Papaphobia
In a little knowledge engineering exercise, I was trying to add the causes of a phobia to the respective Wikidata items. There are currently about 160 phobias in Wikidata, and only a few listed in a structured way what they are afraid of. So I was going through them, trying to capture it in s a structured way. Here's a list of the current state:
Now, one of those phobias was the Papaphobia - the fear of the pope. Now, is that really a thing? I don't know. CDC does not seem to have an entry on it. On the Web, in the meantime, some pages have obviously taken to mining lists of phobias and creating advertising pages that "help" you with Papaphobia - such as this one:
This page is likely entirely auto-generated. I doubt it that they have "clients for papaphobia in 70+ countries", whom they helped "in complete discretion" within a single day! "People with severe fears and phobias like papaphobia (which is in fact the formal diagnostic term for papaphobia) are held prisoners by their phobias."
This site offers more, uhm, useful information.
"Group psychotherapy can also help where individuals share their experience and, in the process, understand and recover from their phobia." Really? There are enough cases that we can even set up a group therapy?
Now, maybe I am entirely off here - maybe, papaphobia is really a thing. With search in Scholar I couldn't find any medical sources (the term is mentioned in a number of sociological and historical works, to express general sentiments in a population or government against the authority of the pope, but I could not find any mentions of it in actual medical literature).
Now could those pages up there be benign cases of jokes? Or are they trying to scam people with promises to heal their actual fears, and they just didn't curate the list of fears sufficiently, because, really, you wouldn't find this page unless you actually search for this term?
And now what? Now what if we know these pages are made by scammers? Do we report them to the police? Do we send a tip to journalists? Or should we just do nothing, allowing them to scam people with actual fears? Well, by publishing this text, maybe I'll get a few people warned, but it won't reach the people it has to reach at the right time, unfortunately.
Also, was it always so hard to figure out what is real and what is not? Does papaphobia exist? Such a simple question. How should we deal with it on Wikidata? How many cases are there, if it exists? Did it get worse for people with papaphobia now that we have two people living who have been made pope?
My assumption now is that someone was basically working on a corpus, looking for words ending in -phobia, in order to generate a list of phobias. And then the term papaphobia from sociological and historical literature popped up, and it landed in some list, and was repeated in other places, etc., also because it is kind of a funny idea, and so a mixture of bad research and joking bubbled through, and rolled around on the Web for so long that it looks like it is actually a thing, to the point that there are now organizations who will gladly take your money (CTRN is not the only one) to treat you for papaphobia.
The world is weird.
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