Talk:Mihailo Tolotos

Did you know nomination
Curious case, but raises some questions. He must have seen his mother, but it may well be that he never saw one from the age that most people start remembering. Can we be sure that this story is completely true, or that the age at which he was abandoned may have grown in the telling? Given the isolation of the Mount Athos community, can he be the only monk with a similar story over the centuries? Did they normally take in foundlings? Did the monks have much ability to look after babies? Obvious problem: since they didn't even allow female animals on the peninsula, where did they get the milk to feed him? Could he be sure that he had never seen a woman, since if that was what he thought then would he have recognised one if one had sneaked onto the peninsula? PatGallacher (talk) 21:42, 9 April 2023 (UTC)

Better sources needed
Continuing the discussion from WT:DYK, and to clarify my reasons for adding the "better source needed" tags, I'd like to reiterate some of the concerns I raised in the AfD. I conducted a fairly extensive search during the AfD but was unable to come up with any useful sources. If no better sources can be found, I think any information about Tolotos which is not derived from the Reuters report should be removed from the article. Sojourner in the earth (talk) 19:24, 30 April 2023 (UTC)
 * The first paragraph of the "Biography" section is sourced only to Weird Universe and Vintage Everyday, which are both self-published blogs. This paragraph makes several claims which are not found in any other of the article's sources, such as that Tolotos' mother died four hours after his birth; that he was abandoned on the steps of the Mount Athos monastery; and that the local monastic community ... gave him his name. These details are of the kind that readily develop around a story through repetition and embellishment, and shouldn't be accepted as fact without much stronger sourcing than is currently present.
 * The date of death stated in the article is wrong. The paragraph from the Edinburgh Daily Courier, cited as the first known mention of his story, is a reprint of a Reuters report that first began appearing in British papers from 19 September 1938. We don't know when the report was written, so the best we can say is that he died some time before this date.
 * If we don't know when he died, then it follows that we can't calculate his year of birth. The birth year given in the article is another piece of information cited only to Weird Universe.
 * Lest anyone be misled by the presence of TIME and BBC sources in the article, I'd like to make it clear that neither of these sources make any mention of Tolotos, and are only there to source the facts about the women who snuck into the monastery.
 * Constable Colgan's Connectoscope is also a dubious source in my opinion (published via crowdfunding, and checking the footnotes reveals numerous refs to Wikipedia), but it's hardly worth debating because it contains no further information on Tolotos than the Reuters report.


 * I agree. I see two kinds of sources: those that are reliable, and those that mention Tolotos.  No overlap between those two groups.  This feels like an urban legend that just won't die. -- RoySmith (talk) 23:52, 30 April 2023 (UTC)