Jar'Edo Wens

The hoax article was created in 2005 by an unregistered user identified by an Australian IP address. The name almost definitely comes from a person named Jared Owens.

Jar'Edo Wens

1. A fictitious Australian Aborigine deity that was the subject of a hoax article of the same name on the online encyclopedia Wikipedia.
   • 2012 April 10, Richo, “The concept of God in Islam”, in alt.religion.christian, Usenet:

     Jar'Edo Wens, Arrernte god of earthly knowledge and physical might, created by Altjira to ensure that people did not get too arrogant or self-conceited

   • 2015 March 22, Stephen Hutcheon, “'Aboriginal god' Jar'Edo Wens hoax finally scrubbed from Wikipedia”, in The Press:

     It has survived unchallenged for almost a decade, but Wikipedia editors have finally caught up with, and removed, an entry created by an anonymous Australian contributor who concocted a fake Aboriginal deity named Jar'Edo Wens.

   • 2015 April 15, Caitlin Dewey, “The story behind Jar’Edo Wens, the longest-running hoax in Wikipedia history”, in The Washington Post:

     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. By the time editors found Jar’Edo Wens, he had leaked off Wikipedia and onto the wider Internet.

   • 2016, Srijan Kumar, Robert West, & Jure Leskovec, “Disinformation on the web: Impact, characteristics, and detection of wikipedia hoaxes”, in Proceedings of the 25th International Conference on World Wide Web:

     Some hoaxes have made it into books, as in the case of the alleged (but fake) Aboriginal Australian god “Jar'Edo Wens”, who inspired a character's name in a science fiction book [10] and has been listed as a real god in at least one nonfiction book [24], all before it came to light in March 2015 that the article was a hoax.

   • 2016, Justine Calypso Seran, Intersubjective acts and relational selves in contemporary Australian Aboriginal and Aotearoa/New Zealand Maori women's writing (PhD Thesis, University of Edinburgh):

     There is still a long way to go, as demonstrated by the fact that the global ignorance of Indigenous cultures has permitted the longest ever running hoax on Wikipedia (live for nearly a decade), focused around a fake Australian Aboriginal divinity called Jar'Edo Wens.

The fictitious deity also gained a lot of attestation after the deletion of the hoax article, primarily in news sources. In such post-deletion news sources, the reference to Jar'Edo Wens as a deity is chiefly humorous.