They are though? They have the name Alan MacMasters, same as the fake inventor
> "Alan MacMasters, 30, is an aerospace engineer from London "and not the inventor of the toaster", he assures me with a giggle. "You shouldn't just believe everything you read on the internet."
> I feel nervous about the possibility of falling prey to another prank. So I ask Alan to send me a photo of his passport, which he does. He is not lying: even if he lacks the voluminous quiff of his namesake, he really is Alan MacMasters
The temptation to correctly identify them as the founding members of what later was backronymed to the American Automobile Association (AAA) is rising ....
> Alex felt mischievous, and wondered how far his prank could go. He asked himself what would happen if he created a Wikipedia article entirely devoted to the supposed inventor of the toaster.
> To illustrate it, Alex grabbed a photo of himself and edited it to look like an image from the 1800s - this was the very same photo that, years later, would catch Adam's eye.
I think the above comment is referring to the true identity of “Maddy Kennedy”:
> On 6 February 2012, Alan was at a university lecture, when the class was warned against using Wikipedia as a source. To hammer the point home, the lecturer said that a friend of his - one "Maddy Kennedy" - had named himself on the site as the inventor of the toaster.
Vandal maybe, but another perspective would be that they are playing the role of an Epistemological Chaos Monkey, providing fitness tests to the worldwide bullshit filter.
