Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Murexia xenochromus

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 speedy delete. With this discussion highlighting that the article is clearly a hoax and moving towards !votes for speedy deletion under WP:CSD#G3, no need to delay its extinction. ^Complex/_Rational 01:20, 29 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Murexia xenochromus

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This article appears to be a hoax. I can find no evidence for this name in any of the literature, and the sources cited here do not mention the name.

I am very familiar with the taxonomic literature for this group and I am confident the name has no basis in reality. The cited authority, Tate & Archbold (1941), does not include this name. There is a corresponding Wikispecies article that I got deleted; it attributed the name to Laurie (1952) instead, which doesn't include the name either. Neither does it appear in Flannery's (1995) book on the Mammals of New Guinea, Van Dyck (2002) who reviewed this group, Groves (2005) a major taxonomic compendium, Krajewski et al. (2007) a recent paper about this group, or the American Society of Mammalogists' Mammal Diversity Database.

I found two online references to the name:

A forum thread that references xenochromus as a subspecies.
A picture on Commons that purports to be the holotype of xenochromus. However, specimen BMNH 1911.11.29.10 is actually the holotype of Phascogale venusta rubrata (=Neophascogale lorentzii), a different New Guinea dasyurid (BMNH catalog). If you zoom in on the picture, you can indeed see a handwritten label Phascogale venusta rubrata.
- Edit: The picture is an altered copy of commons:File:Speckled dasyure (Neophascogale lorentzii) .jpg, with the name edited and the colors changed. Ucucha (talk) 20:16, 27 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  - Which is sourced to UK's Natural History Museum's collection, probably a reliable source.--Túrelio (talk) 09:11, 28 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

References:

Flannery, T.F. 1995. Mammals of New Guinea. Reed Books, 568 pp.
Groves, C.P. 2005. Order Dasyuromorphia. Pp. 23–37 in Wilson, D.E. and Reeder, D.M. (eds.). Mammal Species of the World: A Taxonomic and Geographic Reference. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2142 pp.
Krajewski, C., Torunsky, R., Sipiorski, J.T. and Westerman, M. 2007. Phylogenetic relationships of the dasyurid marsupial genus _Murexia_. Journal of Mammalogy 88(3):696-705. doi:10.1644/06-MAMM-A-310R.1
Laurie, E.M.O. 1952. Mammals collected by Mr. Shaw Mayer in New Guinea, 1932–1949. Bulletin of the British Museum (Natural History) (Zoology)1(10):269-318.
Tate, G.H.H. and Archbold, R. 1941. Results of the Archbold Expeditions. No. 31. New rodents and marsupials from New Guinea. American Museum Novitates 1101:1-9.
Van Dyck, S. 2002. Morphology-based revision of _Murexia_ and _Antechinus_ (Marsupialia: Dasyuridae). Memoirs of the Queensland Museum 48:239-330.

I believe this is an elaborate hoax. Ucucha (talk) 16:59, 27 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Automated comment: This AfD was not correctly transcluded to the log (step 3). I have transcluded it to Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Log/2023 January 27. —^{cyberbot I}_{Talk to my owner:Online} 17:25, 27 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Comment: I have no competence in this area to make a judgement hoax vs real. What I have done is started c:Commons:Deletion requests/File:Murexia xenochromus specimen.jpg to alert Commons that there is/may be a problem. 🇺🇦 Fiddle^Timtrent Faddle^Talk to me 🇺🇦 19:48, 27 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Comment I deleted this file on Commons as fake. All other images were deleted as copyvios by another admin. Yann (talk) 21:51, 28 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Delete I've dug quite deep now, and it appears that every mention of the name on the web can ultimately be traced back to WP. Note, the taxon was also present at Dasyuridae, inserted by the same author [1], before being removed last December [2]. One peculiar exception: the forum thread linked above predates WP appearance of the name by three years. Still, overall it sure does look like a hoax. --Elmidae (talk · contribs) 12:24, 28 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
@Elmidae Does this cast doubt on that author's other uploads to Commons? See https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/Big_baboon_272 🇺🇦 Fiddle^Timtrent Faddle^Talk to me 🇺🇦 13:04, 28 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I would say it does, but maybe Ucucha may be placed to identify these guys by habitus? --Elmidae (talk · contribs) 13:46, 28 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I wouldn't be confident identifying these, as many of these dasyurids look quite similar and I don't have experience with the animals themselves, only their names, but based on the pictures in Flannery (1995) the identifications look solid. For example, Murexia rothschildi indeed has a broad black stripe, and Murexia melanurus has a yellow rump and black tail.

I'm a bit skeptical about the sourcing for these images though, given what we now know about the author. They claim the pictures were own work, but these are hard-to-find tiny mammals living in a remote place (New Guinea); there aren't a lot of people who really would be able to have pictures of them in the wild. So we should seriously investigate the possibility that the pictures were taken from somewhere else. Notice that commons:File:Murexia_habbema.jpg has an "(a)", suggestive it was part of a multi-part figure in some source. The most likely candidate would probably be the marsupial volume of Handbook of Mammals of the World, but I don't own a copy so can't check. Ucucha (talk) 13:59, 28 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Actually, found the source. I'll continue this discussions over on Commons. Ucucha (talk) 14:03, 28 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

@Ucucha, @Elmidae I have created a precautionary DR at c:Commons:Deletion requests/Files uploaded by Big baboon 272. 🇺🇦 Fiddle^Timtrent Faddle^Talk to me 🇺🇦 14:09, 28 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Delete should never have been accepted at AfC as the sources are not about claimed subject. I can find no evidence of existence and the manipulated image shows this is clearly a deliberate hoax. KylieTastic (talk) 15:04, 28 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Anyone got the energy to go through the rest of the users edits as I'm sure well find more issues - unless they were not the origin of the hoax but took this from another source that was the hoax. KylieTastic (talk) 15:08, 28 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Comment: Please see https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Log/block&page=User%3ABig+baboon+272 where this Commons uploader has been indexed for fake image and copyright image upload. See also https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Commons:Administrators%27_noticeboard/User_problems&oldid=728552248#image-manipulator section "Image manipulator" for the Commons Admin take 🇺🇦 Fiddle^Timtrent Faddle^Talk to me 🇺🇦 22:42, 28 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Also see ANI where interested parties are requested to contribute. 🇺🇦 Fiddle^Timtrent Faddle^Talk to me 🇺🇦 23:04, 28 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
G3 Speedy Delete - Clearly a hoax. I removed the references as none of them mention the topic. –dlthewave ☎ 23:49, 28 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Speedy delete I didn't know it was hoax at that time when I reviewed this through AFC, as I 'forgot' (more like should have done) the reference checking. MarioJump83 (talk) 00:24, 29 January 2023 (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.