"...while Alex Dessler has argued that the [Van Allen radiation] belt is a result of volcanic activity."

The above was a joke made by a scientist which then got inserted into the wp article and went unnoticed for almost a decade. (Nov. 2002 - Feb. 2011)

See: "Van Allen radiation belt" -- a Wikipedia horror tale ?

This would be longest-lived wiki-hoax I have ever heard of. Nice catch!

The guy who made the edit, Lir (T-C-L-K-R-D) , was an early member of the Review, and at least briefly an admin here. He disappeared from here in mid-2007.

For the record, I am not Lir. (this was referenced on my RfA and I gave an answer I thought was clever at the time but reads as rather smarmy now)

Lir, wow now that's a flashback from the past. I'm not surprised though. He always portrayed himself as an anarchist and inserting hoax info into article wouldn't have been out of place.

it wasn't like this went unnoticed at the time:

20:03, 12 November 2002 Lir (talk | contribs) (3,214 bytes) (aprilwhat is wrong with the article?)
20:03, 12 November 2002 -- April (talk | contribs) (3,419 bytes) (Reverted again. Talk is now present. Will expand on CORRECT information in this article.)
20:01, 12 November 2002 Lir (talk | contribs) (3,214 bytes) (april you made no statements in talk-if there is something inaccurate int he article than fix it)
20:00, 12 November 2002 -- April (talk | contribs) (3,419 bytes) (Reverted again. Explanatino in talk.)
19:58, 12 November 2002 Lir (talk | contribs) (3,214 bytes) (Do not delete entire articles because of inaccuracies-fix the inaccuracies)
19:49, 12 November 2002 -- April (talk | contribs) (3,419 bytes) (Reverted. Changes contained innacurate info.)
19:29, 12 November 2002 Lir (talk | contribs) (3,214 bytes)
...
19:21, 12 November 2002 Bryan Derksen (talk | contribs) (4,137 bytes) (re-adding information deleted by Lir.)

From: revision history

Then a large number of edits by Lir and the article goes a long time with few changes.

I'm not so sure the insertion was intended as a hoax. "Yes, Im well aware there are some things in that article Im not too sure about." -Lir from Talk page Sounds to me like someone who has more enthusiasm than solid knowledge and got a bit carried away.

That is entirely possible. People forget that Wikipedia in 2002 was a very difference place than today, focused more -- indeed, almost entirely -- on pure magnitude of content than on quality. Today Wikipedia is focused more on preventing a half-dozen persistent sockpuppeteers from editing than on quality. I think that's it.

And what do you know, now it's knowledge.

No, that's not true. I've stopped. There are only 5 left.

I'd say these days its more focused on whipping up articles on whatever flavor-of-the-week has caught the eye of the 24/7 cable media. Homeless sports announcers, drunk flight attendants, hiccuping girls, and stroked-out news reporters are the hot topics today.

How much do we wanna bet that an until-now unknown Panamanian soccer player's Wikipedia article is now dedicating more prose to the owl-kicking incident than to anything to do with his playing career?

Is Wweaton Will Weaton? If so, how cool is it to have Wesley Crusher as a gnome?

The thing is, Alex Dessler is just a regular college professor, right? And he's easy to get confused with Andrew Dessler, who is almost certainly his son, given that they have practically the same name and work in the same department at the same university, namely Texas A&M, which incidentally is not far from where Lir himself ended up.

So, this is actually a good example of what Wikipedia is up against maintenance-wise, though I suppose since it was eventually caught, you could at least say that this isn't an indication that the situation is out of control. Nevertheless, Andrew Dessler's departmental profile says:

So, there you go - hardly an ideal source for encyclopedic information. Also note that "about 10 years" rather neatly coincides with the time the edit was made.

I do my part to help the cause

In Texas, they don't hardly know what a Polack is, so they have Aggie jokes instead.

Lemme see, it's late, but …

Q. Why did the Aggie tighten his Van Allen Belt?

A. He felt a volcanic erection coming on.

Jon

Lir was a really good WR member in its early days. No doubt he posted a lot of shit on Wikipedia in its youth, some of which is so well-hidden we might not ever discover it.

What happened to him? He got a life.

Shows how sloppy those answer forums are. People totally clueless, copying and pasting info, accepting everything from Wikipedia as gospel.

Nope: "Bill Wheaton is a physicist & astronomer, recently (Oct 2010) retired from Caltech. I have especially strong interests in physics, and in space exploration and associated technology."