Then there are the intentional "joke" entries introduced by the editors, such as the totally fictitious Danish musician and composer Dag Henrik Esrum-Hellerup who appeared in the 1980 edition of the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2001/jan/05/referenceandlanguages.culture

Gregg Kimball
Library of Virginia


-----Original Message-----
From: Discussion of research and writing about Virginia history [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Tarter, Brent (LVA)
Sent: Tuesday, January 08, 2013 3:57 PM
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Subject: [VA-HIST] Not-Wikipedia Hoaxes

Among the ink-and-paper hoaxes, late in the nineteenth century the editors of the six volumes of Appleton's Cyclopedia of American Biography paid contributors for their entries. One or more needy writers submitted biographies of people who were supposed to have done scientific research in South America, some with bibliographies of their publications. The editors had never heard of those scientists and evidently were pleased to be able to include records of their lives and achievements in the biographical reference work. It wasn't until much later when a scientist used some of those entries as a starting place for his own research that he discovered that the entries were all fakes, that no such scientists had ever existed, and that there was no record of the published scholarship cited in the entries in Appleton's.

See Margaret Castle Schindler, "Fictitious Biography," American Historical Review 42 (1937): 680-690.

Some of that stuff is probably floating around on the Internet, right now, and if it is obvious that it came from Appleton's, people will probably still believe it.

Brent Tarter
The Library of Virginia
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Please visit the Library of Virginia's Web site at http://www.lva.virginia.gov<http://www.lva.virginia.gov/>


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