So I'm currently taking a Trigonometry class and I'm using the iOS version of the Wolfram-Alpha app to assist me with some of the more mundane calculations (Pythagorean Theorem, etc) and I've come across something rather peculiar. At some point, it suggested a related term called "fairradian" and when I tapped that Wolfram-Alpha dutifully informed me that a fairradian (or Frad for short) was a unit of measure equal to 1015 radians. I hadn't ever heard of the prefix fair- so I looked it up. What do you know? Nothing. Nothing on Wikipedia and nothing at all on Google. Absolutely zip. WA claims it is an SI unit of measure with the "physical quantity" of "plane angle."
It was at this point that I sent a feedback to WA asking for clarification on the term. Where it came from, etc. I included my email address and got an automated response to my email that they had received the message. That was two months ago and I heard nothing. Today, I decided to see if the term still existed on WA and it does, however there are additions to it's information!
Now it has a section titled "Unit status" with three entries. "Proposed," "never used," and "whimsical." I found this very interesting, but there still was no information on it's origins. Who proposed this unit? When? Why isn't it anywhere on Google?
Was this unit actually proposed at some point or is Wolfram-Alpha straight up making this up? Is it perhaps a piece of deliberate misinformation in order to detect copyright infringement in the same way print encyclopedias put in a fabricated article or mapmakers would include phantom roads in order to detect whether or not their work was copied? Or perhaps something else?