This is a very interesting tale of a professor whose class was designed to try and create a fake part of history via the web. They made up a person and a story about them. This is very fascinating and makes me wonder how much of history was made up? Are there things we believe that were simply the act of someone trying to trick us?
From the article:
“A woman opens an old steamer trunk and discovers tantalizing clues that a long-dead relative may actually have been a serial killer, stalking the streets of New York in the closing years of the nineteenth century. A beer enthusiast is presented by his neighbor with the original recipe for Brown’s Ale, salvaged decades before from the wreckage of the old brewery–the very building where the Star-Spangled Banner was sewn in 1813. A student buys a sandwich called the Last American Pirate and unearths the long-forgotten tale of Edward Owens, who terrorized the Chesapeake Bay in the 1870s.
These stories have two things in common. They are all tailor-made for viral success on the internet. And they are all lies.
Each tale was carefully fabricated by undergraduates at George Mason University who were enrolled in T. Mills Kelly’s course Lying About the Past.
Their escapades not only went unpunished, they were actually encouraged by their professor. Four years ago, students created a Wikipedia page detailing the exploits of Edward Owens, successfully fooling Wikipedia’s community of editors. This year, though, one group of students made the mistake of launching their hoax on Reddit. What they learned in the process provides a valuable lesson for anyone who turns to the Internet for information.”
Read the rest here: http://mashable.com/2012/05/16/fake-wikipedia-caught-by-reddit/
