Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Parfact

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. Cirt (talk) 01:48, 6 February 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Parfact

I think this article is a hoax. It relies for its notability and verifiability upon the March 2004 edition of Linguist, the periodical of the International Linguistics Association.

I have some problems with the jpeg purporting to show the cover of the magazine:

1. I cannot find an "International Linguistics Association". I can only find an "International Linguistic Assocation" [1]. They seem to get called the "International Linguistics Association" a lot, e.g. [2] and [3]. There are lots of Google hits for "International Linguistics Association" but when you follow any link on them to the actual organisation you end up at the "International Linguistic Assocation" website. But I wouldn't expect them to get the name wrong on their own publication!

2. The International Linguistic Assocation publishes a periodical, but it is called The Word, not Linguist. You can see what the 2004 issues contained here [4] Even this site manages to use the "International Linguistics Assocation" name!

3. There is a magazine called The Linguist. It is the publication of the (British) Chartered Institute of Linguists. You can see the cover here[5] and the contents of previous issues here [6]. I find it hard to believe that an international linguists association would give their magazine the same name as the one published by the official British professional linguists body.

4.If I type the bar code into the GSI database [7] then it complains that there are the wrong number of digits. It tells me that Key GTIN must be 8, 12, 13 or 14 digits long. Scanning the Universal Product Code article (pun intended) I think the bar code on the magazine is missing its first and last digits.

Eliminating the magazine, then all I can see on the web that might support the article is the definiton in the Urban Dictionary [8] (which it appears anyone can edit, although unlike Wikipedia they don't appear to ask for references); and search terms such as "parfact worcestershire" and "parfact cryptolect" on Google only find Wikipedia clones. Jll (talk) 19:06, 1 February 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Delete - obvious hoax perpetrated a couple of years ago by two SPAs and noticed by nobody until now - sadly, not even the editors who tidied it. The magazine cover is a fake. andy (talk) 19:17, 1 February 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Delete article and the image (.jpg) as well. It makes you wonder how many similar hoaxes are out there. The image ("supplied by features editor of 'Linguist' magazine specifically for use on the language-related Wikipedia page entitled 'Parfact'" no less) gave the article a false appearance of legitimacy, and it was artfully constructed, with articles like "Is the Greek alphabet due for an upgrade?". Brilliant hoax, good catch by the nominator. Mandsford (talk) 20:15, 1 February 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Comment. There are some troublesome aspects of this article.
- Article has no external references.
- The EXIF extended details of the magazine cover (see file page) show Adobe Photoshop as the source of the file.
- The magazine cover has the phrase "Clarifying Photentics" as the title of an article in the magazine. As far as I can determine, there is no such word as photentics. Most likely this is someone's botched spelling of phonetics.
- Note the title of the magazine with spurious diacritical marks over all the letters. I find it difficult to believe that any scholarly linguistic periodical would use these types of erroneous marks.
- The two major contributors to this article and the associated images are two single-purpose accounts who have contributed nothing to Wikipedia besides this article and the images. See JamesPR and Andymusgrave. This does not necessarily disparage single-purpose accounts, but it does create some suspicion.

•••Life of Riley (talk) 20:31, 1 February 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Delete. Additionally to the above, the image of the person on the magazine cover has a highly pixelated edge. This suggests that the cover was photoshopped together at the resolution it is presented here. While I don't find the use of Photoshop itself to be indicative of a hoax (I image many magazine covers are produced in Photoshop), they would be produced at a resolution of 300dpi or more. This cover image would be useless for actually printing a magazine cover. The barcode on the magazine cover features numbers that correspond AFAICT to no standard scheme of barcode numbering. It isn't a UPC code (which have 12 digits), it isn't an EAN code (which have eight 8 or 13 digits), and it isn't an ISSN code (which have 8 digits, plus a separate second block with an issue number). Furthermore, the only "Linguist" magazine I could find a reference to is published by the Chartered Institute of Linguists. JulesH (talk) 20:46, 1 February 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Delete. Hoax. In addition to the above, note that the purported magazine cover image was originally tagged as self-made by the uploader (which of course it was). Also, add this to User:Ashibaka/Hoaxes, perhaps? --N Shar (talk · contribs) 21:30, 1 February 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Delete This is an illustration of why things must be verifiable via reliable sources, so that Wikipedia is not full of clever hoaxes. Edison (talk) 02:30, 2 February 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Delete - Wikipedia is not for things made up one day. JohnCD (talk) 11:56, 2 February 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Delete. I've also marked the images as hoaxes. Flopsy Mopsy and Cottonmouth (talk) 20:59, 3 February 2009 (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.