Fictitious entry

A Nihilartikel is a deliberately fictitious entry in an encyclopedia or dictionary, which is intended to be more or less quickly recognized as false by the reader. The term "Nihilartikel" is German and combines "nihil" (Latin for "nothing") and "Artikel" (German for "article"). There does not appear to be any commonly used English-language term for this phenomenon, other than this loanword; a New Yorker article[1] used the neologism Mountweazel to denote these entries, based on a false entry for Lillian Virginia Mountweazel in the 1975 edition of the New Columbia Encyclopedia. The phenomenon is also known in German by the term U-Boot (submarine).

When looking up an entry in a reference work, one normally starts from an external reference to the subject. For an invented entry, no such reference exists. Therefore, one would typically stumble upon a Nihilartikel only by chance. Some Nihilartikels, however, are related closely enough to a factual subject that they are more likely to be found. For example, a Nihilartikel in an otherwise non-fictional reference work might simply define or explain a term from a work of fiction, or give a biography of a character from a novel, or describe a fictional institution, without explaining that it is fictitious.

Character

It is not always simple to recognize a Nihilartikel. It is especially difficult when the same fictitious entry is reprinted and adapted by multiple reference works. In such cases, the multiple sources serve to bolster the entry's authenticity, so that many come to believe that they are reading a factual article.

Uncovering Nihilartikels is a part of the game for editors and publishers. In some cases, the game can extend beyond a single work, as an academic parody or a satire is reproduced, quoted, or otherwise extended into multiple publications such as encyclopedias or science periodicals.

One can only speculate about Nihilartikels that go undiscovered, especially once a work becomes very old. Katharina Hein writes, "Insiders assume that every encyclopedia contains wrong keywords."

There is great stylistic variance in Nihilartikels: some are simple parodies that are easily seen through, but others are carefully constructed pastiches that imitate factual entries so well that they are very difficult to detect. Nihilartikels normally follow the same structure as a standard entry: biographies have a structure that is particularly identifiable, and therefore false biography articles are the most common type of Nihilartikel.

Classification as a literary genre

Umberto Eco's essay "Towards a Semiological Guerrilla Warfare," originally published in 1967 and collected in Travels in Hyperreality (ISBN 0156913216) can serve as a starting point for a further classification of Nihilartikels in the category of fakes. Eco argued that the prime objective for a cultural guerrilla was to give people tools to help them criticize the messages they are receiving, so as to make them lose their power as subliminal political or marketing levers. Fakes make people sit up and pay attention, because they forcefully impose the need for a critical understanding of the techniques involved in communicating through a particular medium. It is a form of meta-communication and can serve to educate the passive public as to the nature and intrinsic power of the medium. Eco suggests that the goal of empowerment of the public can be reached by "reversing the meaning of the messages" broadcast by the official mass media. Operating within the channels of communication through which power legitimizes itself, the original message is reformulated in an alternative one, thereby revealing the original message as arbitrary and contingent.

These ideas can also be linked to the Luther Blissett fakes (cf. Handbuch der Kommunikationsguerilla, Verlag Libertäre Assoziation Hamburg o. J. [1997], ISBN 3922611648).

The definition of fakes is also characteristic of a Nihilartikel. However, the intentions of Nihilartikels hardly transcend the level of (insider) jokes (among editors of lexica and a good part of the readers):

"A good fake gains its effectiveness from a productive mixture of imitation, invention, alienation, and exaggeration of prevailing modes of language. It imitates the voice of power possibly perfectly, to be able, in a restricted period of time, without being discovered, to speak in its name and with its authority... The goals is... to generate a communication process in which – often exactly through the (intended) discovery of its falsehood – the structure of the faked communicative situation itself becomes the issue. [...]" (Blisset, op.cit., p. 65)

Motivations for creation

Besides the obvious possibility of simple playful mischief, Nihilartikels may be composed for other purposes. Chief among these is to catch copyright infringers. By including a trivial piece of false information in a larger work, it is far easier to demonstrate that someone has plagiarized that work: they will presumably copy the Nihilartikel along with other articles.

This is very similar to the inclusion of one or more trap streets on a map or invented phone numbers in a telephone directory (neither of which is effective for copyright purposes in the United States; see Nester's Map & Guide Corp. v. Hagstrom Map Co., 796 F.Supp. 729, E.D.N.Y., 1992) [2]. However, these traps may still be useful in other countries. Even if the trap cannot be used in a court, it still helps a business owner to detect other people's misconduct.

An outright forgery intended to mislead the reader on a matter of substance would not generally be classed as a mere Nihilartikel.

Examples

Official sources

• Most listings of the members of the German parliament (including its own website) feature the fictitious politician Jakob Maria Mierscheid, allegedly a member of the parliament since 1979.

Reference works

• The German-language Der neue Pauly. Enzyklopaedie der Antike, edited by H. Cancik and H. Schneider, vol. 1 (Stuttgart, 1986, ISBN 3476014703) includes a Nihilartikel now well-known amongst classicists: a deadpan description of an entirely fictional Roman sport, apopudobalia, which resembles modern football (soccer).
• Appleton's Cyclopedia of American Biography (1887-89) is notorious for containing about 200 Nihilartikels.
• Zzxjoanw was the last entry in Rupert Hughes’ Music Lovers’ Encyclopedia of 1903, and subsequent editions down to the 1950s, which was claimed to be a Maori word for a drum. It was later proved to be a hoax (not least because there is no Z, X or J in the Maori language).
• The music-lexicographical works of Nicolas Slonimsky, most notably Baker's Biographical Dictionary of Music & Musicians inevitably contain Nihilartikels; as Slonimsky was both extraordinarily precise and a specialist in the obscure, the extent of his inventions is unknown.
• The 1975 New Columbia Encyclopedia contains an Nihilartikel on Lillian Virginia Mountweazel (1942-73), purportedly an American photographer.
• The first printing of the 1980 New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians contains two Nihilartikels. The first is on Guiglielmo Baldini, a non-existent Italian composer, and the second was on the subject of one Dag Henrik Esrum-Hellerup, who purportedly composed a small amount of music for flute. Esrum-Hellerup's surname derives from two suburban railway stations in Copenhagen. The two entries were removed from later editions, as well as from later printings of the 1980 edition. A third spurious entry, "Verdi, Lasagne", was apparently circulated among the editorial staff and nearly reached the printer, but was pulled at the last minute.
• The New Oxford American Dictionary, in August 2005, gained media coverage when it was leaked that the second edition contained at least one fictional entry. This was later determined to be the word esquivalience, defined as "the willful avoidance of one’s official responsibilities," which had originally been added in the first, 2001, edition. It was intended as a copyright trap, as the text of the book was distributed electronically and thus very easy to copy.
• The German-language medical encyclopedia Pschyrembel Klinisches Wörterbuch features an entry on the Steinlaus (Stone Louse, Petrophaga lorioti), a rock-eating animal. The scientific name implies the origin: a creation of the German humorist Loriot. The Pschyrembel entry was removed in 1996, but after reader protests readded the next year, with an extended section on the stone lice's involvement in the fall of the Berlin Wall.
• The Swedish music encyclopedia Sohlmans musiklexikon contains an obviously facetious entry about Metaf Üsic, an alleged Turkish synth artist and musical scholar, whose research interest were the beards of famous musicians and the importance of facial hair in making music.

April Fool's

• Discover magazine frequently runs one fake article in their April edition as an April Fool's joke. The articles are often so outrageous that they are hard to miss, yet the next month's issue frequently has angry letters from readers who feel misled or quote bad science. Examples have included the discovery of the "Bigon" (a subatomic particle the size of a bowling ball) and of the "Hotheaded Naked Ice Borer" (an Antarctic predator resembling a Naked Mole Rat that burrows through ice).
• San Serriffe was originally the topic of an April Fool's article in The Guardian.

Culinary

• Swedish Lemon Angels, an impossible recipe listed in How To Play With Your Food by Penn and Teller, wherein lemon juice is combined with sodium bicarbonate effecting an effervescent and messy chemical reaction. Whilst not intended as a copyright trap, the recipe has worked its way into many other recipe books and online databases, usually with no regard for the culinary worth of the end product.

Trivia books, etc.

• The book The Golden Turkey Awards describes many bizarre and obscure films. The authors of the work state that one film described by the book is a complete hoax, and challenge readers to spot the made-up film.

• The Trivia Encyclopedia placed deliberately false answers for a limited number of quiz questions, for copy-trap purposes; this was tested when the makers of Trivial Pursuit based some of their questions on the work. [3]

• The Urban Legends Reference Pages (snopes.com) include a section entitled The Repository of Lost Legends, containing false discussions of made-up legends (for example, that the bear in the design of the Flag of California is the result of a handwritten note being misread and that it was meant to be a pear.) The aim of the stories in the section is to caution readers against using appeals to authority, and encourage the checking of references for claims that seem unreasonable.

Other

• Australian archaeologist Tim Flannery's book Astonishing Animals, written in collaboration with painter Peter Schouten, describes some of the more outlandish animals alive on Earth. They caution that one of the animals is a product of their imagination and it is up to the reader to distinguish which one it is.

• Rhinogradentia are an entirely fictitious mammalian order, extensively documented in a series of articles and books by the equally fictitious German naturalist Harald Stümpke. Both the animals and the scientist were allegedly creations of Gerolf Steiner, a zoology professor at the University of Heidelberg.

• Author Isaac Asimov wrote The Endochronic Properties of Resublimated Thiotimoline in 1948. At first glance it appears to be a genuine, highly complex, scientific essay; however on closer analysis one finds it is science fiction presented as a clever parody of opaque scientific writing.

• Infamously, physicist Alan Sokal submitted a spurious article to Social Text titled "Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity" consisting purely of vaguely scientific-sounding gibberish to demonstrate the journal's penchant for publishing absolute nonsense; see Sokal affair.

In Fiction

A Fred Saberhagen Berserker science fiction short story has a Berserker directed to a star system by an encyclopedia salesman. The salesman is put on trial for treason, but reveals that the encyclopedia article for the star system, with population figures, resources, etc., was a Nihilartikel included in the encyclopedia to detect plagiarism; thus the Berserker actually ended up in an empty star system where it ran out of fuel and ceased to be a threat to humanity.

Related types of text

In contrast to Nihilartikels, which are false information in a real encyclopedia, there are also literary encyclopedia fictions. For instance, in Jorge Luis Borges's story "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius", the narrator claims to have come across an encyclopedia entry for "Uqbar" in a copy of The Anglo American Cyclopaedia (New York, 1917), a pirated version of the Encyclopædia Britannica; later he encounters a volume of the (entirely imaginary) First Encyclopaedia of Tlön. The Borges story is laced with references to people and works, some of them real, others imaginary, any of them liable to send the reader to an encyclopedia (or, nowadays, the World Wide Web) for further information. It is quite possible that any number of Nihilartikels might be available to convince the unwary reader of the factuality of some of Borges's fictional creations.

Borges often worked in other related forms, including literary forgeries (such as passages in the style of Emanuel Swedenborg or from the The Book of One Thousand and One Nights) and reviews of imaginary books.

In a similar vein, Douglas Adams and John Lloyd's 1983 book The Meaning of Liff created imaginary definitions for real British place-names, such as Huttoft and Mavis Enderby.

Penny Arcade webcomic scribes Tycho and Gabe created in 2005 an open Wiki detailing the fictitious book series Epic Legends of the Hierarchs: The Elemenstor Saga [4] which was (ostensibly) intended as a parody of popular fantasy fiction. Infamously, this "saga" was first attempted to be introduced into Wikipedia, only to be quickly excised as fancruft — prompting Tycho to bear a grudge to the digital encyclopedia.

Another similar phenomenon is the satiric work masquerading as non-fiction. Probably the best English-language example of the latter is Leonard C. Lewin's Report From Iron Mountain on the Possibility and Desirability of Peace [5], widely misinterpreted as an actual think-tank report. Similarly, some papers in the Journal of Irreproducible Results, a journal of parodies of scientific papers, are plausible enough to be mistaken for reality; a JIR article on atomic bomb construction was even reported to be taken seriously by a terrorist group. Articles in the parody newspaper The Onion have occasionally been picked up and reported as if they were genuine.

Sometimes ghost words resulting from typos or misreadings can be treated as real words. An example was dord, that was defined in 1954's Webster's as "density", but was actually a misreading of D or d, an abbreviation for the word.

In the field of computer security, a "honeytoken" is an individual record, inserted into a database that includes sensitive information, which has no legitimate data and thus is extremely unlikely to ever be accessed legitimately.

See also

• Archive of fictional things
  • List of fictional books
• Culture jamming
• False document
• Ludibrium
• Mornington Crescent
• George Psalmanazar
• Trap street
• Uncyclopedia (The content-free encyclopedia that anyone can edit)

External links

• A collection of topics in Wikipedia that look fictitious, but aren't

Further reading

The literature about fakes, parody, travesty and pastiche barely touches upon the phenomenon of the Nihilartikel. This may be because reference books are not in the view of the people writing on these topics. Among the few exceptions are two German language articles:

• Katharina Hein's "Der Orthodidakt" in Berliner Morgenpost, July 16, 2000
• Michael Ringel's "Fehlerquelle" ("Sources of error"), in the Süddeutsche Zeitung Magazin, number 41, 1998

Source

• David Fallows: "Spoof", Grove Music Online ed. L. Macy (Accessed August 14, 2005), (subscription access)]

• Henry Alford: :The Talk of the Town", The New Yorker (Accessed August 27, 2005), 29th August 2005 issue]

• Michael Quinion: "Kelemenopy", World Wide Words (Accessed September 25, 2005)

• Steve Burns: "The "Philip Columbo" story" Ultimate Columbo Site (Accessed March 7, 2006)