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Comment by nemo1618

I wonder if any of these are actually not hoaxes, but simply unverifiable or insufficiently notable. Quite a few of the hoax articles are bands, for example; isn't it more likely that they were real, and only played a show or two in some backwater town, rather than being invented whole-cloth? Maybe someday there will be a "List of Wikipedia articles that were considered hoaxes but were actually true."

This one is pretty hilarious though:

"Fictitious claim that the founder of Orange Julius invented auto-cleaning spectacles, an inflatable shrimp trap, and a portable pigeon-bathing unit. Dairy Queen, which now owns Orange Julius, was fooled; the company based an entire ad campaign around the hoax and produced this video[1] about Julius Freed's supposed inventions."

[1] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Rj1Ts1X6Vt0

And this one seems to explain the origins of a lot of hoax articles:

"After being repeated tens of times, sometimes by journalists and academics, the hoax was identified by EJ Dickson, one of its authors, turned journalist, who had written it as a joke with a friend while 'stoned'."

parent nemo1618 7 years ago

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