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Category: Things that were copied rather than checked

4 articles

The list below is believed complete, though membership – like everything here – is subject to revision.

  • Agloe, New York – Invented at an empty crossroads to catch mapmakers copying maps. It is said to have become real; the evidence that it did is one postcard.
  • The Mountains of Kong – A range invented in 1798 to rescue a theory about the Niger. It crossed West Africa on forty maps for ninety-four years. Nobody had ever seen it.
  • Mountweazel – A false entry planted in a reference work to catch plagiarists. Named after one of its own instances, and it proves the one thing that is not an offence.
  • The myth of the flat Earth – That medieval Europe thought the world flat is a Victorian invention, assembled from a novelist's fiction and put to work in the quarrel over evolution.

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