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. Star Mississippi 14:31, 25 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Rashad Hashim (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) – (View log | edits since nomination)

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No indication that this poet existed. Page edits show conflicting accounts of death (murder vs. suicide); no independent search results, no results for the poem "which brought him to prominence" in English or Arabic results per WP:BEFORE. Kazamzam (talk) 17:46, 18 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

• Note: This discussion has been included in the deletion sorting lists for the following topics: Poetry and Africa. Kazamzam (talk) 17:46, 18 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• Note: This discussion has been included in the list of England-related deletion discussions. Spiderone^{(Talk to Spider)} 18:21, 18 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• Delete - unfortunately, this looks to be a hoax as there is nothing in any WP:RS as far as I can see. Thank you for bringing this to AfD. If this is indeed a hoax, then it's one of the longest lasting in Wikipedia's history. Spiderone^{(Talk to Spider)} 18:22, 18 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  Boulder Fist...oy vey. Kazamzam (talk) 18:32, 18 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  Comment: At first I thought this was quite funny as one of the longest lasting hoax articles in project history but the more I think about it, the more concerned I am. This article dates back to April 2007, has had a few dozen edits, and no checks for existence ever took place, let alone sources to confirm notability and warranting inclusion. Drive-by tagging allows junk articles like this to stick around with the presumption that someone, surely, will do something about this eventually and spam will be filtered out. Bots and semi-automated edit tools can tidy the article but there's almost no substitute for the human act of gathering, verifying, and formatting sources. WP:URA should be bursting at the seams with members and it's crickets over there. Kudos to the editors who run those bots and make those edits for stub sorting and importing the short description from Wikidata, but if we had a tenth of that number doing verification work, I believe this lemon would have been in the compost heap maybe a decade ago.

  How can we deal with this, given the size of the problem - 129,000 articles (and those are just the ones tagged!) unreferenced, another 377,000 needing additional sources? This won't be solved in the comments of a random AfD but we cannot continue allowing unreferenced articles to be kicked down the road for someone else to deal with. This should be, edit-wise, priority one. Thank you for coming to my TEDTalk. Kazamzam (talk) 22:19, 18 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  Here's an interview with a poet who claims to have been reading Rashad Hashim’s work, not a basis for notability, but should put the idea that this is a hoax to rest. God knows where she found a copy of it though. small jars tc 23:22, 18 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

• Delete I can see other individuals with this name in a search, but not him. Mccapra (talk) 20:46, 18 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• Comment – This AFD should be considered alongside Zina Mahjoub's, as the two were apparently lovers. small jars tc 21:05, 18 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• I think it is probably a delete from me on the basis that we can't verify the information. It might not be an actual hoax, but (obviously) unless someone can find RS which meet the GNG, we can't tell. JMWt (talk) 22:14, 18 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• Is this deleted arwiki article related? small jars tc 23:56, 18 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  I don't think so - based on Google Translated this person is Yemeni and born in 2001; at least from the claims of the article under discussion and the Momtaza Mehri article, he was most definitely Sudanese. Kazamzam (talk) 00:48, 19 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

• Delete lacks sources fails WP:GNG.Pharaoh of the Wizards (talk) 05:29, 25 February 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.