Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Mihailo Tolotos

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 merge‎ to Monastic community of Mount Athos or a subsection thereof. While there is consensus for the material to remain, there is not a consensus for it to remain a separate article as the myth relates to his monastic life. Star Mississippi 03:03, 11 May 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Mihailo Tolotos[edit]

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This is a classic case of WP:BIO1E. What makes the subject worthy of inclusion is that the monastic community excluded women, which is merely exemplified by the fact that this monk reportedly never saw a woman. The story that this particular monk never saw a woman is not credible because at least one woman was present at his birth (to be fair to the author, the article never claims that - just that it was reported as such) but this illustrates that the reporting of his death was sensationalist. Where this belongs is in an article about the community, and it is already at Monastic community of Mount Athos#Late modern times. Dorsetonian (talk) 19:43, 9 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Edit note: I corrected the link to the notability guideline WP:BIO1E above post-nomination. Dorsetonian (talk) 01:56, 10 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This discussion has been included in the deletion sorting lists for the following topics: People and Religion. Dorsetonian (talk) 19:43, 9 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Keep This story pops up in the news cycle every so often, as recently as the last few weeks. It is sensationalist, but he seems to have sustained coverage almost 100 years later. Likely at GNG simply for that reason, we have a fair bit of information about his life. He may be notable for one event, but he's still talked about 100 years later, so is getting sustained coverage. Oaktree b (talk) 20:39, 9 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Note: This discussion has been included in the deletion sorting lists for the following topics: Christianity and Greece. Spiderone^{(Talk to Spider)} 20:46, 9 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Weak keep: There's a DYK on the main page right now for a guy best known for being a "miser" who lacked nearly the sustained coverage as this monk. However, the quality of the sources and quantity which provide significant coverage is a tad dicey. I lean keep, but could be swayed to delete based on the sourcing deficiencies. ~ Pbritti (talk) 21:13, 9 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Cautious delete since I take his story with a pinch of salt, see talk. PatGallacher (talk) 21:48, 9 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]
~~Weak keep~~ the story of his life is more myth than truth, but that doesn't mean it isn't covered enough to meet WP:GNG. I am opposed to a merge to Monastic community of Mount Athos (the main article), but might support some other page specifically focused on individuals of Mount Athos monasteries. Walt Yoder (talk) 00:41, 10 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]
- Comment Sojourner's commentary on the sourcing is accurate. Walt Yoder (talk) 18:25, 4 May 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Keep as passes WP:GNG with sustained coverage in reliable sources, imv Atlantic306 (talk) 01:51, 10 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Redirect to Monastic community of Mount Athos#Late modern times.
It looks to me like we have three pieces of information about this man: 1) his approximate year of birth; 2) his approximate date of death; and 3) his place of residence. Our only source for this information is a five-sentence obituary in a U.S. newspaper. Every other source that I can find is simply a regurgitation of this obituary. Some sources add additional bits of information, such as that his mother died when he was four hours old, but it's not clear where this information is coming from; none of the sources containing these elaborations are WP:RS in my opinion. One of them candidly admits that we do not have enough evidence to say for certain that Tolotos even existed. The image used in our article is, according to its file page, taken from this Twitter post, which does not give any explanation of where the photo comes from.
What little verifiable information we have about Tolotos – i.e. that a newspaper reported on his death – is already contained in Monastic community of Mount Athos#Late modern times; even if both his existence and his notability were established, I still wouldn't see the need for a separate article on this figure. Sojourner in the earth (talk) 09:36, 10 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]
I wish those !voting keep would provide links to some of these reliable sources they're finding. In fact, sorry, I don't want to overload this discussion, but I think some source analysis is called for. Here's an analysis of the sources currently present in the article:
Weird Universe & Vintage Everyday – Self-published blogs
BBC News & TIME – These don't mention Tolotos at all
Constable Colgan's Connectoscope – I'm not sure about Unbound Publishing (apparently pledge-based), but Tolotos appears in several other trivia collections of this kind. We don't usually consider books like this reliable for anything about which the author is not an expert; the author of this one is a retired Scotland Yard constable.
Edinburgh Daily Courier – This is the five-sentence report discussed above. I've searched Newspapers.com and found the same report (with identical wording) appearing in British newspapers from 19th Sept 1938 (so the death date in the article is wrong). Some of these papers cite Reuters as their souce. I'm happy to accept Reuters as reliable, but this is still only one source, regardless of how many times it is regurgitated in local papers.
Historic Mysteries – Unsure about the reliability of this one; in any event, it doesn't contain any additional information about Tolotos that isn’t found in the Reuters report.

It is incumbent on those !voting keep to explain why they think these sources are reliable, or to provide additional sources. Sojourner in the earth (talk) 06:55, 11 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Keep - he's received coverage in several books and RS news stories. The reporting and some of the details of his life may be exaggerated, but it passes WP:GNG at least. - Knightsoftheswords281 (Talk-Contribs) 15:01, 10 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Keep per WP:GNG - clearly he was notable worldwide in the 1920s and 1930s. The longstanding consensus is the adage that "once notable, a person is always notable." Bearian (talk) 17:37, 14 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]
As I mentioned above, the repetition of the same Reuters report in multiple newspapers does not constitute worldwide notability. Footnote #4 of WP:GNG says: It is common for multiple newspapers or journals to publish the same story, sometimes with minor alterations or different headlines, but one story does not constitute multiple works. Sojourner in the earth (talk) 18:35, 14 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Keep Regardless of whether his claim to fame is actually true, the combination of the various sources seems to just scrape by on WP:GNG. I can see an argument for merging it into Monastic community of Mount Athos, but in my opinion there is enough content here for a standalone article. MrsSnoozyTurtle 01:53, 16 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion and clearer consensus.
Relisting comment: I am reopening and relisting this AfD which I previously closed as "keep" for the following reasons, as posted on my talk page: After Sojourner in the earth engaged in a thorough assessment of the sources, the three subsequent "keep" opinions did not engage with this analysis and merely asserted that the sources were sufficient. To help the community arrive at an informed consensus about the quality of the sources at issue, they should instead have explained why they are of that opinion in view of Sojourner's arguments. Accordingly, I think we do not yet have rough consensus on the GNG issue.
Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks, Sandstein 15:44, 3 May 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Delete. This was reopened at my suggestion. This article came to my attention when it showed up at WP:DYK. Fundamentally, there's a single source that says anything about Tolotos, i.e. the short wire story which was initially printed in The Edinburg Daily Courier and a few other papers. All of the other sources fall into two groups. There's a couple of articles in WP:RS (BBC and Time) which talk about the monastery but say nothing about Tolotos himself. Then there's a bunch low-qualty self-published blogs which got some churn out of the story. The Constable Colgan's Connectoscope: How One Thing Leads to Another isn't much better; it just regurgitates the same wire story, and was published by what's essentially a vanity press. If people are going to argue to keep this, they need to present WP:RS, not just assert that GNG is met because they story keeps showing up in supermarket tabloid quality blogs. As I noted on Sandstein's talk page, even the photo we have of him isn't reliably sourced to be him and was found on a twitter feed. -- RoySmith (talk) 16:05, 3 May 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Delete or redirect. Per Sojourner and Roy. Numerous issues with source reliability and quality, plus a lack of SIGCOV (5 sentences announcing his death is barely anything). JoelleJay (talk) 21:34, 3 May 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Redirect to Monastic community of Mount Athos#Late modern times. Per Sojourner's analysis; the sources available that actually state that he never saw a woman are too weak to support a potentially dubious claim. There's nothing here to definitively separate it from an urban legend and it's the only thing making him notable. The mention of the urban legend at the proposed redirect target seems like sufficient coverage. Dylnuge ^{(Talk • Edits)} 06:12, 4 May 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Keep as a ~~WP:LASTING~~ WP:SUSTAINED and notable legend. If someone can prove that this is a WP:NHOAX we would still have a WP:SURMOUNTABLE issue. We trust the reliable sources and his notability is derived from not seeing a woman which is a plausible explanation based on the locale. We can serve our readers by keeping the article as it accurately and neutrally covers the subject. We have a List of urban legends but I have not seen evidence that this is one of them. A redirect is an WP:ATD but I think keeping the article serves our readers. Lightburst (talk) 15:33, 4 May 2023 (UTC)[reply]
WP:LASTING says, Events are often considered to be notable if they act as a precedent or catalyst for something else. How does Tolotos meet that? -- RoySmith (talk) 15:42, 4 May 2023 (UTC)[reply]

@RoySmith: My mistake on the guideline. WP:SUSTAINED is what I meant to say. I have corrected it above. Lightburst (talk) 15:49, 4 May 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I guess I don't see how we can accurately cover a topic where there's not even enough reliable sourcing to verifiably say if the only thing worth writing about is true. It may be plausible but an outlandish claim where the only RS is a single brief newswire report will always be dubious. WP:VNT and all. Dylnuge ^{(Talk • Edits)} 18:59, 4 May 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I mean, he's been receiving WP:SUSTAINED coverage from numerous publications even 80+ years after his death. I found some Greek sources that look potentially good: [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8]. Its a pretty decent case in my opinion for GNG, or at least NBASIC. BeanieFan11 (talk) 15:45, 4 May 2023 (UTC)[reply]
- I'm working from machine translations, but:
  - www.iefimerida.gr: based on the same reuters story, cited as found on reddit.
  - www.sdna.gr: another reuters rehash, as found on reddit.
  - dete.gr: another rehash of the same clipping.
  - koitamagazine.gr: cites storypick, which bills itself as "100% Pink Cows only so that you don’t have to go through the load of content produced every day on social media"
  - mikropragmata-lifo-gr: also cites storypick as their source
  - ethnos.gr: Ostensibly a real news source (Ethnos (newspaper) but looks more like a supermarket tabloid to me. The Tolotos story is described as Weird story, but true! and while not specifying where anything came from, it sure looks like yet another rehash of the same reuters piece.
  - pronews.gr: Another source that's ostensibly a newspaper, but based on the specific details presented, it's clear this is yet another rehash of the same reuters story.
- In short, not a single one of these is a WP:RS, and not a single one leads me to believe it's anything more than the same sensational story dredged from other crappy clickbaity sites and recirculated.
-- RoySmith (talk) 16:15, 4 May 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Also, WP:NBASIC requires sources that are "intellectually independent of each other". Since these are all based on the same original reuters wire story, they fail that test. -- RoySmith (talk) 16:17, 4 May 2023 (UTC)[reply]
FWIW, I tried Find a Grave. It's WP:UGC, but sometimes it's got hints about other possible WP:RS you can track down. In this case, is all the same material. The Reuters article, the Nixon Furniture Company advertisement, the photo that's been floating around twitter with no reliable provenance. So no help there. -- RoySmith (talk) 19:13, 4 May 2023 (UTC)[reply]

That argument would work for every "weird facts" phenomenon. Should we have an article on the person who made up the "you eat 8 spiders a year sleeping" myth? JoelleJay (talk) 06:00, 6 May 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Yes we have similar spider-eating articles. Spiders Georg. Lightburst (talk) 13:43, 6 May 2023 (UTC)[reply]

That's not on the person who invented it, but that article should also be trashed as memecruft. JoelleJay (talk) 20:48, 6 May 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Comment Two editors are deleting much of the article in what I can only assume is an effort to bolster deletion rationales. Not good. Lightburst (talk) 03:47, 6 May 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Since when is removing unverifiable information "not good"? JoelleJay (talk) 06:02, 6 May 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I assume I'm one of the editors you're referring to, though my only contribution so far has been to add a new reference to the article, and to remove some of the unsourced information which this new ref proved to be incorrect. As for RoySmith, his revisions of the article began during the interval before the AfD was reopened. Nevertheless, I think it's perfectly acceptable in this case to remove unverifiable information while the AfD is ongoing. The state of the article during the first round of this discussion was very misleading; it gave the impression that a fairly credible non-stub article could be made out of the available information, and this may have influenced the opinions of some of the keep !voters (this is ordinary human bias, to which we are all susceptible). Creating a more realistic version of the best kind of article that this article could ever be will, I hope, help editors to come to an informed decision. You are, of course, welcome to add more content to the article at any time, so long as it is reliably sourced. Sojourner in the earth (talk) 06:45, 6 May 2023 (UTC)[reply]

We should both observe WP:COAL. The wikilawyering in the AfD is excessive. For the most part, editors are intelligent and capable of assessing an article without our help. This AfD is already unusual in that a proper close was made and then based on a request from another administrator, the closing was undone. Lightburst (talk) 13:43, 6 May 2023 (UTC)[reply]

We should both observe WP:COAL. I'm happy to, that's why I hadn't commented before now in the re-opened AfD. But when someone accuses me of deleting much of the article in ... an effort to bolster deletion rationales, I feel I have the right to respond. I think you're right that we should both step back now. Sojourner in the earth (talk) 14:37, 6 May 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Leaning Keep it seems that this is the same person (1875) A Man Who Never Saw a Woman - it is a somewhat more detailed account of a traveler who is said to have dined with the person - and it may be the earliest account. Even though he is not named in the source, the geographic location of Zeropotamo Monestary (Xeropotamou Monastery) at Mount Athos, also the age of the person (Guesstimate of 30-35 in 1875) squares. There is also the circumstances of the man's birth. And then we have his story which was published worldwide for years after. In 1949 Ripley's was covering him. In 1956 appeared in the Edmonton Journal. And most interesting, this article from 1934 that speaks about the horrific conditions in Athos. Younger monks chained to dead monks for three years, vermin in their hair and beards, etc. In 1925 the Pittsburgh Press stated that some of the monks had not seen a woman in 25 years. We have enough RS to verify and to provide a {{circa}} birthday and fill in some details and so I lean keep. If we choose to ignore reliable sources because of the incredulity of the claims, we are going against our own guidelines. Regarding Find a Grave - there is not a grave for any of the monks. Their bones are stacked on shelves with a sign that reads "Remember we have been like you. Some day you will be like us." Bruxton (talk) 20:50, 6 May 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Merge to Monastic community of Mount Athos There is almost nothing meaningful to say about this person. Their notoriety is based around Mount Athos excluding women, where this maybe deserves a few sentences. It would need better sourcing than sensationalist international newspaper article from the 1930s to be a standalone article. Hemiauchenia (talk) 23:52, 6 May 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Merge and redirect to Monastic community of Mount Athos per Hemiauchenia. It seems like there is an interesting story in here somewhere -- about how this story has lived on, if not about the man himself. But until some RS gets around to telling that story instead of just repeating the same questionable tale over and over, or until somebody finds some Greek sources with a bit more content, there just isn't much for us to say. And as things stand, the fragmentary story we have is going to be more useful to the reader in the general article on the community (as a story about that community) than in a standalone article (as a story about a guy about whom literally nothing else is known and who might not even have existed). -- Visviva (talk) 07:01, 7 May 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Merge and redirect per the above, does not really seem to be all that independently notable. Slatersteven (talk) 11:35, 7 May 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Merge and redirect, it's a vaguely plausible search term. --Joy (talk) 13:23, 7 May 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Redirect per Sojourner. One wire news report does not a Wikipedia article make, no matter how good speculation it makes. Galobtter (talk) 20:32, 7 May 2023 (UTC)[reply]

While there was at least one female human present at his birth (assuming that his birth parent was not trans), that does not mean that he necessarily saw one there. Babies normally keep their eyes closed for the first few minutes of life... and who can blame 'em? -- Nat Gertler (talk) 12:32, 8 May 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.