Nihilartikel
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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. The phenomenon is also known in German by the term "U-boot", meaning 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 (e.g. browsing randomly, see serendipity). Some Nihilartikels, however, are closely enough related to a factual subject that they are more likely to be found. For example, a Nihilartikel in a 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.
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The character and nature of Nihilartikels
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 the creation of Nihilartikels
Besides the obvious possibility of simple playful mischief, Nihilartikels may be composed for other purposes. Chief among these is to catch copyright violators. 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). 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 of Nihilartikels
- 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.
- Discover magazine frequently runs one fake article in their April edition as an April Fool. 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.
- 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).
- 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 a clever parody of opaque scientific writing.
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 Encyclopeadia 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.
Also related is the entirely fictional reference book, such as Ambrose Bierce's The Cynic's Word Book (1906) or The Devil's Dictionary (1911). 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.
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 [1] (http://www.museumofhoaxes.com/iron.html), 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. 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.
Examples
- Appleton's Cyclopedia of American Biography (1887-89) contained more than 200 fake biographies in addition to the many entries about real people.
- San Serriffe was originally the topic of an April Fool's article in The Guardian. An early version (http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=San_Serriffe&oldid=1859598) of this Wikipedia article was also a Nihilartikel.
- The Sokal Affair was a hoax in the form of a scientific journal article, although arguably too politically pointed to be a proper Nihilartikel.
- An early version (http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Uqbar&oldid=1843580) of the Wikipedia article on Uqbar was a Nihilartikel based on Jorge Luis Borges's story Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius.
See also
- Archive of fictional things
- Culture jamming
- False document
- Fnord
- Ludibrium
- George Psalmanazar
- Dord: an instance of an accidental Nihilartikel
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, 1998de:Nihilartikel