Wikipedia talk:List of hoaxes on Wikipedia

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Minor-planet moons, and the satellite of 38628 Huya

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Does the issue covered in Talk:Minor-planet moon#Source of the provisional designations? qualify for being added to the false statements in articles section? I don't want to just add it, because I think I've been involved in that discussion too much. There are many (dozens) of affected articles, with most of the problems introduced in 2016.

The most clear-cut case of a fabricated moon name is probably Special:Diff/681936007 (added 2 October 2015, removed a few weeks ago), compare Talk:Satellite of 38628 Huya#Provisional designation. Thankfully, our discovery came in time for the pre-print of one scientific article [1] that used the fabricated name (which had found its way from Wikipedia into a scholarly book in the early 2020s) to be changed for the final publication [2]. Renerpho (talk) 22:04, 10 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Clinton County Chaos

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Clinton County Chaos was created in 2010 and seems to be a team that never actually existed. Hoax or just clerical error? Ten Pound Hammer • (What did I screw up now?) 03:53, 17 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]

@Ten Pound Hammer: I don't think it's a hoax. It's not notable, but it may well have existed.
If it was a hoax then the perpetrator (not necessarily the article creator) went above and beyond and created a website at ccchaos.webs.com,[3] which they kept up for at least a decade (archived versions from 2011-2021, but the url is now dead). The earliest archived version says "Woman's Tackle Football is here in Clinton County, Ohio! Check out our new online team calendar at www.my.calendars.net. This has all of the teams up coming events! Anyone interested in playing or coaching contact us at [redacted], leave a message!" As of 2021, that was still the only message on their site. I would delete for lack of notability, if no additional sources are found.
The team is listed in National Women's Football Association, with a note that they "joined WSFL". There are no references for that, and both articles are lacking citations (tagged as such since 2021).
The creator of the article, Tom Danson, is still active, so let's ask them: What is this team about? Renerpho (talk) 11:48, 17 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]

15-year old error

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Removed here. I am pretty sure it was not a hoax (deliberate attempt to mislead), but still, worth nothing for posterity (and this page listed and still lists quite a few errors which are unlikely to be deliberate hoaxes). Just noting on talkpage. Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 11:34, 1 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Battle of Faggeta

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@Gawaon and Tythefishs: I don't know if this is the best place to discuss this, but I wanted to ask again about the addition (and removal) of WP:Articles for deletion/Battle of Faggeta from the list. I agree with Gawaon that this isn't a clear cut case of a hoax article, but Tythefishs's deletion nomination never contested that. What I'm seeing is an article that was once deleted as a "probable joke page" in 2013, undeleted shortly after, and is now being questioned again. I don't believe that this is a hoax.

I would really like to see the full article again, because there are some other interesting things to consider. The subject is mentioned in a couple other Wikipedia articles, so determining if it is real or not is important. Tekle Haymanot II says that he joined Ras Mikael in defeating Fasil at the Battle of Faggeta on 9 December 1769. There are no inline citations, but the article contains [1] (Bruce's book) as a reference. This was written in 2009 by User:Llywrch, who has since become an active administrator on the English Wikipedia. To be clear, I think this is probably evidence for the battle being a real event, and possibly a more notable one than was indicated in the deletion discussion. Battle of Faggeta has stood as a redlink in that article for four years until it was created. Other articles that bring it up are:

Mikael Sehul doesn't mention the battle, but it does cite Bruce's book, with an interesting comment about the difference between the 1805 and 1964 versions.[6]

I don't see any mention of Blundell's book in the deletion discussion. Do we consider it to be reliable? Should we remove the quoted sections from the articles above as a possible fraud? Should we just remove the redlinks because the subject isn't notable enough? Renerpho (talk) 09:33, 21 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I can't comment on the subject as such, having no knowledge of it – I just noticed that nowhere in the deletion discussion is was clearly identified or described as a hoax. The books by Blundell and Bruce are very old, so it would be better to find newer sources, but supposing they confirm that there was such a battle I would consider that prima facie evidence that at least it happened and is therefore not a hoax. Whether it's sufficiently notable to get its own article, I can't answer, however. Since the reason for deletion was simply that the article was "Created by a banned or blocked user", I'd say that if you research the matter and find enough RS to create a stub article and demonstrate it's notable, you should be able to recreate that article without any problems – but, of course, that will require some work, especially regarding the notability. Gawaon (talk) 10:37, 21 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]
This article was in the end speedy deleted since it was created by a banned user with no additional content from others Tythefishs (talk) 02:15, 22 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I'm coming to this discussion late -- which seems to happen to me far more often than I'd like -- but I can assure everyone that the Battle of Faggeta did happen. It was one of the countless battles during the Gondar period of the Ethiopian Empire.

Blundell & Bruce are very reliable sources, although Blundell's translation, as a pioneering effort, does contain a number of problems; nevertheless both are far more reliable than the other standard history of Ethiopia for this period, E. A. Wallis-Budge's work. (Wallis-Budge is notorious for being hasty & careless in his writing, & I found enough examples of his carelessness in his history of Ethiopia that I would only use it with caution.) While both Bruce & Blundell could be considered primary sources, good secondary sources -- which Wikipedia favors -- fail to cover the politics of this period: Tadesse Tamra's Church and State in Ethiopia stops at the first decades of the 16th century; Richard Pankhurst's The Ethiopian Borderlands effectively stops at 1700; Mordechai Abir's Ethiopia, the Era of the Princes begins around 1810; & Donald Crummey's Land and Society in the Christian Kingdom of Ethiopia is concerned with the socio-economic aspects, not the intricacies of wars & politics.

At the time I wrote many of the articles on Ethiopia, I was one of the few working in this subject area, & therefore prioritized getting material up on Wikipedia over going back & co-ordinating the various articles. It also didn't help my efforts that, at the time I was writing, my alma mater decided to up the cost of access to the university library to alumni from $20 to a few hundred dollars. So, yes, there are problems with many of the articles about Ethiopia I wrote at the time, but the belief then was someone would follow behind & improve what was written. A belief, as we have since learned, which is erroneous. -- llywrch (talk) 04:02, 22 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

We could be adding it back, I would be happy to contribute, but first we need more reliable source, that book might be reliable, but we definitely need more Tythefishs (talk) 04:19, 22 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

References

  1. ^ James Bruce, Travels to Discover the Source of the Nile (1805 edition), vol. 4, pp. 193f
  2. ^ James Bruce, Travels to Discover the Source of the Nile, selected and edited with an introduction by C.F. Beckingham (Edinburgh: University Press, 1964), p. 61.
  3. ^ James Bruce, Travels to Discover the Source of the Nile (1805 edition), vol. 4 p.  410. The Ethiopian chronicles call her Yewubdar.
  4. ^ H. Weld Blundell, The Royal chronicle of Abyssinia, 1769–1840 (Cambridge: University Press, 1922), p. 207
  5. ^ Weld Blundell, H. (1922). The Royal chronicle of Abyssinia, 1769-1840. Cambridge: University Press. p. 205.
  6. ^ Bruce, Travels to Discover the Source of the Nile (1805 edition), pp. 416f; this passage can also be read in the abridged version, Travels to Discover the Source of the Nile, selected and edited with an introduction by C.F. Beckingham (Edinburgh: University Press, 1964), p.66