It's time for a little wild conspiracy that I just saw over on the Dota 2 subreddit today. The finals for the annual mega esports event known as The International is upon us. For the next several days, eight teams will be competing in Dota 2 matches to win the Aegis and a part of the $2.5 million prize pool. This year's main event is being held in Copenhagen, Denmark, with the entire event being run by PGL ESPORTS and assisted by Valve.
As with many such events, there is plenty of merch to be sold. One such item is a hoodie being sold with an image of the Aegis, the words "The International" under, and then the city, country, and year of this year's event. This is all fairly standard stuff as far as event or gaming apparel is concerned, except there's just one problem.
Copenhagen is spelled wrong in the hoodie. Reddit user EninrA noticed that their shirt spelled the city as Coppenhagen. Note the extra "p" in the name. They posted about the mistake on r/DotA2 and thus a conspiracy started to form.
In the user comments, Turpuoise1996 noticed that the Wikipedia entry for Copenhagen listed "Coppenhagen" as the local spelling of the city. A native of the city then chimed in to say that this isn't true. Further snooping uncovered the fact that someone very, very recently had vandalized the Wikipedia entry for Copenhagen. The vandalization took place on September 13, 2024 at 11:56AM (ET), or just 21 minutes after that initial Reddit post was made by EninrA.
As Wikipedia logs the IP for every edit made to their pages, it's pretty easy to figure out either who that IP belongs to or whereabouts in the world the IP originated from. This led to Reddit user wickedplayer494 doing a search on the IP. As it turns out, the IP of the person that vandalized the Copenhagen Wikipedia page belongs to "SC PGL ESPORTS SRL."
That is to say, someone at the venue for The International, be it staff within PGL or otherwise, went to Wikipedia to try to gaslight the world that Copenhagen was spelled "Coppenhagen" to make the misspelling on the official merchandise look correct.
