The story behind Jar'Edo Wens, the longest-running hoax in Wikipedia history
Editors' discovery in March that Jar'Edo Wens was a 9-year fabrication just one of 33 found in 2015 on site that relies on public input, policing
Jar'Edo Wens is an Australian aboriginal deity, the god of "physical might" and "earthly knowledge". He's been name-dropped in books. Carved into rocks.
There is no such figure, it turns out, in aboriginal mythology; instead, Jar'Edo Wens was a blatant prank, a bald invention, dropped into Wikipedia nine years ago by some unknown and anonymous Australian. Some suspect a prankster by the name of "Jared Owens".
By the time editors noticed the false god Jar'Edo Wens on March 3 this year, he had leaked off Wikipedia and onto the wider internet.
Created in 2005, the hoax deity's reign lasted nine years, nine months and three days. He may not have been a god, but Jar'Edo Wens became the longest-lived hoax on the free encyclopedia yet that anyone knows about.
Ask any diehard Wikipedian about hoaxes, and they'll call them a natural byproduct of the Wikipedia project: Since the day the open-sourced encyclopedia opened for business in 2001, pranksters, vandals and other saboteurs have done their best to disrupt it.