Fictitious entry

Most listings of the members of the German parliament feature the fictitious politician Jakob Maria Mierscheid, allegedly a member of the parliament since 1979. Among other activities he is reported to have contributed to a major symposium on the equally fictitious stone louse in Frankfurt.[8]

Fictitious entries in reference publications often occur in an attempt to catch plagiarism, such as:

• In August 2005, The New Oxford American Dictionary gained media coverage[2] when it was leaked that the second edition contained at least one fictional entry. This later was determined to be the word "esquivalience", defined as "the wilful avoidance of one's official responsibilities", which had been added to the edition published in 2001.[9] It was intended as a copyright trap, as the text of the book was distributed electronically and thus very easy to copy.
• David Pogue, author of several books offering tips and tricks for computer users, deliberately placed a bogus tip in one of his books as a way of catching competing writers who were re-publishing information from his works without permission. The fake tip, which purported to make a rabbit appear on the computer screen when certain keys were pressed, did indeed appear in other books shortly after Pogue published it.[10]
• In addition to the 1975 New Columbia Encyclopedia’s entry on Lillian Virginia Mountweazel, the editors created another fictitious entry on the blind American artist, Robert Dayton.[11] The article claims Dayton experimented “with odor-emitting gases that resemble pungent body odors." His supposed work, known as "Aroma-Art," is presented in a sealed chamber where an audience inhales scented air.[3]

Fictitious entries on maps may be called phantom settlements, trap streets,[12] paper towns, cartographer's follies, or other names. They are intended to help unmask copyright infringements.[13]

• In 1978, the fictional American towns of Beatosu and Goblu in Ohio were inserted into that year's official state of Michigan map as nods to the University of Michigan and its traditional rival, The Ohio State University.[14]
• The fictional American town of Agloe, New York, was invented by map makers, but eventually became identified as a real place by its county administration because a building, the Agloe General Store, was erected at its fictional location. The "town" is featured in the novel Paper Towns by John Green and its film adaptation.
• Mount Richard, a fictitious peak on the continental divide in the United States, appeared on county maps in the early 1970s. It was believed to be the work of a draftsman, Richard Ciacci. The fiction was undiscovered for two years.[14]
• In the United Kingdom in 2001, the Ordnance Survey (OS) obtained a £20m out-of-court settlement from Automobile Association (the AA) after content from OS maps was reproduced on AA maps.[15] The Ordnance Survey denied that it included "deliberate mistakes" in its maps as copyright traps, claiming the "fingerprints" which identified a copy were stylistic features such as the width of roads.[16]
• The 2002 Geographers A-Z Map of Manchester contains traps. For example, Dickinson Street in central Manchester is falsely named “Philpott St”
• The fictitious English town of Argleton was investigated by Steve Punt in an episode of the BBC Radio 4 programme Punt P.I. The programme concluded that the town's entry may well have originated as a copyright trap.[17]

They are not to be confused with paper streets, which are streets which are designed to be built but as of the printing of the map do not yet exist.

• The Trivia Encyclopedia placed deliberately false information about the first name of TV detective Columbo for copy-trap purposes and then sued Trivial Pursuit (which based some of their questions and answers on the work), without success.

Other examples of copyright infringement that do not fall under the above categories include:

• In the summer of 2008, the state-owned Slovak Hydrometeorological Institute (Slovak: Slovenský hydrometeorologický ústav, short: SHMÚ) became suspicious that a competing commercial service, the website meteo.sk, was stealing their data. On 7 August 2008, SHMÚ deliberately altered the temperature for Chopok from 9.5 °C to 1 °C. In a short time, the temperature of 1 °C appeared for Chopok at meteo.sk as well.[18]
• The ANP in the Netherlands once deliberately included a false story about a fire in their radio newscast to see if Radio Veronica took its news from the ANP. Several hours later, Radio Veronica also aired the story.
• Google, alleging its search results for a misspelling of tarsorrhaphy started appearing in Bing results partway through the summer of 2010, created fabricated search results where a hundred query terms like "hiybbprqag", "delhipublicschool40 chdjob" and "juegosdeben1ogrande" each returned a link to a single unrelated webpage. Nine of the hundred fraudulent results planted by Google were later observed as the first result for the bogus term on Bing.[19][20][21]

Fictitious entries often occur in reference publications as a prank, or practical joke, in an attempt to be humorous, such as:

• The German-language Der neue Pauly. Enzyklopaedie der Antike, edited by H. Cancik and H. Schneider, vol. 1 (Stuttgart, 1996, ISBN 3-476-01470-3) includes a fictitious entry now well known amongst classicists: a deadpan description of an entirely fictional Roman sport, apopudobalia, which resembles modern association football.
• Appletons' Cyclopædia of American Biography (1887–1889) contains about two hundred fictitious entries.
• Zzxjoanw was the last entry in Rupert Hughes' Music Lovers' Encyclopedia of 1903, and it continued as an entry in subsequent editions down to the 1950s. It was described as a Māori word for a drum. Later, it was proved to be a hoax (having seemed suspect because Māori does not use the letters J, X or Z).
• The 1975 New Columbia Encyclopedia contains a fictitious entry on Lillian Virginia Mountweazel (1942–1973).[2] Her biography claims she was a fountain designer and photographer, best known for Flags Up!, a collection of photographs of rural American mailboxes. Supposedly she was born in Bangs, Ohio, and died in an explosion while on assignment for Combustibles magazine. Mountweazel was the subject of an exhibit in Dublin, Ireland, in March 2009 examining her fictitious life and works.[22]
• The first printing in 1980 of The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians contains two fictitious entries: on Guglielmo Baldini, a non-existent Italian composer, and Dag Henrik Esrum-Hellerup, who purportedly composed a small amount of music for flute. Esrum-Hellerup's surname derives from a Danish village and a suburb in Copenhagen. The two entries were removed from later editions, as well as from later printings of the 1980 edition.
• The German-language medical encyclopedia Pschyrembel Klinisches Wörterbuch features an entry on the Steinlaus (stone louse), a rock-eating animal.[23] The scientific name Petrophaga lorioti implies its origin: a creation of the German humorist Loriot. The Pschyrembel entry was removed in 1996 but, after reader protests, was restored the next year, with an extended section on the role of the stone louse in the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Fictitious entries occasionally feature in other publications in an attempt to be humorous, such as:

• Rhinogradentia are a fictitious mammalian order, extensively documented in a series of articles and books by the equally fictitious German naturalist Harald Stümpke. Allegedly, both the animals and the scientist were the creations of Gerolf Steiner, a zoology professor at the University of Heidelberg.
• Taro Tsujimoto is a fictional character often included in Buffalo Sabres reference works. Tsujimoto, an alleged Japanese forward, was the creation of Sabres general manager George "Punch" Imlach designed to fool the National Hockey League during the 1974 NHL amateur draft; Imlach drafted Tsujimoto and only months later—well after the pick was made official—admitted that the league had been fooled by the fictitious player.
• Franz Bibfeldt is a fictitious theologian created by Robert Howard Clausen for a footnote in a student paper. Bibfeldt was later popularized by Clausen's classmate Martin Marty as an ongoing in-joke among theologians, including a book and a parody lecture series at the University of Chicago Divinity School.
• At least two sports teams at Georgia Tech have long included George P. Burdell, a fictitious student originally created as a practical joke by a Tech student in 1927, in their lists of lettermen in team media guides:
  • Football: Lists Burdell as a letterman in the 1928, 1929, and 1930 seasons.[24]
  • Men's basketball: Lists Burdell as a letterman in the 1955–56, 1956–57, and 1957–58 seasons.[25]

Many publications have included false items and then challenged readers to identify it, including:

• Australian palaeontologist Tim Flannery's book Astonishing Animals includes one imaginary animal and leaves it up to the reader to distinguish which one it is.
• The product catalogue for Swedish consumer electronics and hobby articles retailer Teknikmagasinet contains a fictitious product. Finding that product is a contest, Blufftävlingen, in which the best suggestion for another fictitious product from someone who spotted the product gets included in the next issue.[26]
• Muse, a US magazine for children 10–14, regularly includes a two-page spread containing science and technology news. One of the news stories is false and readers are encouraged to guess which one.
• Games (a magazine devoted to games and puzzles) used to include a fake advertisement in each issue as one of the magazine's regular games.
• 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 they challenge readers to spot the made-up film; the imaginary film was Dog of Norway, which supposedly starred "Muki the Wonder Dog", named after the authors' own dog

• WP:HOAX
• WP:April Fools