Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Dice Bob


 * The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review).  No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was delete as a hoax. Normally I'd add this to the hoax archive but in this situation I think that'd be seen as an encouragement. Tokyogirl79 (｡◕‿◕｡)  14:29, 10 February 2017 (UTC)

Dice Bob

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This article has had zero references since its creation in 2009. I tried to verify that such a haircut exists, but couldn't find any sources that mention it (even unreliable sources) that weren't based on this Wikipedia article. If anyone can verify that a dice bob is a real thing, I'll be happy to keep the article, but otherwise I'm afraid it might be a hoax or simply a hyper-local phenomenon that is otherwise undocumented. Kaldari (talk) 20:47, 8 February 2017 (UTC)

Hi,

Article creator, TheKhakinator here. The winter of 2009 was a fraught time for a young TK. I was halfway through my second year of University, which was thankfully going much better than my first - academically at least. Hormones rage in young teenagers, and there was a group of us that would congregate nightly on the still-relevant MSN for conversations. This daily group chat, nicknamed the "orgy" by its largely teenaged participants, was a hotbed of nascent memery, wild injokes and social interaction.

These conversations weren't just a casual catch up between old friends. I'd only known most of these people for a few months. No, participation in the "orgy" (seriously, ugh) generally required one's full attention to keep up with the rapid pace if you wanted to stay up to date. There were characters - I'm reminded of a particular member whose trademark was bold Papyrus font in black, or pink on the occasions we all switched our font over to imitate him, and his undying love of steak, iced coffee, and DragonBall Z. Every few weeks or so we would demand a party and one would be hosted by whoever in the chat had the best house for the job.

Things would fire up around 6 PM most nights, but could be as early as 4. I'd sometimes tether my EEE PC to my Sony Ericsson W910i on the train home to get an early start on proceedings if that helps you paint a picture of the era. We'd stay up late, and I shit you not, we would actually pull all nighters on this thing. Just chatting on MSN. I learned to type at 110 words per minute on a 10-inch laptop (a skill that serves me well to this day, I might add).

It was edging around midnight one Wednesday, 8 long years ago, when I was in the thick of what was a relatively regular night on the chat. I was attempting to flirt with a young woman, and decided what better than a public display?

In high school, vandalising Wikipedia was a pet hobby of myself and a few friends. We all wanted to see who could create the best fake article. Mine were all pretty quickly deleted. One of us succeeded quite well, creating OWMC - a page about a Muslim equivalent to the YWCA that was an elaborate fabrication. This lasted a year before a couple of us, after a bitterly fought delete campaign, brought down his article. After this and other hijinks grew old, some of us became Stubbifists - users keen to create small articles to fill in the gaps on Wikipedia, often leaning on locally significant topics. I'm particularly proud of a couple of articles of my own creation - The Tas Pappas article has blossomed into really great guide on his life and career after narrowly avoiding deletion - particularly harsh for one of the few skateboarders to pull off the 900. Connector pen is also one I'm glad to see still around, though it's lacking any pictures of the great sculptures you can make with the pens themselves which is the whole reason they're special.

The temperature outside was edging closer to 4 degrees - cold but dry - as I fired up Wikipedia. People had been talking about hair and I decided to go with a bit of creative flair - I was going to invent a hairstyle. It had to come from a hip, relevant setting - Tribeca is a fun sounding borough of New York and I'd try and tie it to an LGBT subculture. The trick to creating a believable fake article is that it's just like taking psychotropic drugs - it's all about set and setting.

But what the hell does this have to with flirting? Check the article.

Read the first letter of each line. Everybody knows the hottest form of courting is the acrostic poem, straight out of third grade, yo. Landed me some epic lulz in the chat. It was the 21st century equivalent of scrawling your crush's name in big red letters on the side of a train carriage, I guess. I felt pretty damn cool.

In the end, nothing really came of it. Her and I shared some deep conversations over the next few weeks but nothing really came of it. Over the next year, the group splintered as the vagaries of relationships and one-time flings started to chew things up from the edges in. Two years later, Microsoft shut down what had become "Windows Live Messenger" for good.

I used to roll with those peeps at 18ths. Years later I was at a 21st and caught a few of the old gang. We shared some small talk, casual mentions of old times - but hey, people change. Perhaps the last standing vestige of what was such a huge part of my entire social life is this article. This article right here. It stands on the precipice of darkness.

I ask you - if the dice bob did not exist in Tribeca in the 80s, does it not exist in the memories of those who were there for its imagination. Is that notable enough for it to stand as a memorial to something once so viscerally important, so vital to fifteen or so teenagers just starting to taste their freedom in the suburban depths of one of the world's smaller capital cities?

It is up to you all to decide.

TK out.

TheKhakinator (talk) 04:33, 10 February 2017 (UTC)
 * I'm going to delete this, since you've has admitted that it was all a hoax to impress some girl. I'm going to be very, very honest, edits like this one in 2015 paired with creating several hoax articles in the past makes me very sorely tempted to block you here and now. I'm surprised that you weren't blocked previously, honestly. What's making me hesitate is that many of these edits were done way back in the past, but the edit to the Mazda article (which can be taken as vandalism given your past) paired with your "sorry not sorry, but let's keep it for the laughs" cavalier attitude makes me doubt that you'll be able to make any beneficial edits on Wikipedia. Tokyogirl79 (｡◕‿◕｡)  14:28, 10 February 2017 (UTC)


 * The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.