 Wikipedians authorized to trace IP addresses in case of suspected abuse. He often takes his laptop to class so he can be available to Wikipedians while giving a quiz. And he keeps an eye on 20 IRC chat channels where users often trade gossip about abuses

they have witnessed. I was on the IRC chats back in the day, not the Wikipedia ones. Very formative stuff for me. The IRC chats like my entire teenagerhood. Oh, yeah. Wow. It's like the foundation of your personality. I remember what like the alerts where I remember what people's exit messages where I remember

the games that we would play on them and shit. It's deep in there. Yeah. That'll be on your deathbed. Your life flashes before your eyes. Why are you telling me not only mortality reminder. Not only are you going to die, but you're probably gonna be thinking about like, oh, I was happy in the IRC channel when I was 14.

Fuck you. My peak. My peak when I was in the IRC channels as of in on the on the fucking downstairs computer at 15. Geez. Yeah, but no, those are pretty good times. Honestly. So SJ, he's an admin.

He's like, he has all these responsibilities. He's awarded various accolades. It's such a good guy. The best, best wiki editor. He uploaded the most pictures in one year and they were all clear and perfectly in focus. The sidebar. That was him. You know that globe with the puzzle piece.

You know that little that little anime girl that wiki pay tan. You know, he wrote the little lock, the little lock that they put on there when someone's just dead because everyone's editing it too much. He made that up folks. Jimbo who? Anyway, what's wrong with this guy? What did he do? What the fuck did this guy do?

So SJ is offered a paid position with Wikipedia's for profit enterprise, which is called wiki. And when that happens, he realizes the cat needs to come out of the bag because he's not going to be anonymous behind a screen anymore. He's going to have an office that he goes to in person. Right. So he gets on his Wikipedia user profile and announces. Oh no. His name is Ryan Jordan.

He does not hold a PhD, nor is he a tenured professor at a private college. He's in fact 24 years old and he dropped out of community college. He's never taught before. Oh, Ryan. Yeah. There's a path that ends in me being a Ryan there, but for the grace of God. Like I empathize. You got lost in the sauce and in this case it was the wiki sauce.

It was a very, very thick, opaque wiki sauce. Bechamel. It was a wiki bechamel. Yeah. There's a few things going on here. The New Yorker article never had his real name. They never were able to really fact check him besides just using his user profile on Wikipedia, which corroborated all the biographical details.

So there wasn't much that they could do besides posts and editors note a few months after the publication. When asked for comment by the New Yorker, Ryan Jordan did not respond. Wikipedia's founder though, Jimbo, he responded to the falsified identity issue by stating, and it's printed in the editor's note in New Yorker. He says, I regard it as a pseudonym and I don't really have a problem with it. So that was going to be my question because regardless of whether this guy is King Kong Big Dick of, what was he claiming, geography, history? Religion.

Religion. Religion. Thank you. Even if he's not that guy, he's still required to provide sources the same as anybody else, no? Yes, he is. Yeah. So he's not saying that like, according to me, Jesus wept. It's like, it says here that Jesus wept, right?

Yeah. And so who gives a fuck? Right. And Jimbo, his whole philosophy was like, fuck the PhD. That was not fun for me. You do not have to have credentials. Like that is not why we're here. The information takes precedence over credential over the academy, which awesome.

Cool. Sure. Sure. Collaborative, open sourced, free. Let's keep it that way. Yeah. And if anonymity is important to a user, then people will be crazy. Sure.

That logic stands. Digging into it a little bit more, though, and my thinking about it, it doesn't quite hold up so much because one, Brian Jordan, he went on record with a highly respected news source and he gave them false information. There were no quizzes. Okay. So they're not that good. Okay, fair. They're not that good.

Maybe we should respect them last for not checking their sources. Next. That's true. You forget that this is all building up to the grand finale of me lashing myself with a chains in front of this Chinese lady while the bulldozers come. That's true. So you got, I got to get you ready. Okay.

Yeah. No, no, no. That's true. So I think if Jimbo's philosophy is correct information over credentials, then that's Fair enough. It's a bad look. It's a bad look to have someone who is with credibility issues. Uh-huh.

Uh-huh. Yep. I get that. It's a bad look. And I forgot to mention this, but his role as a wiki administrator has not changed at all. And he is still in a paid position with wiki. So his status with Wikipedia has not changed at all. So number two here.

When this all gets out and the New Yorker raises, you know, a stink about it. And by stink, I mean an editorial note. Oh, that was funny. Thank you. Okay. So that's their version of a stink. So apparently Ryan Jordan takes to the article written on this because of course there's a Wikipedia article written on SJ.

He takes to the talk page and he casually mentions there that Stacey Schiff offered him compensation for his time in responding to her questions. Oh, yeah. That's a bad look. Yeah. He wrote, my response to her was that if she truly felt the need to do so, i.e. compensate me for my time, she should donate to the foundation instead. Oh, as your initial reaction.

This is a huge no-no paying sources for their information. Journalistic integrity is out the window if you involve finances in an exchange of information. Because if I'm like Taylor, I'm writing this article on, I don't know, Vancouver, blah, blah, blah, and I want to pay you $500 to tell me this information that I need. Then it's going to sway the way you give me the information. Yeah, that's true. I'm looking at you like, you know, I don't know anything about nuclear physics, but I do know I need to make rent.

So, I get it. $500 would not be bad. Yeah. So when asked about this, Schiff replied that it was quote, complete nonsense and quote. Okay. Number three here is that when Wikipedia administrators were going back through SJ's edits, because there was some question of his credibility here, maybe we should go back and check. Very sensible.

He claimed to have a degree in religion and theology, but he does not. So maybe we'll just take another peek and make sure all those sources are correct. So, going back through his edits, administrators found that he more than once used his credentials, his falsified credentials, mind you, to sway the determination of what could be published information. Oh, so he used as his Trump card, when the argument was going on for a long time, he would get a new degree. Yeah. Kind of thing.

I mean, for example, he praised the use of the book Catholicism for dummies as a credible source for citation. He wrote to other Wikipedia editors on an entry for some obscure Catholic thing. There was a question of whether Catholicism for dummies should be a credible source. And he wrote to them, this is a text I often require for my students, and I would hang my own PhD on its credibility. You can't now. Yeah.

You can't be doing that. No. You can't be doing that, SJ. I do like the sense of hanging a fictional PhD on something. Yeah. On Catholicism for dummies. Like, it's a good, it's a, it's a funny book for it to be about. Yeah.

I'm not going to lie. Yeah. So this consideration gets to Jimbo, founder of Wikipedia, and he eventually lets Ryan Jordan go. Ryan Jordan is no longer an employee of Wikia. He's free. He's a free agent. Yes.

And Jimmy Wales writes a letter to the New Yorker, which is published in their mail section, and it's entitled Making Amends, and I'll read a section of it. I'm writing to apologize to the New Yorker and Stacey Schiff and to give some follow-up concerning Ryan Jordan. When I last spoke to the New Yorker about the fact that a prominent Wikipedia community member had lied about his credentials, I misjudged the issue. It was not okay for Mr. Jordan or SJ to lie to a reporter, even to protect his identity. I later learned more about the deceptions involved and asked Mr. Jordan to resign from

his position of responsibility. He is also resigned from his position at Wikia as well. SJ, I think, was a 24-year-old dude who just got a little too tied to his laptop. Hadn't touched grass in a while, probably. Yeah. Yeah. Which, you know what? Same here, baby.

Same here. Yeah. I'm sympathetic. You can't fabricate credentials to win online arguments about Catholicism. Yeah. You can, but you shouldn't. But you do raise a good point. Perhaps Catholicism for dummies might not be the most credible source, but he never

falsified sources. He never violated the actual articles. The information that hit the articles was maybe skewed, but not false. Yeah. But again, it comes back to credibility. And I don't, but I don't, that sounds like such a hard-ass thing. Yeah. I'm willing to lie about this.

What else are you willing to lie about? But then I think I'm like, you know, I've lied. I don't think that that means that I'm a compulsive liar. I think that this is like a very... Victimless crime? No. No, because it comes back to people like us who make these shows. Even if we're not going and reading off a Wikipedia page, I feel like the really dismissive

take on shows like ours is, oh, they just read a Wikipedia page to you, which is not what we do. Like at all. We put a lot of work into like crafting our narrative and... Yeah. I paraphrase that shit. Yeah. Exactly.

I'm kidding. I'm kidding. And so not everybody does that, not to hold ourselves like aloft or anything. I think that that's like the reasonable standard that everybody should put in, but not everybody does. Like I was thinking about it when you were talking about those teenagers who edited their friends' names into people. I was like, is that a victimless crime to replace some random vice president?

And what I ended on was like, the victim is that vice president who deserves to be commemorated for posterity. Just because a vice... Like a vice president is a per... Folks, this is my platform. Vice presidents are people too. Vopravitar. Kamala.

Kamala, we're getting you on the show. Couple of vopravitar. Please. But you know what I mean. And so I thought that, no, that's not a victimless. Like I feel like especially now we see the ways that misinformation is not a victimless crime because you can really... That shit can go real, real bad.

Yeah. So let's get back to Jamal. What's her deal? What is her deal? So with a long history of... Maybe long isn't the word because it hasn't been around for maybe that long. But a rich history of Wikipedia pranks and falsified credentials. Jamal is to date one of the most wide reaching and airtight hoaxes to hit the site.

Though she did not set out to trick anyone. Her goal was not to pull the prank. Her goal was not to dupe anybody. Jamal, starting in 2019, she was looking for an online community to be a part of. She went kind of all out with it. She got lost in the sauce. Again, a thick, opaque, wiki sauce. On her Wikipedia user page, she claimed to be the daughter of a Chinese diplomat to Russia.

That's the thing. It's never just I'm representing myself as more or less exactly who I am and falsifying all this stuff. It's also, and I'm a diplomat's daughter and I'm a cat girl and I've got two different colored eyes and they change color when I'm angry. There's always the wiki-sona to accompany it, right? Again, you're right. It's about seeking community.

That's really interesting. I hadn't anticipated that. Daughter of a Chinese diplomat to Russia and the wife of a Russian citizen who she claimed had started an online petition denouncing the Russian invasion of Ukraine. She claimed to have attended Moscow State University where she got her doctorate in world history. And as we know, this is not true. There is no Russian diplomat dad. No?

No Russian husband denouncing- But the fur hats. I know. No. The detail involved too, being like my husband's Russian, but he doesn't believe that Putin is doing good things in the world. In my casual observation, when people inhabit online personas of this variety, you see a lot of intersecting identities.

You see a lot of left-leaning politics. It's about making your character as above reproach as possible and having something to- If somebody starts questioning what you're putting down, you can pivot to this particular area of expertise or identity. Yeah. You know? Yeah. So falsified, no doctorate.

In fact, no degree in higher education at all. She graduated from high school. Congrats. I know. That's good. She's not fluent in Russian nor in English. In actuality, she was born in Hong Kong and moved to mainland China at a pretty young age.

She married another Chinese national who works as a businessman and he travels quite a lot, which leaves her alone at home, bored, and pretty lonely. Yeah. Not much of a community. Oh. Yeah. And a big imagination. Yeah.

For Mother Russia, all of these factors combine. That makes perfect sense. So to quell her loneliness and explore her interest in history, Russian history in particular. Creative writing. It's all there. Yeah. I don't know if she realized her skill as a creative writer. But I'll need a creative outlet.

We do. It's only healthy. Yeah. She starts where anyone gets started when they want to look something up, right? They go to Wikipedia. Of course, that's only where you get started, right? So she digs into primary sources. She ends up on Research Gate.

She's a community of scholars and academics and she asks a few of them to help her understand a little bit more about ancient Russia, medieval Russia, but their circles were pretty tight. She says that everybody had each other's phone numbers and they weren't very keen on like any newcomers, especially if they weren't credentialed academics. They seemed pretty unwilling to help her or what she really wanted was to make friends with them. As she was looking through these primary sources too, a lot of them translated into Chinese. They weren't really making sense to her.

There wasn't a full picture of the historical record that like she was hoping for. So when she started to get kind of frustrated with these gaps, she just make her own shit up. Just make her own shit up. Good for her. That way the next person won't have the same problems she had. She's doing a service. Yeah.

She's thinking of others. No more frustrating historical gaps. We have a new history and it's great. The best part is, is it real? You won't know. You weren't there. Yeah. No one.

Yeah. Was King Tutankhamen real? No big deal. Was Taft real? She takes to Wikipedia, starts editing and she starts pretty slowly adding details about obscure and ancient events and localities, just very, very minutia-based stuff. And her edits were making it through. They were getting published.

So she kept going, cross-citing her own pages, building this web of all of your own falsified information. A beautiful architecture of lies. Across Chinese Wikipedia. And of course, you need citations on Wikipedia. That's the only way that your edits will remain on the pages. Primarily administrators and editors are looking for primary or sometimes secondary sources to support the claims.

And especially in something like Russian history on a Chinese Wikipedia site, having maybe a secondary source wouldn't be unheard of at all. Meaning a translated text or a text interpreted by a Chinese scholar about Russian history. And so she finds a few books that are just that, the secondary sources. So what she does is she takes these secondary texts and they're always printed texts because those are harder to find if you're on the internet. And she would cite them as a source and give a random page number. She didn't have the book, so she would just kind of pull a number out of the air.

For example, she cited a well-known book published in Chinese on Russian history. The book does exist. It is there. Crafty. The book only has 200 pages. And she cited page 256, something like that. Sloppy work. Or she would cite a book that was published in Chinese in 1967, but the actual book wasn't

published in Chinese until 1974 or something like that, just as an example of those numbers. So slightly off there, the deception was extremely subtle, especially for the way that Wikipedia is edited, where pranks, big, huge, glaring- Ha-ha, pee-pee-pooh-pooh. Those things are tracked very, very carefully. She's very convincing with her falsified credentials because they're very subtle. They're not like the big, huge red flags. So they pass a lot of editors.

And another way that she is so convincing is that she created at least four fake counts. Stock puppets, baby. You gotta have sock puppets. Stock puppets. You gotta have some sock puppets in the mix. Yeah. A sock puppet account is just a fake account. I guess it's like talking.

The person you're talking to is fake. It's a puppet on your own hand. Well, I agree with it. I agree with it too. Oh my God. Wow, look. Everybody's agreeing with me. I must be right.

You know what I mean? So one of her sock puppet counts was a doctoral student in world history at Peking University who had studied in Russia. And this student actually claimed to know Jamal in real life. This is all straight out of the Miscribe textbook. Do you know Miscribe? No. A Harry Potter fan who was a very influential sock puppeteer put it that way.

And ended up getting like being the subject of like the biggest fandom expose in history written by someone who like quietly aggregated all of this evidence that she was actually all of these sock puppets and then like published it in an anthology series of journal posts. I didn't even know Harry Potter fandom. I was tuning in to read this shit every time it dropped. Like people still talk about Miscribe. Oh wow. Yes, the fuck they do.

She was a legend in sock puppet shit. Cool. If you don't want to expose yourself to online, then people need to have seen you. And if you can't find those people, then make them, baby. Yeah, true. Through those sock puppets too, she also paints herself as a very modest academic. Sock puppets to hype your own modesty is the best. Yes, so good.

So she wrote as Jamal, her username, right? To her own false account. Her sock puppet on her right hand, yeah. The sock puppet was saying like, oh you're such a good skolma, you're just like, oh that sucks the best. And she's like, please don't call me boss. I'm just an ordinary student. Oh my, I love this.

She's so good. Yes. Oh my gosh. She's known as being, yeah, this modest, very chill, and very hard working. She is posting and editing almost every other day for years. Wow. Oh, yes. In fact, to honor her dedication, Eric Liu, a history student involved with Wikipedia

since 2015, awarded her a Wikipedia accolade, a barn star, earlier in 2022. So the year that she was found out, he was like, hey, thanks so much, Jamal. You're the best. Here's an award. Oh, I mean, isn't she? We never said best at what? That's true. That's true.

That's true. That's what I'm saying. He can be quoted as saying, I thought she was a rare talent, as the site lacked writers knowledgeable and medieval Russia. I really hope someone gets on medieval Russia soon, because we have a gap here, clearly. There's obviously something missing, yeah. One of the things that is especially noted is that her language is very clear, very concise, and not super flowery, which I think is kind of interesting because she's making up fictional

worlds. Mm-hmm. She's very prosaic about the way she describes these little details. A lot of folks just like really, really like to build that world. You know what I mean? It's somewhat irrelevant to them if there's narrative in it other than the lore of Oh Peter the Great came here once long ago. Yeah.

They're not actually that fussed about inhabiting these worlds with the forward movement of a narrative focused in on a particular protagonist with the structure of a story. They're like, no, I just want to talk about how the dwarves live in logs over here, man. Yeah, yeah. You know what I mean? We're going to take a few pages, and we're going to talk about the specific geology of this area. Yeah.

And so in that regard, I get it. I think that there's probably a lot of people who are like that. Put it to you this way. I once wanted to... You do all kinds of crazy shit when you're looking for leads on a story, folks. So I searched my own... I searched like Tropical Storm Taylor or Hurricane Taylor, and I was like, maybe there's some under-reported hurricane I can cover because it happens to have my name or something.

And I found this page that detailed all of this stuff that Hurricane Taylor had done and it killed like 26 people in New York or something like that. And then I realized this was on a fictional hurricane wiki with all of these fictional... Yes, that was my exact reaction. I was delighted. I was delighted to have encountered this. And so it's all of these like fictional natural disasters with all of these minutia, and there seem to be people like, and like, again, in the back end of the wiki page, just discussing

about like, we're taking pitches for Hurricane Josie, folks. Whoa. You know what I mean? That's so cool. Yeah. And so I looked at it. And again, this thing of like, I think the creative act there is so enjoyable in and of itself.

And if your thing happens to be geeking out on like, fictional hurricanes, then I say, I'm glad you gave me a good one. I fuck some people up in New York. Yeah. That's what I say. More power to you. Yeah. So yeah, there's a nest to fill every seat.

I know I say that all the time, but there really is a nest to fill every seat. Especially when we're talking about the internet. And Mao, she injected this false information into 206 articles with varying degrees of false information, right? Sometimes she would just be like, oh, and then Peter the Great. And then sometimes she made up the whole cash in silver mines that never existed. Cash in as a city, as a town, medieval town, totally true. It's on the river.

It's gorgeous. A plus. You know, as well as anybody, you've said it yourself on this podcast, there's got to be that grain of truth in the lie. It's true. That's what makes it adhere. That's the grain of sand that the pearl forms around. So beautiful.

Right? So beautiful. A veteran Chinese Wikipedia John Whip said about her, the content she wrote is of high quality and entries were interconnected, creating a system that can exist on its own. Jim Mao single-handedly invented a new way to undermine Wikipedia. I'm going to blush. Stop. I know, right?

A little of me undermined Wikipedia all by myself. Stop it. John. With my little minds, with my little cash in mind, stop it. Some of the pages, like some of the books aren't even that long. If you look, there's all kinds of things. Don't stop. Do you know how easy it is to just make up a map?

Nobody looks at these books. Once the web novelist, Yifan, the one who started reading about the cash in silver mines and was like, wait, wait, wait, something's fishy here. So once he found out that the cash in silver mines never existed, heartbreaking, he alerted a group of Wikipedia administrators to comb through Jim Mao's contributions. And it took about a month to clean up the mess. Many of the details were hard to parse from actual fact because they were so subtle and so like, oh, this citation works here but not here and how do we do this?

So a lot of the administrators reached out to credentialed academics to verify what was real and what wasn't. And of course, many of the articles have been translated into other languages and that falsified information was shared in many other versions of Wikipedia. So it wasn't just Chinese Wikipedia that was infected. It had spread well beyond the confines of language. What a woman. Mm-hmm.

Jim Mao was immediately suspended and is banned from Wikipedia for ever for life and fair enough. That's gotta be hard though. That's her canvas. Yeah. I know. Before everything was shut down, she did go onto her user page and deleted all the false information and posted an apology. In it, she apologizes to anyone that she deceived.

In particular, she highlights other scholars of Russian history. She didn't mean to undermine them in any way. Other scholars of Russian history? Fair enough. Fair enough. Just scholars of Russian history. Just scholars. I wish she is not one.

She writes in it, I should say too, that this is translated using Google into English from the Chinese. So interesting because there's already like issues with translation and information getting warped in translation. So there's probably some warping happening here. Quote, as the saying goes, in order to cover a lie, you must tell more lies. Yes. I was reluctant to write hundreds of thousands of words, but lost millions of words.

And it goes on to say, I spent more than three years on the wiki, hundreds of hours, and wrote millions of words, all of which have disappeared. To be wrong is to be wrong, and I don't want to make excuses. I just want to be brave enough to admit my mistakes. I know I'm going to face taunts and ridicule. I know my actions are silly and totally deserving of ridicule. I spend way too much time on the wiki. In reality, I am about to give birth, and my family's financial pressure is also high,

so it's impossible to have time to edit wikis. What I said above comes from the bottom of my heart, and it is not false. I accept my permanent ban and will not create any new accounts using the VPN. My current knowledge is not enough to make a living, so I will learn a craft in the future, steadily, and stop doing these illusory things. No, just be an artist. I know! Just be a writer.

You don't need to learn a craft. You have a craft, and it's called fiction. I understand her being like, okay, well, this is a little bit unhealthy. Maybe I should just pick up plumbing. I get that too. Wow. Poor thing. I know.

Though, hopefully, there has been an overwhelming response to the news of this, her undermining of wikipedia, and people are in some camps kind of horrified, and the questions of credibility on wikipedia are all bubbling up all over again. Some people are into it. Yeah. Of course. There's an ass for every seat. People really, really want to read more of her work.

Yes! I'll push that shit. Read it. What happened in the silver mines? Yes. Exactly. We want to know. Because remember, a novelist is the one, E-Fan, who found out that it was all false research

for his novel. So... Interesting. Obviously, something was working, because he's a novelist, and he was like, Jesus Christ, the story is writing itself. I love this. I want to tell you this. Yeah, exactly.

This is too good to be true. I can't believe nobody's talking about this. Right, exactly. So it's in there, Jamal. You just have to follow, trust the false, trust the falsified facts you've created. Or you need to link up with these fictional, storm, wiki people, and they can maybe show you a more ethical approach. Yeah.

Yeah. It doesn't have to be wikipedia specifically. That's true. That's true. Yeah. Nobody said it had to be wikipedia. Nobody. Nobody did.

Nobody did. It definitely changed the way that I use wikipedia. I most certainly look at the talk pages. I look at the history pages now, before I would just kind of like go to the citations and kind of pull from there and get the general sense and like move on quickly. But I realize, actually, here's a really good example. So the web novelist who cracked the case, who found out that the cash and silver mines weren't real, Yifan.

There were some sources cited from the wikipedia that I had followed. Some of the sources referred to Yifan with she, her pronouns, and some of them referred to them using he, him pronouns. I was like, okay, could these be two different people? Yep. Or is one of these getting it wrong, one of these getting it right? Do they use both pronouns interchangeably? That's happening here.

And I hit the talk button on the wikipedia page and somebody had raised that question. They said exactly what I had found. Through these sources, there seems to be some disparity. Do we know what's actually going on? Somebody came on. There's a vice article that's heavily quoted and that I use as well. And they're like, well, that one uses he, him pronouns and that seems to be the most credible.

So I guess we'll go with he, him. And then somebody else came on another user and said, they're a web novelist and they wrote about it on their own blog. Here is a link to their blog on the blog they identify as he, him. The blog? Oh, it's that person's own blog. It's the web novelist's own blog. Ah, okay.

That counts. He clearly uses he, him pronouns through it. And it's like, okay, it's this guy. Because if you Google Yifan Chinese novelist, another novelist comes up, a young girl who's Chinese American who published a book when she was like 16 years old with Harper Collins or something like that, like kind of a phenom. And there's a lot of Google traffic on her because she has a published book. She writes in English.

So if you search it. And if you're writing in a hurry and you search it, it's her done. Perfect. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. But if I hadn't been to the talk page on Wikipedia, I wouldn't have found like the real information. So I don't know. It's really, it's really fascinating because there's all of these issues with the creation

of Wikipedia pages, especially political entries. The back and forth can be very, very intense. Who makes it into the history book? If everybody's allowed to write the history book is kind of a fascinating question in the end. And how does the way that we communally create an encyclopedia that's supposed to be the truth or whatever? How does that jibe with all our different versions of the truth?

Exactly. And I have to say the Wikipedia article on Jamal and the cash and silver mine host. Really good. Fan fucking tabs. Beautiful. So good. So well because that happens a lot. You'll encounter pages where it's like, oh, that clause, no, that's just dangle baby there.

What's happening? Like this doesn't the sentence grammatically does not hang together. And I don't know what is actually being said. The grammar gets in the way of the meaning. But at that page, you could tell that there's somebody from Big Wiki behind that for sure. Or somebody who was like writing a dissertation on it, you know. Well, I imagine that it's probably of high profile importance for them to get that one exactly, right?

Yeah. Well, obvious reasons. And a lot of the primary sources come from Wikipedia itself in that case, right? Of any source. But also the most motive to keep it quiet. That's true. That's true. There's a really nice piece of art that kind of encapsulates this so, so well.

There's a British artist and technology writer named James Brittle. Have you heard of him? B-R-I-D-L-E. He has an art book and there's only one published. It is called The Iraq War, a historiography of Wikipedia changelogs. It was published in 2010. It's a 12 volume 7,000 page collection of printed books showing all 12,000 changes made to the Wikipedia page, the English Wikipedia page to the Iraq War from December 2004 to November

2009. Interesting. It's just a stack of books, pretty much. But it logs in no longer a digital form, but in a hard copy printed published form. Taking up a lot of physical real estate as opposed to Wikipedia, which is hypothetically endless. Exactly. This is actually like resource intensive and dense and heavy.

Yes, exactly. It's an artistic statement, folks. It's called irony. Look it up. But what it does is it tracks all the vandalisms, all the political opinions that made it and then got erased and then came back and then got swooped this way and that way and this. And it's a history of making history. Interesting.

It's a log of how we decide to record the truth. And we were having some, for those of you who weren't blessed to be around during the period of the Iraq War, we're having some issues with the truth at the time. Yeah, weapons of mass destruction. Oh my. Was that mission really accomplished? We're going deep into the old like 2004 Democrat gripes now, folks. Oh, real deep.

Bring back John Kerry. Tim Kaine's still on the come up, a shining young start of E. But Taylor. Yeah. Everything I've told you, I just made up. No, you didn't. I've heard about this one before. That's stupid.

Was that source credible? That's true. That's true. That's true. Am I credible? We always say it and then we usually end up cutting it because we think it probably undermines ourselves. But like, are we credible?

We're as credible as two strangers on the internet who tell stories. That's who we are. We have this exactly the amount of credibility that we've seen then. What I mean to say is like, if something that we say sounds funky, like look into it for yourself. Yeah. Look into anything. Look into any source.

Yes. Thanks for listening. If you want more infamy, we've got plenty more episodes at bittersweetinfamy.com or wherever you listen to podcasts. If you want to support the podcast, shoot us a few bucks via our coffee account at ko-fi.com forward slash bittersweetinfamy. But no pressure. Bittersweetinfamy is free, baby.

You can always support us by liking, rating, subscribing, leaving a review, following us on Instagram at bittersweetinfamy, or just pass the podcast along to a friend who you think would dig it. Stay sweet. For this episode's Minfamous, I read the entries on Musa I of Mali from Britannica.com and the National Geographic Encyclopedia. I also read the historic Hodge of Mansa Musa, King of Mali by Aisha R. Masterton on abodislam.net, June 24th, 2022, and a Golden Age King Mansa Musa's reign by Stephanie Culkey for Northwestern

Magazine, Spring 2019. Hope that's how you pronounce your ass named Stephanie. The sources that I used for this episode include an article in Vice World News entitled Abored Chinese Housewife Spends Years Falsifying Russian History on Wikipedia, published by Rachel Chung, July 13th, 2022. I looked at an article published on Engaggett, entitled A Chinese Wikipedia Editor Spent Years Writing Fake Russian Mid-Evil History, written by Mariela Moon, published July 14th, 2022.

I looked at a post written by the Chinese web novelist Yi Fan. He used the username Ivan on a Chinese log platform, Ji Hu. The post is entitled How to Evaluate the Large-Scale Tampering and Falsification of Ancient Russian History and Chinese Wikipedia. I read an article from Sixth Tone entitled She Spent a Decade Writing False Russian History Wikipedia Just Noticed, written by Wu Pei Yu, published June 28th, 2022. For information on medieval Russia, I looked at the website SmartHistories.com and their section on medieval Russia.

I read the article in The New Yorker Know It All by Stacy Schiff, published July 23rd, 2006. I read the very in-depth Wikipedia article on the SJ Controversy. As well, I looked at the English Wikipedia site Fabricated Articles and Hoaxes of Russia in 2022. On Chinese Wikipedia, I looked at a translated page entitled List of Wikipedia Hoaxes slash Cation Silver Mine. It is a project page and the subject of prank research. So it was archived from Jin Mao's original posting on the Cation Silver Mine.

None of that information, of course, is true. And I looked at the article page, the talk page, and the view history page of English Wikipedia's Jin Mao Hoaxes. The interstitial music you heard earlier is by Mitchell Collins and the song you are listening to now is Tea Street by Brian Steele. You may not know us, but you will. We're SMS Equipment, specialists in mining, construction, and forestry heavy equipment. We offer the world's most innovative brands and technology.

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