Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Jacquotte Delahaye

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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 keep. Liz Read! Talk! 20:39, 24 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Jacquotte Delahaye[edit]

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Jacquotte Delahaye (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) – (View log | edits since nomination)
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As a real person, a hoax; as a fictional character, not sufficiently notable. The earliest mention of her that I can find in Google Books is in the 1960s, which doesn't track with her operating in the 1650s; she seems to have originated in a book or books by Léon Treich sometime between the 1940s and 1960s (I don't have full Google Books access to Les femmes d'abordage which seems like it contains info on which book she was in), with her biography being embellished through a horrible game of telephone over time. –Roscelese (talk ⋅ contribs) 20:53, 17 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

  • Keep as passing WP:GNG. As just one example, the book Pirate Women: The Princesses, Prostitutes, and Privateers Who Ruled the Seven Seas (excerpts of which are available on Google Books), includes multiple pages of coverage about Delahaye (and not from an "in-universe" perspective). Colin M (talk) 21:22, 17 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]
  • Note: This discussion has been included in the list of History-related deletion discussions. –LaundryPizza03 (dc̄) 16:53, 18 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]
  • Tough one. I am getting plenty of hits, but very few scholarly. The only academic paper I see that mentions her is [1], where he is mentioned on passing with the qualifier "supposed". This is a review of the book Women Pirates and the Politics of the Jolly Roger by Klausmann, Meinzerin, Kuhn, where the reviewer notes this supposed pirate is discussed. Google Books has mostly useless snippet view, but I was able to access the book through Z-library. She has a 4-page chapter there, but the quality of this work is very dubious - the chapter is half-fictionalized (story), and it contains ZERO references or footnotes. Despite receiving one academic review, I don't think we can call this work scholarly (the reviewer also describes the authors as freelancers and the book as offering " a mix of fact, legend, savory recipes, and political dicta "). She is mentioned in [2] (Piracy: From the High Seas to the Digital Age by Lombardo book). I cannot access it so I can only see that she is mentioned on one page. The book is not scholarly - the snippet blurb says the author has A BA in English and writes books for young adults. She gets two pages, again, unreferenced, non-academic in [3]. A more serious (non fiction) but unreferenced paragraph in [4]. Pirate Women: The Princesses, Prostitutes, and Privateers, this is the book mentioned by Colin above, and it is at Z-library too, so I downloaded it. The author, Duncombe, does not appear to be an academic and the book does not appear to have received any academic reviews. She does, however, present a relatively coherent analysis, starting by confirming that the subject is likely a hoax: "If Anne de Graaf has only a small chance of having really lived, Jacquotte Delahaye has an even smaller one. Spanish author Germán Vázquez Chamorro in his book Mujeres Piratas (Pirate Women) claims that she certainly never existed...". Sadly, her work, as mentioned, is nonacademic and has no footnotes, she just refers to "others wrote", and cites, besides Chamorro, only Klausmann (not even bothering to mention the two other co-authors of that work). This being the fifth or sixth sloppy nonacademic rehashing of the same, i where I gave up. As far as more reliable sources go, a few mention her in passing. Ex. [5] by [6] (the chair of the department of history at Saint Louis University) seems to treat her existence as a fact by writing that "Jacquotte Delahaye led a gang of a hundred pirates that took a small Caribbean island from the Spanish in 1656 and died several years later in a shootout defending her “freebooter republic.” (sadly, there is no footnote; this just goes to show that academics can often do half-assed research too and refer to fictional characters as real...).
So in summary... I am leaning weak keep given that her story has proven to be enduring (as a form of a tall tale I guess), but the article needs to clearly say that this is a fictional character. The sources I reviewed did not clarify who invented it or when, although the op is likely right, ex. [7] states that "Jacquotte Delahaye, for example, is said to have been a biracial female filibuster who ... Her life is a 1940s fabrication by French author Léon Treich". --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 12:41, 19 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]
@Piotrus: I think that even if we acknowledge that she's an urban legend or whatever, we run into the issue of a paucity of sources discussing her from an out-of-universe perspective. It'd be like if we sourced Vanishing hitchhiker from accounts of people who claimed it happened to them - we clearly couldn't do that even if we took the initiative to reframe it properly as an urban legend. The info that we have on her "life" comes from the primary sources who made it up. –Roscelese (talk ⋅ contribs) 05:11, 20 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]
@Roscelese If we treat the account of her life as a plot summary, there is still more (the discussion of creation by Treich, the discussion of her in the context of rare but popular female pirates) than in the cases of most fictional characters which nonetheless generate quite a lot of (IMHO, quite weak, argument-wise) keep votes. I base my view on the fact that I've been a regular of the linked list of Fictional elements-related deletion discussions which I encourage you to frequent too. From my perspective, she is more notable, and gets more coverage in sources than many comic book characters and similar that have been kept based on simply having plot summaries and media appearances listed in few picture books(!). Now, I am not sure if the comic/popculture fans will appear here (sadly, it doesn't appear Delahaye got her own comic book series yet...), but I do think this is a discussion worth drawing attention to, which is why I am also going to ping User:7&6=thirteen of the (in)famous Article Rescue Squadron. This is a topic than can be, IMHO, rescued, and that includes rewriting the article with sources I found (and similar) that are not very hard to access. Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 10:35, 20 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]
User:Roscelese User:Piotrus WP:ARS is open to any editor. Not a closed club. Anyone is welcome. Given your opinion (above), YOU can and should post it at the Rescue List. You are most welcome and invited to partcipate. 7&6=thirteen (☎) 14:40, 20 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep Hewitt, D.G. (March 1, 2018). "Female Pirates Who Were Every Bit as Fearsome as Blackbeard". History Collection. Retrieved February 20, 2022. has lots of sources, but they relate to other female pirates. Whether she was an historical figure is beside the point. She could be The Count of Monte Cristo and still be notable. WP:Verifiability and WP:Notability; not WP:Truth. Easily meets WP:GNG. Based on the many sources now in the article, WP:Before if done, was imperfect. 7&6=thirteen (☎) 16:07, 20 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    Is History Collection RS? Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 10:58, 21 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    I wouldn't think so, even setting aside my previously stated belief that any source treating her as a real person is suspect. –Roscelese (talk ⋅ contribs) 17:47, 22 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment Since it is agreed this is a person who was invented in the 20th-century, I removed all categories that are for real historical people. We need to do a much better job of not mixing fictional people into categories for real people.John Pack Lambert (talk) 17:12, 21 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]
  • Weak keep As per Piotr. MrsSnoozyTurtle 10:04, 22 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment Article and sourcing is not what it was when nominated for deletion. 7&6=thirteen (☎) 17:13, 22 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]
  • You seem to be mistaken, my !vote here is Keep. Regards, MrsSnoozyTurtle 21:34, 22 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]
You seem to be mistaken. Your !keep !vote was understood. My comment was not directed at you, but instead to others contemplating the situation. Perhaps the formatting was confusing. If so, I apologize. Regards. 7&6=thirteen (☎) 23:42, 22 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Putting the pieces together, the confusion seems to be because your comment is indented as a reply of mine, and it now sounds like this was not your intention. Thank you for the apology. MrsSnoozyTurtle 08:11, 23 February 2022 (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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