Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Ivan Maleshoff

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. $Salvio giuliano$ 06:52, 14 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Ivan Maleshoff

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Bringing to AfD to get the wider community to look at this page. My concern is that the story may be false.

I absolutely urge people to look at the discussion on the talkpage about the sourcing for this page. Basically the only sourcing for what is an astonishingly prolific serial killer in the Soviet Union are a couple of wire-based foreign news reports over a week or so in June 1935. The spelling of the name varies more than transliteration differences would allow, and despite appearances doesn't quite look like a typical Russian or Ukrainian name. Nothing appears in Soviet Ukrainian court documents. Nothing appears in any Russian or Ukrainian sourcing post USSR. Russian language Wikipedians who looked into this dismissed it as false (discussion linked to on talkpage)

So, there is some RS sourcing for this article, but it's internally inconsistent, and other sourcing hasn't been found where it really should exist. OsFish (talk) 05:59, 7 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This discussion has been included in the deletion sorting lists for the following topics: Crime, Russia, and Ukraine. OsFish (talk) 05:59, 7 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Delete : The discussion, both on the talk page and the Russian language discussion (ala google translate) seems pretty convincing that this is a hoax. The potential sources listed with null-results seem to cover the situation pretty well; if it were a true story, then it seems to me that it would most likely appear in several of them. Overall, I think it would be better to delete it than to have it present without marking it as a hoax. In addition, even if it weren't a hoax, it seems to fail WP:NBIO. (It would be nice to list it as a hoax explicitly, but the discussions seem to indicate that it would be difficult to demonstrate that from reliable sources, since absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence.) Radzy0 (talk) 18:48, 7 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Delete - I have not found any reliable sources in Russian. Mentioning a Russian or Ukrainian spelling of his name in the article would help to run a search more effectively, maybe someone else will be luckier that me.ThegaBolt (talk) 18:28, 9 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Comment I tried that, and I think the ru wikipedians tried as well. Малышев/Malyshev is the closest common surname, but I also tried Малешев/Maleshev, Малишев/Malishev, Машелов/Mashelov etc. but got nothing. The name and patronymic (which aren't ambiguous in spelling at all) and various forms of murder/mass murder and Kyiv. Just nothing except iirc one Russian blog that all the same ultimately referred to the 1935 wire stories and no other sourcing.OsFish (talk) 04:23, 10 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Delete per above. Silent-Rains (talk) 16:45, 11 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.