User:Blythwood/NPP and hoax articles

Spotting most hoax articles is very simple. What this article tries to do is to run through some common obvious signs of hoax articles so you can quickly spot them, file for speedy deletion without wasting too much time on them–and use them to find and fix vandalism on other articles.

I want to start with one basic idea here: nothing should ever be marked as patrolled if you haven’t Googled it. If an object, person, place or concept doesn’t seem to appear on Google, there’s a very good chance that it fails notability criteria or it's a hoax, so at the very least you need to put a message on the creator’s talk page asking for more information. Don't assume that good text and formatting means it's OK - often hoaxers and marketers copy and rewrite other articles. (In addition, sometimes there's already an article on a topic under a different name.) More on this below.

Think about what hoaxers might have on their minds

There have been some very well-organised hoaxes on Wikipedia, of which the Bicholim Conflict article is the most notorious. Written by someone with a good awareness of the academic writing style, it had everything: decent writing, audacity, obscure subject, citations to dusty old books nobody was likely to check (in fact they didn't even exist). It could still have been spotted had anyone simply refused to take on trust that anything in the article was true and Googled its title. For five years, nobody did. (And pranks like it go back to antiquity.)

You should never just believe anything you read on Wikipedia - it could be wrong, it could be based on out-of-date information and it might be oversimplified. But fortunately, most hoaxers are kids and the kind of kids who write hoax Wikipedia articles often have very predictable things on their minds. You should immediately be suspicious of articles and additions on topics that you can imagine some IT-literate 13 year-old kid fantasising about, or topics on which you'd expect that we would already have an article. Some somewhat exaggerated examples:

• Kid’s television shows nobody has ever heard of and whose theme song is credited to the director, who also produced the show, wrote it and voiced all the characters
• Upcoming video games and professional video games players, “Internet personalities”, YouTubers and the like
• People claimed to be incredibly successful and rich (with precise estimates of their worth) with vague job titles like “Silicon Valley businessman”
• Thirteen year-old members of the British aristocracy who are also incredibly successful at sport, saved someone from drowning while surfing at Bondi Beach and are also Korean for some reason
• Pop musicians supposedly mentored by Taylor Swift (hint: literally everything Taylor Swift does is the subject of at least five articles on websites that aren’t one-post blogs)

• In fact, just all articles on pop musicians and rappers generally. WP:GARAGE is the definitive guide here. Especially if there are claims of them having attended incredibly prestigious universities like Harvard or Cambridge.

• Weird tourist-guide stories, like "said to be haunted", "connected by secret smugglers' tunnels", "said to have been prophesied by the ancient Egyptians" and the like. (You also see these on very bad articles on legitimate subjects, of course.)
• Entire counties of the USA supposed to have a population of 200,000 people. I’m pretty sure we’d have an article on those already.

While these are obviously mostly done by new accounts, don’t assume that this will automatically be the case. I’ve seen one account (now blocked) that made several fairly legitimate edits to Star Wars articles before its owner decided to spend all his time promoting his career as a YouTuber.

Remember that hoaxers may blend truth with fiction

It's important to remember that an article may not be entirely a hoax - an article may be a puffed-up resume or some other blend of truth with fiction. For example, a 12 year-old may write an article giving their real name and details but as the CEO of an e-sports company they imagine themselves becoming in future. As a result, some aspects of the article may appear to be true when you Google them or click over to citations.

Real example: I recently ran into an article on a jewellery designer (true) who is also a billionaire Silicon Valley venture capitalist and LSE guest lecturer on cybersecurity who changed career to jewellery design after a spiritual epiphany (er, not true). An "Instagram celebrity" linking to an genuine account - with fifteen followers. I've also seen an article on a genuine U.S. civil rights activist who we did not previously had an article on, that rapidly swerved into ludicrous jokes like that he also literally built his own high school (one suspects it was inspired by a school project on local history). And as I said before, it's important to remember that children don't think like adults. You might expect a hoaxing account run by an adult to exclusively post hoax information, only making "legitimate" edits as a cover. Hoaxing accounts run by children may not play by the same rules - they may make fairly legitimate edits to an article on a member of One Direction, before suddenly writing in their fan fiction. (I've run into a contributor who spent several weeks doing nothing but add infoboxes before suddenly posting several articles headed "DO NOT DELETE THIS ARTICLE THIS IS A CHARACTER FOR MY GAME".) Knowing how to deal with these contributors is difficult - do you try to encourage them onto good behaviour or recommend that they be blocked as they can't control their baser impulses? Not always easy to decide. This is especially true with kids, who for example may both really love a TV show and really wish it had run for another season and decide to make up some episode titles. If you're reporting someone to AIV, be clear about why you think they've gone off the rails and why you think there's no coming back for them (here's an example report I've made).

It's often easy to spot Walter Mitty articles from dates of birth, since hoaxers often put their real ones in. I remember (not strictly a hoax, this one) an article about a son of a moderately prominent U.S. Republican Party political figure who it was claimed was a CEO of a corporate finance company. That sounds plausibly notable. Checking the date of birth revealed that this kid (who as far as I can tell does exist) was in fact eighteen years old and had apparently been given a bit of money by his daddy so he could play-act at being a big-shot businessman running his own little company. (Another common resume inflation trick the article used, again not strictly hoaxing: claiming attendance at a prestigious university on the grounds of having attended a summer school there.) Similarly, watch out for weird health details only the person would be likely to know about. The second you see a mention in a bio article that a person has autism or Asperger's, apply heightened skepticism.

Hoax articles may blend truth with fiction in complicated ways, using considerable imagination. I'll link to a specific example of this to give an idea of the complexity of this. About a year ago, I ran into a whole nest of fake articles and edits. They involved two accounts who had converted a redirect link about a tiny hamlet on the north-west coast of England into an article on a gigantic port, former centre of smuggling and slave-trading, with supplementary articles about an imaginary aristocratic title, shipping company and so on. (Very Joan Aiken.) But one of the articles was on a quite real and almost notable management consultant on starting new companies, with huge amounts of fictitious detail connecting him to this mythology.

I often think about who created those pages. Was it that guy's brother or cousin or aunt, stuck in a boring house on the edge of the marshes leading to the sea where nothing ever happens and fantasising about their relative's exciting life in London and what their home would be like if it was a bit more interesting, with a few more pirates and things?

Check contribution histories

Sometimes there may be a whole group of hoax articles, so once you've spotted a hoax article it's always worth checking the author's contributions history and the "What links here" page. Some months ago I read an article about a fictitious library system which it was claimed was always used by a company as a placeholder name in their manuals. A bit of googling and looking at the creator's other articles rapidly showed me that the "company" only existed in the page creator's imagination. Going the other way, I once saw an incredibly bad article that looked like garbage, but Googling the topic and checking over to their user profile reassured me that they knew what they were doing and just didn't get drafting pages rather than live-editing. A quick message asking if they could get the article as finished as possible and delete the placeholder sections was all it took.

Going the other way, gigantic articles (especially well-formatted ones) by a new account are very often suspicious. They may be hoaxes using large amounts of copied and modified text from other articles, or (moving away from pure hoaxes) sockpuppeteering from editors who have been banned resuming business. If you're suspicious that an article has been posted by a sockpuppet, check the "What links here" page - it will often find you talk pages on which a previous version of the page has been discussed, so you can quickly find details of the other account and file an AIV report.

Don't be fooled by large numbers of citations. Hoaxers, marketers and people writing not-very-serious articles often add cargo-cult like citations that only link to the mainpage of the claimed university they attended, the record company they imagine getting a contract from, and so on. Or they may copy those citations from other articles. I've seen several hoax articles that were simply the text of another article with the name changed.

Hoaxers and jokesters often link their page or add their details to their school's Wikipedia article among its notable alumni, so it's often worth watchlisting your home town's Wikipedia article and your high school if you want to help stop vandalism. As you've probably gathered, most hoaxers write and link from articles that are uppermost in their minds. In addition, be ready to speedy user pages as well if you're seeing the same personal advertising or obviously false claims on them.

As an example of how powerful this approach is, just the other day, I was reading an article, just for fun on a topic I don't usually edit on, when I noticed a malformed table with a link to a draft article about a movie I'd never heard of. Some quick Googling made it obvious that it only existed in the author's imagination. By checking contribution histories and looking for the title on other Wikipedia pages, I was able to quickly fix vandalism on eight articles, tag nine hoax drafts for deletion, identify the previous account used by the vandal (who'd already been banned for hoaxes) and with this information filed a detailed AIV report that quickly got three different IPs used by the vandal blocked!

If you see something, say something

You may be thinking by this point that spotting hoaxes is normally quite simple. It almost always is - many of these recommendations are about helping you to quickly spot hoaxes so you don't have to waste time with research or an AfD nomination. But I’ve found several hoax articles where the hoax was fairly obvious and the articles had been read and tagged as problematic in some way, but the editors did not mark them for speedy deletion as a blatant hoax. Sometimes they were apparently too nervous to take that step. Don't be nervous. Most articles that look like hoaxes, in my experience, are hoaxes.

Here's the thing: tags don't make an article look more suspicious. I think most experienced readers know what a bad article looks like: no sources, extravagant claims, and so on. But I actually think a tag makes an article look less suspicious: it makes it look like someone knowledgeable has looked at it, grimaced a bit, and shrugged and said "yeah, I guess that can stay for now." If an article is literally about something that is not real it needs to be removed at once. "This article may not be about a notable topic" isn't good enough: sometimes you need to shout "FAKE NEWS!!!!!!!!" and call in an airstrike.

Stay safe out there

Remember that a Wikipedia page could have been created or modified by criminals trying to get links to their website. I'm not any kind of web security expert, so go watch this link from someone who is, but a few relevant things.

Never, under any circumstances, try to do NPP with a browser or operating system that isn't up to date or you haven't disabled Flash on. Don't just click on sites that might be dodgy - examine the whole URL if you're concerned and watch out for odd-looking sites on obscure domains or URLs that seem to be fraudulent. Paste urls you don't like the look of into Google and let it examine them for you and show you a preview. If after this I feel I absolutely have to check out sites I'm suspicious of, I use Tor and its customised browser set to maximum security with all plug-ins and other potential security holes disabled.