Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/James Snipplet

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. The consensus is very clear, and entirely in accord with policy, there is no significant dispute, so I am closing in accordance with WP:SNOW. DES ^(talk) 19:36, 8 September 2015 (UTC)

James Snipplet

James Snipplet (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) – (View log · Stats)

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My searches absolutely nothing at all aside from results for other people or simply mirrors. What's especially interesting is this (change of content but no sourcds at all) and this has stayed too long (started in May 2008 by SPA) to not have gotten better and what's worse is that there has never been any other significant change. So unless this was an unknown person, there's simply nothing to confirm existence and suggest improvement. Inviting Calamondin12 for comment. SwisterTwister talk 02:40, 4 September 2015 (UTC)

This was tickling me as such a fabrication I considered speedying but thought AfD was better and at best, if this man existed, the author may have been adding their family history (which would also explain the no sourcing). SwisterTwister talk 05:11, 4 September 2015 (UTC)

Note: This debate has been included in the list of England-related deletion discussions. SwisterTwister talk 02:41, 4 September 2015 (UTC)

Note: This debate has been included in the list of Politicians-related deletion discussions. SwisterTwister talk 02:41, 4 September 2015 (UTC)

• Delete I found absolutely nothing in my searches too, beginning to think this is just some hoax. SuperCarnivore591 (talk) 04:19, 4 September 2015 (UTC)
• Delete If he actually was a "widely respected member of the British Parliament" active in speaking out about the Potato Famine in Ireland, then certainly he would be discussed in books indexed by Google. But I find nothing. Then, we have a major addition of content by an editor who claims to be a "history buff", and who made just this one edit and then disappeared. I think that this unreferenced article is a hoax. Cullen³²⁸ Let's discuss it 04:58, 4 September 2015 (UTC)
• Delete It really does look like a hoax. If this guy were real, there would be sources. The only other possible explanation is some sort of spelling error. I did try searching on Sniplet and a couple of abbreviations for James. The only corroboration for his existence that I could locate was a twitter account [1] - it corroborates his existence as a hoax. Nice spotting, User:SwisterTwister.E.M.Gregory (talk) 09:50, 4 September 2015 (UTC)
• Delete Hoax. Someone as involved in politics as he's supposed to have been would be well referenced. Lack of simple facts like which constituency he represented in parliament gives it away, too. Neiltonks (talk) 10:33, 4 September 2015 (UTC)
• Delete. Clearly a hoax. Any MP in virtually any era will have many references in Google Books, old newspapers and elsewhere, particularly one firmly identified with a political cause. No references whatsoever for "Snipplet argues snippets" or similar details. The "Crime and Outrageous Act" is apparently a bungled reference to the Crime and Outrage Bill (Ireland) 1847. Charles Gavan Duffy's Young Ireland: A Fragment of Irish History 1840-1850 lists the names of the commissioners on the Royal Commission (more commonly known as the Devon Commission) on page 640, and Snipplet's name is not among them. Calamondin12 (talk) 12:13, 4 September 2015 (UTC)
  • For what it's worth, this is the first Wikipedia hoax I've encountered to be "supported" by a fake Twitter account. Calamondin12 (talk) 13:35, 8 September 2015 (UTC)
• Yeah, I'm going with "crock of hooey" here. Past UK Members of Parliament are not a difficult topic to source — I could potentially buy a member of the old Parliament of England in the 1200s or 1300s slipping through the sourceability cracks, but not a member of the Parliament of the United Kingdom in the 1800s. (The foundations of modern media and publishing were already very much in place by that time — frex, we still to this day have direct, widely available digital access to The Times of London content all the way back to 1785. So no stinking way does something like this just disappear from the history books — an MP who'd become a prominent laughingstock, to the point of having his name sweep the entire nation as a sarcastic slang word, would have gotten covered like crazy.) Plus, if you look further back in the edit history, the context of the "snippet of blood" speech changes from the Irish potato famine to the creation of the Suez Canal — as does the entire thing he even said the snippets of blood were doing (they were being wasted on a capricious adventure instead of being compared for preciousness.) And we'll never mind that "snippet of blood" is not a figure of speech anybody would ever have used in a political tirade anyway — blood idiomatically comes in drops, not snippets. Finally, for added bonus, this article fails to state what constituency he represented in Parliament (presumably because any such detail would have made a hoax easier to detect), and no article about any parliamentary constituency in the entire United Kingdom links to his name either. So he's clearly a figment of somebody's imagination — nobody who had really served in Parliament in the 1800s would be this unsourceable, especially had they become even half as infamous as this article claims. Delete with fire. Bearcat (talk) 18:28, 4 September 2015 (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.