Wikipedia talk:List of hoaxes on Wikipedia/Francis Bunbury

This is an archive of the discussion of Francis Bunbury, 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.

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Hoax?

An IP editor had added the following comment to the top of the article: WARNING This stub is false, although humorous. It creates a false history for a fictional character. See O. Wilde's "The Importance of Being Earnest".

I don't know for sure if it is a hoax, but the article's content is difficult to verify and the mention of an "O.F.O.W. Wilde" in the text, plus the unlikely claim at the end about the Keats poem make me suspicious, and I've tagged the article accordingly. --RL0919 (talk) 23:58, 18 December 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Well spotted, RL0919 and that IP. "O.F.O.W. Wilde" is Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde, and "A. Moncrieff" is a character in The Importance of being Earnest who has an imaginary friend called "Bunbury". Unfortunately the relevant page of the Directory of British Architects 1834-1914 is not visible in Google Books' preview, but I think all the above, plus the lack of anything but WP mirrors in a Google search for "Francis Bunbury" architect is good enough to PROD it as a hoax. JohnCD (talk) 20:37, 19 December 2010 (UTC)[reply]