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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 Obvious delete. Good work, people. DS (talk) 17:11, 31 October 2024 (UTC)‎[reply]

Harold Standish

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Harold Standish (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) – (View log | edits since nomination)
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This article seems to be a hoax. I cannot find any of the cited books, and the cited Journal of Canadian Studies article or issue does not exist. A Google Search for "Harold Standish" finds only mirrors of his Wikipedia article. A Google Search for results before his article's creation finds nothing; only a PDF that mirrors our article on Canadian poetry, which he is name-checked in. Searches on Google Books, Google Scholar, or Newspapers.com return no sources that support his existence. As well, Standish and his works are not recorded in any library catalogs, such as WorldCat, and no edits to his article after 2008 have changed the content in a substantial way. Averageuntitleduser (talk) 23:26, 25 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I am also nominating the following related page because of hoax concerns described above:

The Golden Time (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views)
Delete. None of the references listed exist. If his works truly were significant, surely some online sources would exist. Procyon117 (talk) 17:12, 26 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete as per all of the above. Wikipedia is not a home for hoaxes on any subject. TH1980 (talk) 00:29, 27 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete per WP:V. Even if it’s not a made up in one day entry, we have no sources to verify any facts, and the creator of the article hasn’t been active in over a Decade. Bearian (talk) 11:14, 28 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete. The references in the article do not exist, and I cannot find even mentions of them in literature journals (WP:V/WP:GNG). Rjjiii (talk) 04:05, 29 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete. Even on deep searches of Newspapers.com and ProQuest for old at-the-time coverage that wouldn't have Googled, I found absolutely nothing there either. To be fair, I did find a few stray hits for short stories published in the Toronto Star under the name "Harold Standish Corbin", but further research into that name didn't provide any convincing evidence that this article was just mistitled — the work attributed to Mr. Corbin doesn't align with any of the titles here, even the birth and death dates attributed to Mr. Corbin don't match up, it doesn't even appear that Mr. Corbin was even Canadian, and on and so forth. And the Journal of Canadian Studies Vol 15 No 4 it was published six years later than the date claimed here, and its fully consultable index doesn't list any article about the work of a Harold Standish. So I, too, have failed to locate any evidence whatsoever that this isn't a hoax.
    And since Canadian literature is one of my areas of expertise, trust me that there's no way that any "significant Canadian modernist along with the likes of Earle Birney, Douglas LePan, and Sheila Watson" would be this impossible to source when Birney, LePan and Watson are all so much more sourceable. Even now "forgotten" writers would still have had sourcing in their own time which we could recover without having to concoct fake sources that don't exist — even if a writer's work has never been reprinted, we can still locate any coverage that would have existed at the time of the original printing, and the original printing would still be in stock in university and Library and Archives Canada collections.
    I'd also like to call attention to the critical assessment of his work by George Woodcock claimed in one of the footnotes: "Some have called Standish's work a sham, but any astute reader will recognize his work for what it really is--a revelation about what we know, and think we know, about Canadian literature." But since the novel's article describes something quite adjacent to As for Me and My House and Who Has Seen the Wind, and the biographical article documents absolutely nothing else to suggest that any of his other work was all that radical a departure from the work of other Canadian writers of that era either, I'm left with no choice but to interpret that quote as a preemptive rebuke to any Wikipedians who might dare to question the authenticity of this article, rather than a thing Woodcock ever actually said about the work of a completely unsourceable writer named Harold Standish. Bearcat (talk) 17:59, 30 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment: Anne Wilkinson (poet), First Statement, John Sutherland (Canadian writer), Lorne Pierce, and Northern Review were created by the same account, and in the same week. (The account was active for just one week.) I wonder whether they are any more real? Gawaon (talk) 09:09, 31 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Those are all real, I can confirm. I've hit every one of them before in other past research (e.g. the stuff about Sutherland's homophobic review of Patrick Anderson's poetry came from me, I created our article about Pierce's Ryerson Press, and on and so forth.) And most of them have wikilinked sources in them which do pan out properly, unlike this one. Bearcat (talk) 12:58, 31 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]
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.
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