![]() ![]() There are a lot of fake facts sitting on Wikipedia, and in an internet era that often uses aggregation (including this article), it's important to seek out verification of every fact. Is there any greater meaning to traps like these? There might be a couple. What all those old-school traps really mean There's no record of the Mountweazel trap working - her explosive "death" while working at Combustibles magazine probably tipped off any copycats - but she joins made-up words and entries in other encyclopedias and dictionaries. She was imaginary, used in 1975 to try to protect the New Columbia Encyclopedia's intellectual integrity, albeit with a particularly implausible backstory. In 2005, the New Yorker brought to life the tale of Lillian Mountweazel, a fictitious fashion designer and photographer who liked to take pictures of mailboxes. 4) The tale of Lillian Mountweazel, the encyclopedia's best friend It's still there today, in the East Room. The United States government bought one of the copies that Stuart made (he made a few others, too), and Dolly Madison even made sure to rescue it from the White House when the building was set afire in 1814. It worked as an identifier, but the intentional typo didn't diminish the picture's prestige. Stuart inserted an anti-piracy measure into the painting, and it's both subtle (because of its placement) and blatant (because of its spelling error): The book's spine says "UNITED SATES": When he was asked to make copies, including the one pictured above, he developed an ingenious way to identify that they weren't the original. Gilbert Stuart's 1796 Landsdowne portrait of George Washington was instantly iconic (today it sits in the National Portrait Gallery). 3) Want to know if a painting's a copy? Look at the books. As Wired notes in a map-happy slideshow, one mapmaker's earnest - but incorrect - depiction of California as an island was copied throughout the 17th and 18th centuries. Paper towns like Lindberg's have appeared throughout history, and sometimes not intentionally. Apparently, the owners of that lonely store had seen Lindberg's original map, assumed it was correct, and then named their store for this imaginary town. In court, McNally said the town was real, using as evidence a store in "Agloe" named the Agloe General Store. Mapmaker Rand McNally took the bait and included Agloe on a later map. In the 1930s, Otto Lindberg of the General Drafting Company teamed up with his assistant, Ernest Alpers, to devise an analog anti-piracy measure - they invented a town called Agloe that combined their names, with the idea that copycats would steal the imaginary town as well as the real ones on their maps. Unlike the subjects of other NPR stories, Agloe isn't real. Take, for example, the town of Agloe, New York, which NPR chronicled. A paper town is, most simply, a town that only exists on paper. 2) Fake paper towns caught map plagiaristsīy now, many readers are familiar with paper towns thanks to popular author John Green, who used the phenomenon as one of his book titles. Frank - not Philip - Columbo would be proud. That said, he did gain the pride of shaming one of the world's most popular board games, as well as inventing a fact that's still wrongly repeated today. ![]() (Though Trivial Pursuit admitted to using Worth's fake Columbo nugget, judges felt it wasn't an actionable offense.) Worth appealed all the way to the Supreme Court, but never found his payday. Worth promptly sued the game's makers for stealing his facts, but the court case never went anywhere. Worth's trap worked, and "Philip Columbo" showed up in the 1984 edition of the Trivial Pursuit board game. The catch is that nobody knew his first name (and most sources say that it later appeared as Frank). In Super Trivia: Volume II, published in 1982, he claimed that Lieutenant Columbo's first name was Philip. ![]() Unfortunately, he had no recourse because it's impossible to copyright obscure facts, since anybody could claim they found them on their own. A serial trivia book author named Fred Worth had a sneaking suspicion that his questions were being pilfered by other writers. ![]() Mark Evans tells the story in Inquizition, his book about quizzes. It's so good, it even helped solve a real-life mystery. If you aren't familiar with the classic show Columbo, starring Peter Falk as the title character, you should go watch it now (it's on Netflix, and it's the best show ever made). He's perfect - except he isn't named Philip. 1) A fake trivia question helped bust a fact stealer. These older techniques fought piracy without using a single byte, and they worked pretty well, too. Related What Elizabethan book pirates in the 1500s can teach us about piracy today ![]()
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