Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Rods of ancient Egypt

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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. DS 15:16, 12 October 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Rods of ancient Egypt

Categorizing this under Fiction and the Arts because I don't see a history category, and I suppose it could be part of the arts. This article is part of a subtle hoax. Someone has seized upon a feature of ancient Egyptian sculpture and invented a history and interpretation of it, which an editor then put on Wikipedia. I carefully checked the references, they fall into three categories. The first is a reference to the Cleveland museum of art, which makes no reference to "rods" but only to a piece of folded cloth in the statue's hand. The second source used is the Neilos site. This is a commercial site, and a commercial link to it was added near the end of the reflist. The third source is a reference to a book and other materials by Valery Uvarov.

I checked out this book by the link provided, and it has no scholarly information and seems to be part of a hoax. The Neilos site links to Uvarov's book as well. Looking carefully at the Neilos site and Uvarov's article on page 3, you can see the pictures of the Menkaure statue are the same, and the wands for sale on the Neilos site are the same as on page 6 on the Uvarov article. The editor who started the wikipedia page has a history of adding questionable material to other articles, and though this is "sourced," the "rods of ancient Egypt" is not a legitimate topic. Jeff Dahl 01:38, 8 October 2007 (UTC)

  • Another interesting thing I just noticed is the "in other languages" box. It appears that each of these links is to the article about Horus in that language. It appears from the history that the hoaxster added these all at once, when the article was created. I also did some checking of the internal links on Rods of ancient Egypt, and it appears that Minnefer and Nykara were created to bolster the backstory of the article. I hesitate to nominate Minnefer and Nykara for deletion, because although the articles were created to support the hoax, these two officials did really exist and are cited. I guess I could go either way on keeping them. Jeff Dahl 00:28, 11 October 2007 (UTC)

I am not ver yfamiliar with deletion rules, but is this necessarily a hoax? Might it not just be poorly referenced, etc? The user has a history of edits, how likely is it to be a 2 year old hoax? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 220.237.198.148 (talk) 07:25, 8 October 2007 (UTC)

It is a hoax. Read the last paragraph of the nomination (before all the comments). NASCAR Fan24(radio me!) 12:06, 8 October 2007 (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.