Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Vanda Varvara


 * 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.  MBisanz  talk 00:01, 29 January 2013 (UTC)

Vanda Varvara

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An IP contributor was recently blocked for some angrily-written speedy tags on this article, maintaining that it is a hoax, but, upon review, I have reason to believe that xe was indeed correct. The pictures are all of Alla Nazimova, all of the references and links that I checked were either internal errors or entries on Mark Rothko  , and all of the books that I checked do not appear to exist. It's far too in-depth to not have any inline citations, and the claims to notability made in the lede seem completely fictitious ("...was a Russian–French–American painter who is considered to be the most influential female artist in the 20th century"). I've discussed this on IRC with several other editors, who generally agreed with me that this was probably a hoax, but not blatant enough to warrant G3 speedy deletion. Clearly something is fishy with it, and either I've encountered some statistical anomaly where every single source I checked came up empty, or we've just found List of hoaxes on Wikipedia's newest entry.  — PinkAmpers   &#38;   ( Je vous invite à me parler )  23:55, 21 January 2013 (UTC)


 * Speedy delete as G3. I understand that some are going to not feel this merits a speedy deletion, but after looking at the links provided, and Google searches on the books/her name not turning up anything at all credible, I believe this should just be speedied and done with. Absolutely none of the links claiming to be reviews of Varvara actually link to a review of her, i.e. they are dead links or another artist. Also, the pictures, as mentioned above, are of a completely different person. We may not like to admit it, but the wool has most definitally been pulled over our eyes here, and we need to own up and get this off of Wikipedia before more people see it.
 * Further information:
 * The two links to commons and wikiquote at the bottom should be ignored. There is absolutely nothing on those two sites that mentions her name, much less is in-depth about her.
 * The links provided all go to different artists/non-existant pages, which have never existed as far as I can ascertain from searching. Also, the sources provided in the form of books don't seem to exist, and those that do don't mention her at all, and are about other artists.
 * If she was really the most influential artist of the 20th century, don't you think you or I would have at least heard her name before? Or much less not been hearing others as being the most influential?
 * If this really merited an AfD, there would have to be some small hope that anything in the article was true. Heck, for me any assertion that she exists in any somewhat reliable source would be enough to make this fail G3. However, I don't see that. I don't see anything that makes any assertion at all that this is not something that is a G3 deletion, other than the fact that it has (per PA) been here for a year. Does having a user be here for a year prevent us from blocking them as a sock of another user? Nope. gwickwire  talk edits 00:25, 22 January 2013 (UTC)
 * Although this is a hoax, I believe that speedy deletion is inappropriate in this case because it is not a blatant hoax. Any article for which research is necessary to discover whether or not it is a hoax requires a consensus to delete. Dcoetzee 04:07, 22 January 2013 (UTC)

I also suggested on #wikipedia-en on IRC when this issue was brought up by the nominator to CSD it. Now that I have been asked to comment here, the author's, User:AlaMenthe's first edit is in their userspace and is a complete draft with all the interwiki, all bogus, all nonexistent at Latin and Cyrylic-glyphed wikipedias and linking to Mark Rothko on Farsi, Chinese, Japanese, Hebrew, and Jiddish. Also, Mark Rothko's photograph is still in that edit, as is the caption describing him. This hoax is premeditated in that there exists a Russian painter of roughly similar profile and chronology, Varvara Stepanova (Russian, 1894–1958), as evidenced here on Museum of Modern Art's webpage: http://www.moma.org/collection/artist.php?artist_id=5643. Of course the Wikiquote and Commonscat link templates are fake. The page never existed on Russian or French wikis, that's only place where I bothered to check. The first two book references and the publisher of the third are also fake. Lastly, anybody born in Russia would have a patronymic -- be on the lookout for that in the future. --Mareklug talk 00:41, 22 January 2013 (UTC)
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 * Delete The images in this article are the most obvious fabrications. All three are of Alla Nazimova, and taken about 12 years prior to the dates stated in the article. Google Books has American abstract expressionism of the 1950s, and it does not contain the terms "Varvara", "Varvarra", or even "Vanda". The other books listed in sources cannot be found anywhere else on the Internet, and are probably fabricated. The interwiki links are dead, as are the commonscat and Wikiquotes links (their targets are not deleted - they never existed). As is typical for hoaxes, the creator User:AlaMenthe is a single purpose account that was already familiar with Wikipedia policies and vanished after writing it. The article appears to have been based in part on this revision of Mark Rothko, but with "Mark Rothko" replaced by "Vanda Varvara", as demonstrated by this sandbox edit and this duplication detector report. Some links like the "Vanda Varvara exhibition at Tate Modern, London, September 2008 – February 2009" still link to Mark Rothko's exhibitions. Grats to PinkAmpersand on spotting this one. Dcoetzee 04:28, 22 January 2013 (UTC)
 * Assuming that this AfD is closed as "delete", I'll file an SPI against the creator, since, as you said, xe clearly knew what xe was doing. I'm also slightly suspicious of the IP contributor who raised the issue initially (interspersed with pointless profanities), if only because it's been almost exactly a year since the article was created (and, indeed, if this AfD isn't closed early, the article will have existed for exactly a year and a day) - perhaps we're looking at a situation similar to Chen Fang, where the creator realizes xe'll never get any recognition if xe doesn't blow the whistle on xemself. — PinkAmpers   &#38;   ( Je vous invite à me parler )  05:45, 22 January 2013 (UTC)


 * Delete This article superficially looks well written and well sourced, BUT it seems to be one of the greatest hoaxes I've come across. The image in the infobox is of Alla Nazimova and the homerun sources such as TIME and the Guardian are non-existent links. I looked into this artist's collect at the Tate and could not find anything. Google News Archives has no hit results.  Mkdw talk 20:19, 27 January 2013 (UTC)
 * Delete Pretty obviously it's a hoax. Just checked a few links, and they are either non-existent or link to something different.  ~satellizer~ ~talk~  23:10, 27 January 2013 (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.