Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Larmenius Charter


 * 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   keep. -- Cirt (talk) 08:23, 19 December 2010 (UTC)

Larmenius Charter

 * – ( View AfD View log )

Prod completed, article was deleted, and subsequently WP:REFUNDed three days after closure due to complaint from IP (with no other edits aside from complaint) on REFUND board alleging "self-serving" and "subjective analysis", so I have brought it to AfD. The article is about a non-notable hoax document with available "sources" having only trivial coverage saying it is a hoax. There's simply no way to make this an encyclopedic standalone article without OR. MSJapan (talk) 21:32, 9 December 2010 (UTC)  Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks, King of &hearts;   &diams;   &clubs;  &spades; 01:12, 17 December 2010 (UTC)
 * The cited source is not trivial coverage. It's an entire page and a half explaining the hoax story and what the reality is actually considered to be.  And it's not the only source by far.  Mackey explains that it's a forgery at some length, too, in his encyclopaedia entry for "Temple, Order of the".  Robert Freke Gould discusses it as one of several "apocryphal manuscripts".  Arthur Edward Waite wrote 22 pages on the thing, 6 in his encyclopaedia and 16 in Secret Tradition in Freemasonry.   The latter (chapter 6 of the book) has been republished standalone as ISBN 9781425351533.  Nesta Helen Webster cites Waite, saying "Mr. Waite has expressed the opinion that all this was an invention of the late eighteenth century, and that the Charter of Larmenius was fabricated at this date though not published until 1811 by the revived Ordre du Temple under the Grand Master, Fabr&eacute; Palapat.".  That seems a fairly concrete starting place.  William Moseley Brown even handily documents both viewpoints on the document, attributing them to the people who hold them, on pages 53–56 of Highlights of Templar History. I notice that there has been an even more extensive list of sources that can be used (Partner1981, Robinson1990, Baigent+Leigh1989, Knight+Lomas, and Picknet+Prince) cited on the article's talk page since 2006. By the way:  If you don't like sourcing a statement about the anachronistic Latin to a for Dummies book, you can try sourcing it to Joseph Gabriel Findel, who was the person who originally made that observation, and whom better sources than the Dummies actually cite by name.  &#9786;  Uncle G (talk) 01:34, 10 December 2010 (UTC)
 * Comment And yet no one goes and finds these things for years (quite literally in this case) until an AfD comes up. Funny that.  Anyhow, are you planning on putting those references into the article, or do you believe that proof of existence without addition is sufficient?  Also, your ref finds need to be qualified - Knight and Lomas and Baigent are all pseudohistorians, Robinson is a throwaway ref (IIRC, if it's the book I think it is), and that's the problem - apart from referencing one other encyclopedia, there's just not a lot of substance there.  The website that was sourced in the article was an OR .com.  Sourcing is more than just existence. MSJapan (talk) 03:06, 10 December 2010 (UTC)
 * It might be funny if it were true, but it isn't true. By my arithmetic, the citations of sources on the talk page &mdash; which are not my finds, by the way &mdash; pre-date this AFD nomination by some 4 years and 1 month. Uncle G (talk) 10:36, 12 December 2010 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of Literature-related deletion discussions.  -- • Gene93k (talk) 02:17, 10 December 2010 (UTC)
 * Sounds like a keep per Uncle G,Sadads (talk) 02:34, 10 December 2010 (UTC)
 * Keep I addedd the for dummies reference - after the restoration and before the afd - because approximate in scope and depth to the current text, thus allowing for a quick cite of much content as well as the missing clarification of its presumed hoax status. Give that it is a summary text and there are more detailed sources for elaboration and qualification, I don't see why we can't have an article. --Tikiwont (talk) 13:52, 12 December 2010 (UTC)
 * Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion so a clearer consensus may be reached.


 * Keep per Uncle G. This historical hoax would appear to be the subject of commentary in multiple reliable sources, and as such meets the GNG. - Smerdis of Tlön - killing the human spirit since 2003! 16:17, 17 December 2010 (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.