Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Florentin Smarandache

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 Keep. Nishkid64 22:51, 19 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Florentin Smarandache

Florentin Smarandache (edit|talk|history|links|watch|logs) - (View log)

This article exists solely to promote Florentin Smarandache, who has promoted himself via extensive sockpuppetry in various & sundry places on the Internet. Here's an excerpt from one of my personal favorite sockpuppet episodes (there are many more): Hello from India! [1] posted from an ip address belonging to UNM-Gallup, the employer of Smarandache. Now that this bio is up for deletion, we can expect a flurry of sockpuppets coming forth to cheer for Smarandache & question the motives of everyone in sight. Please in the name of all that is good let's not reward sockpuppetry and self-promotion with a Wikipedia article. Delete Wile E. Heresiarch 06:05, 14 January 2007 (UTC)

• Keep. Smarandache may be a wacky self-promoter and much of the sort of math he does may be the kind of unmotivated axiomatics and base-specific number theory that more serious mathematicians find trivial, but he's well known for it and therefore notable. —David Eppstein 06:27, 14 January 2007 (UTC)

• Comment added later: "reward"? Since when is being in Wikipedia a reward to be handed out only to the virtuous? Notability is not the same as quality. —David Eppstein 08:22, 14 January 2007 (UTC)

Notability is not the same as quality. Yes. So what? Relentless self-promotion doesn't make him notable. Wile E. Heresiarch 08:28, 14 January 2007 (UTC)

• Delete article fails the WP:PROF test and other tests on WP:BIO. I don't know that he is well-known for "unmotivated axiomatics and base-specific number theory". That seems like quite the stretch. --ScienceApologist 08:00, 14 January 2007 (UTC)

• Keep. Notable doofus. -- Dominus 08:13, 14 January 2007 (UTC)

• Delete - Most of the information about Smarandache outside of Wikipedia seems to be written by Smarandache himself. If material written by Smarandache is excluded, it is unclear that much of anything is left. Hence, this person is non-notable outside of what he has written on himself. Dr. Submillimeter 08:49, 14 January 2007 (UTC)

• Keep. A search of Amazon.com for Smarandache comes up with 182 books, many of them not written by him. When you can get a dozen authors--W. B. Vasantha Kandasamy, Linfan Mao, Mladen Vassilev-Missana; Krassimir Atanassov, Amarnath Murthy and Charles Ashbacher, Yi Yuan and Kang Xiaouyu, Howard Iseri, Sebastián Martín Ruiz, Ion Soare, and Wenpeng Zhang--to write books with your name in the title, you're notable. As for verifiability, Thompson Gale's Contemporary Authors series--which should be neutral, and available in most major academic libraries--has an article on him, which is available standalone from Amazon for six bucks. I'm getting a strong feeling that people are confusing dislike of the person with notability. I don't know much about the guy, but even if his works were insipid cultic trash, getting this many people from around the world to write about his work, plus the biography in Contemporary Authors, makes him notable. P.S. Can we avoid the preemptive attack on all who would vote to keep this article? It runs into WP:AGF area.--Prosfilaes 09:42, 14 January 2007 (UTC)

  I've tried to look up these books. Most are self-published books, some of them filled with mathematical garbage, next to some meaningful but entirely unexceptional stuff like you'd expect any associate professor to be able to produce.  --Lambiam^Talk 14:05, 14 January 2007 (UTC)

• Keep. Dominus nailed it. DavidCBryant 10:53, 14 January 2007 (UTC)
• Purge. The point is not whether he is notable, but that the article violates Wikipedia rules for a bio. Exclude material only written by Smarandache himself. pom 11:32, 14 January 2007 (UTC)
  • Which Wikipedia rules? It doesn't impress me as a featured article, but there's no glaring NPOV problems, and WP:AUTO doesn't demand that self-written articles be deleted, nor that information from the subject be excluded (WP:AUTO--"One thing which you can do to assist other Wikipedia editors is, if you already maintain a personal website, please ensure that any information that you want in your Wikipedia article is already on your own website. As long as it's not involving grandiose claims like, "I was the first to create this widget," or "My book was the biggest seller that year," a personal website can be used as a reference for general biographical information."). Also, generally "merge", "delete", and "keep" are acceptable responses to an AfD. If you request is that the article be edited in some way, "keep" it and make the changes or bring it up on the talk page.--Prosfilaes 11:48, 14 January 2007 (UTC)
    • Ok, so Delete. pom 18:54, 14 January 2007 (UTC)
• Delete per nom and Submillimeter. Akihabara 12:41, 14 January 2007 (UTC)
• Delete. I see no evidence this person is notable. Did I miss something, like that he is mentioned in The Guinness Book of Records as the worlds' top self-promotor? Even if the person was notable, if you remove everything from the article that is completely uninteresting or unverifiable, nothing of encyclopedic value is left.  --Lambiam^Talk 13:18, 14 January 2007 (UTC)
  • Do I get a feeling that people are a bit biased against this guy? His theories that a dozen people have written books on isn't a bit notable? A hypothesis listed on Eric Weisstein's World of Physics isn't a bit notable?--Prosfilaes 13:53, 14 January 2007 (UTC)

    The way this hypothesis is presented on Eric Weisstein's World of Physics is as follows:

    Several authors have published theories claiming that the speed-of-light barrier imposed by relativity is illusionary. While these "theories" continue to be rejected by the physics community as ill-informed speculation, their proponents continue to promulgate them in rather obscure journals. An example of this kind is the Smarandache hypothesis, which states that there is no such thing as a speed limit in the universe (Smarandache 1998).[2]

    Maybe they are "a bit biased" too. If you look up the reference[3], it is really totally unscientific even in comparison with your run-off-the-mill piece of pseudo-scientific junk. It reads like the typical junk faster-than-light speculation posted by a freshman on a bulletin board. I don't know whether Smarandache was picked randomly, or as a particularly egregious example of ignorant speculation.  --Lambiam^Talk 16:03, 14 January 2007 (UTC)

• Keep, provided the 134 published titles factoid is true. (How many do you have?) As for the wacky self-promotion, clean it up. (Maybe it's a Romanian thing that the rest of us just can't understand.) Lou Sander 13:37, 14 January 2007 (UTC)

  His books are published by vanity publishers. Please reconsider. Wile E. Heresiarch 16:40, 14 January 2007 (UTC)

  I counted the number of pages on his website where he manages to use his own name, whether for Smarandache Social Paradox, Smarandache's Law on Sensations and Stimuli, Smarandache Notions, Quantum Smarandache Paradoxes, Smarandache Geometry, Smarandache Anti-Geometry, Smarandache Function, Smarandache Palindrome, Smarandache n-structure, Smarandacheials, Smarandache Zero Divisors, Smarandache-Rodrigues-Maiorino Theory, Smarandache Divine Paradoxes, Smarandache Semigroups, Smarandache multiplicative functions, Smarandache Complex, Smarandache Groupoids, Smarandache Number, Smarandache-Zero Divisor, Smarandache's Illusion, Smarandache's Syndrome, ..., it just goes on and on. I found 336 such pages. The guy is just incredibly prolific. Most of it (established by sampling) either makes no sense, or is completely elementary and utterly trivial. A Lambiamoid Number is a prime number plus one. Lambiam's Theorem: 3 is the only odd Lambiamoid Number. Lambiam's Hypothesis: There is an infinite source of energy. Lambiam's Paradox: 0×0 = 0, therefore 0 = 0/0 = undefined. I wouldn't be surprised if it turns out that several people writing articles in the walled-garden Smarandache universe are the Master himself writing under a pseudonym.  --Lambiam^Talk 17:26, 14 January 2007 (UTC)

• Keep. notable. John Vandenberg 14:14, 14 January 2007 (UTC)
• Weak Keep (it should be very weak!), there is some borderline notability there but Wikipedia is to be an ancyclopedia not a collection of autobiographies, which is why we have WP:AUTO, it should be written neutrally as in WP:NPOV,it should include multiple neutral sources as in WP:BIO and should be independently verifiable as in WP:V, autobiographies are generally neither of the above and I better stop writing or I'll be swinging to delete Alf photoman 15:53, 14 January 2007 (UTC)
• Comment. This is painful. What can we say about this guy in accordance with WP:BLP? Not much I'm afraid. We do know Smaranadache is an associate professor at a two year college in New Mexico. He got promoted recently (from assistant prof!). He writes a lot, and with a few exceptions, publishes most of it in vanity presses and most of it is trivial, wrong or a rehash of known stuff. He styles himself a painter. Is this notability in the style of Archimedes Plutonium? I don't think so.Delete.--CSTAR 17:13, 14 January 2007 (UTC)
• Comment - If this article is going to be kept, then the article should include references about Smaranadache that were unambiguously not written by Smaranadache. Can anybody identify such materials? If not, then the article should be deleted. Dr. Submillimeter 17:35, 14 January 2007 (UTC)
• Keep. He's an odd guy and lousy mathematician to be sure, but I think he is notable enough. Besides it warms my heart that he got a PhD from Moldova State University :) Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 00:03, 15 January 2007 (UTC)

Ok Oleg. BTW is that a tie or a loin cloth that he's wearing in the picture?--CSTAR 00:22, 15 January 2007 (UTC)

• Neutral. I usually vote delete for guys who do this kind of self-promotion on the internet using aliases and other dirty tricks. But this guy can be considered a success story for a mathematician without any notable result. For example, I see that Eric W. Weisstein has some stuff on one of his theories. :-) bogdan 00:26, 15 January 2007 (UTC)
• Comment. At least he's listed in the University of New Mexico faculty directory. (Look HERE and enter Smarandache.) —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Lou Sander (talk • contribs) 01:53, 15 January 2007 (UTC).
• keep but limit to verifiable info. (I demonstrated just now by removing one unverified section) The Gales series is selective, and is the sort of objective secondary source suitable for WP purposes. I don't like him is bias, plain and simple. DGG 05:18, 15 January 2007 (UTC)
• Keep. Smarandache sequences and Smarandache-Wellin numbers have extensive articles in MathWorld, so maybe a kook, but still a notable one. Article could be pruned/cleaned up, but this is not sufficient reason for deletion. Gandalf61 12:26, 15 January 2007 (UTC)

  If these topics are notable we should have articles on these topics. We have articles on Atkin-Lehner theory, Bradford's law, Klinefelter's syndrome, and Zappa-Szep product, to name just a few, without articles on the namegivers.  --Lambiam^Talk 14:20, 15 January 2007 (UTC)

  Well, we do have an article on Smarandache-Wellin numbers. And I think it's slightly perverse to say a concept can be notable but the person that it's named after may not be - but I won't press the point ! Gandalf61 14:58, 15 January 2007 (UTC)

• This is a much better example than the one CMummert found of a subject that should be a missing topic despite its presence on MathWorld. I've prodded for notability. —David Eppstein 18:18, 15 January 2007 (UTC)

• Keep. I would actually prefer that biographies like this would not appear here on wikipedia, perhaps just some articles on some things that Smarandache has done. But currently we can read many such entries on wikipedia, so according to how the wiki rules are applied in practice, we cannot delete this article. If we delete this article then a large number of similar biographies should be deleted as well as other articles on marginally notable topics. E.g. what about The Hockaday School and St. Mark's School of Texas.? Count Iblis 13:30, 18 January 2007 (UTC)

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.