Talk:Raphael, Nicholas, and Irene of Lesbos

About proposed deletion

@Onel5969: I'm not sure yet, but I was considering removing your proposed deletion. Of course the argument for deletion is quite cogent, but there is a special situation that makes me feel it might actually be better to treat all three "saints" together and redirect the individual articles here instead. The reason is that these are all "newly revealed" saints, i.e. completely fictional ones. They were literally dreamed up one day by some people in the 20th century, without any historical indication whatsoever that they ever existed. All four articles make the same mistake of presenting the fictional life stories, "in-universe", as if they were actual historical information. These pseudo-historical claims are, of course, entirely unsourced (there couldn't possibly be any sources confirming them, other than sources saying that somebody saw these stories in a dream.) Unfortunately, all the references we seem to have are from the same religious sphere of discourse and therefore do the same, presenting these personalities as if they were historical. There seem to be virtually no actual, independent reliable sources dealing with what should be the actual topic of this article: an analysis of religious beliefs, describing how these dream visions could become the object of religious veneration in the 20th century. But if we're ever going to find such sources on which to write an legitimate article, it will be an article about a single fictional story and a single religious phenomenon involving these three figures. Fut.Perf. ☼ 07:16, 26 June 2018 (UTC)

Wow, Future Perfect at Sunrise - That's a very good point. In light of what you say there, perhaps the article should be written so as to be able to include more than just these 3. Are there other "Newly Revealed" saints? Maybe this article should be moved to "List of Newly Revealed Saints", with cited information detailing what you say above as the lead, and then in short descriptions include any NR saints? Onel5969 ^{TT me} 10:20, 26 June 2018 (UTC)

I know of Ephraim of Nea Makri‎, a similar case. I think there are a couple more, all invented in Greece the mid-20th century, and all involving stories of horrible martyrdom at the hands of stereotypically brutal, evil Muslims (usually Turks). Fut.Perf. ☼ 10:31, 26 June 2018 (UTC)

Well, since you seem to know much more about this than I do, why don't you move this page to List of newly revealed saints, and compile all the info from the individual pages, which is well sourced (get rid of the garbage stuff). I think that would be the way to go, don't you? I'd do it, but I think you would do it better. Onel5969 ^{TT me} 13:46, 26 June 2018 (UTC)

I could do that, or just leave this article here and reword it, the only problem is that I still haven't found any better, reliable sources. It's one of those awkward situations where WP:V and WP:NOR are really difficult to fulfill: we can't just naively report stuff the way we find it in the existing sources, because those sources are quite obviously biased/unreliable/non-independet and their content is self-evidently implausible. We can't just point out why and how they are unreliable, because in the absence of better sources providing that analysis for us this would be OR. But we can't easily take the easy way out either, saying if there are no sources the whole topic must be non-notable, because the religious practices and beliefs in question are evidently wide-spread and relatively prominent. Whichever way you do it, it's never really satisfactory. Fut.Perf. ☼ 13:53, 26 June 2018 (UTC)

I've tried a quick stab at removing the fallacious implication of historicity in the article here, and have redirected the three individual pages. This is still far from ideal, but probably the best we can do in the absence of any serious, independent sourcing on this religious phenomenon. Fut.Perf. ☼ 20:39, 2 July 2018 (UTC)