While carrying out research for a forthcoming book, Chinese novelist Yifan inadvertently stumbled upon a complex hoax worthy of Borges hidden in the pages of Chinese Wikipedia. Its creator, a woman referred to as Zhemao (her Wikipedia username), had exploited the site’s paucity of Chinese articles on mediæval Russian history to construct an elaborate web of nearly 300 articles that created an entirely fictitious, self-referential world hidden within the encyclopedia that had gone undetected for more than 10 years.
Yifan first encountered Zhemao’s creation by reading an article about the Kashin silver mine. This explained that the mine had been discovered in 1344 by Russian peasants and had been worked by more than 40,000 enslaved people and freedmen, generating vast wealth for the principality of Tver in the 14th and…
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