Wikipedia talk:List of hoaxes on Wikipedia/Philodoppides
 | This is an archive of the discussion of Philodoppides, a hoax article that was deleted. It has been copied here solely for the purpose of documenting hoaxes on Wikipedia, in order to improve our detection and understanding of them. If you would like to actually make a comment on this page or the discussion you see below, please go to Wikipedia talk:List of hoaxes on Wikipedia. |
 | This project page was nominated for deletion on 21 August 2023. The result of the discussion was delete. |
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Disputed[edit]
Philodoppides appears to be an imaginative and well-crafted hoax. The name Φιλοδοππίδης and declined forms appears nowhere in the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae, nor does *Ἑλεηνηΐς. Gerber 1997: 174-5, which is said to provide his dates, is about Sappho fr. 16. Callimachus frr. 439-40 Pf., said to be P.'s entry in the Pinakes, are about the comic poets Alexis and Diphilus. No scholion on Iliad 12.274 is recorded by Bekker. The elegiac couplet cited as a fragment is reasonably convincing, but no lyric poet uses ναυτικά, a word of Attic historiography. The Suda would hardly condemn P.'s μέλη on Helen if the Heleneis was a hexameter poem (though the reference to Philostratus is a nice touch).
An ancient account of the Trojan War from Helen's perspective, even a lost one, would be a wonderful thing to have recorded. Unfortunately, however, Philodoppides seems to be a new Bilitis. In the words attributed to Lesimbrotus of Cos:
οὐ Φιλοδοππίδεώ τις ἐπέφραδεν οὔνομα μάρτυς,
κείνου δ᾿ ὡς Μεγαρέων οὐ λόγος οὐδ᾿ ἀριθμός. Poimenlaon (talk) 13:34, 4 July 2023 (UTC)
- @Liz, might some sort of corrective administrator action be appropriate here? This seems to be a long perpetrated and subtle hoax. @LegesRomanorum created the article in 2020[1] and removed a "disputed" tag from the page as recently as July 2023[2]. Additionally, I think @Will classics 1993 is possibly a sock of @LegesRomanorum as Will classics 1993 edited the page saying that they were changing the name of a fictitious poem to its conventional title "(Heleniad --> Heleneis passim (this is the conventional title of the poem"[3]. Their edit history is similar in other ways as well.--Jahaza (talk) 22:57, 21 August 2023 (UTC)
- I was going to bring this up at WP:ANB. I broadly agree with Jahaza: LegesRomanorum abused their standing as an established editor to create an elaborately deceptive hoax. I think a long-term block would be warranted. Modussiccandi (talk) 06:32, 22 August 2023 (UTC)
- @LegesRomanorum: needs to reply here. This was a really strange thing to have done. I agree with others, it looks as if Will classics 1993 was a sock, invented for that one day, to give a bit more edit history to Philodoppides. Andrew Dalby 13:14, 25 August 2023 (UTC)
- I was going to bring this up at WP:ANB. I broadly agree with Jahaza: LegesRomanorum abused their standing as an established editor to create an elaborately deceptive hoax. I think a long-term block would be warranted. Modussiccandi (talk) 06:32, 22 August 2023 (UTC)