Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Jack Sarfatti

This page is an archive of the proposed deletion of the article below. Further comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or on a Votes for Undeletion nomination). No further edits should be made to this page.

The result of the debate was KEEP as rewritten by User:Hillman. I have ignored votes by anonymous users and User:Adastra, but there is still a good argument for keeping the article as rewritten, so I'm going by that. — JIP | Talk 07:28, 14 September 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Jack Sarfatti

AFAICR, Jack Sarfatti is an Internet troll. Anyway the article's contents are patent nonsense. Delete. — JIP | Talk 06:53, 5 September 2005 (UTC)

• Delete, should have been speedied for failing to allege notability. Zoe 07:01, September 5, 2005 (UTC)
• Delete as above. There may be space for a future article on him, but the current content adds nothing, and will not be useful in a new article. --Apyule 07:40, 5 September 2005 (UTC)

change vote to a very weak keep. He probably meets notability (eg here and here), but the article must make the alternative nature of his work clear. --Apyule 06:50, 11 September 2005 (UTC)

Change vote to a plain Keep following CH 's great work. --Apyule 05:04, 14 September 2005 (UTC)

• Abstain. Having seen (but not actually bothered to read much of) his contributions to certain usenet groups, I am actually slightly curious who he is. This article doesn't say more than I had already figured out on my own, but I may vote to keep a rewrite. Uppland 07:58, 5 September 2005 (UTC)
  • Keep after rewrite. Uppland 16:52, 13 September 2005 (UTC)
• sigh I'm going to have to vote keep. Notable kook/quack/hoaxter in pseudoscience. DS 15:06, 5 September 2005 (UTC)
• Keep. This article is linked by 15 other articles and has been ordered. In my private opinion, it will never get too much longer, and it contains the critical information everyone wants to know. --140.247.123.100 (Lumidek) 17:47, 5 September 2005 (UTC)
• Delete unless someone cares to make it not-crazy, in which case keep. It seems he is notable, but unless someone can take the time to fix the article it shouldn't be here. Sdedeo 20:32, 5 September 2005 (UTC)

Pauli said: "It's crazy, but is it crazy enough to be true?"

Bohr said: "The opposite of a truth is a falsehood. But the opposite of a great truth is another great truth." Einstein said: "Great Spirits have always been harassed by mediocre minds." Remember Sarfatti studied directly with Hans Bethe, David Bohm and other great physicists. He knew Feynman and Heisenberg and many others of top rank. [Comment by an anonymous user, possibly woodymarble@mac.com]

Anon, I'll only say this once, but in future please sign all your comments on VfD pages with your Wikipedia user name to avoid confusion about who said what. By the way, it would be nice if you dropped "deep cover" and confessed to being Jack Sarfatti, if that is who you are.---CH (talk) 19:28, 11 September 2005 (UTC)

• Sarfatti has made a major financial contribution to Wikepedia. He has a PhD in physics from the University of California and has an increasing influence on the funding of theoretical physics by the Bush Administration. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 68.121.166.142 (talk • contribs) 16:48, 6 September 2005
• Weak keep if this article can be properly rewritten before close of discussion. Hall Monitor 16:57, 6 September 2005 (UTC)
• Keep: All the people here above who voted to delete are not physicists. They have no degrees in the subject. How dare they?) —Preceding unsigned comment added by Adastra (talk • contribs) 17:12, 6 September 2005, user's first edit
• We note that all of the votes for "delete" are by non-physicists. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 68.121.166.142 (talk • contribs) 17:00, 6 September 2005

• We need this article. Jack Sarfatti is a legitimate physicist who has been involved in alternative theories. However, this article needs serious revamping! —Preceding unsigned comment added by 65.241.103.49 (talk • contribs) 03:54, 7 September 2005

Hmm, I ran into you (65.241.103.49) earlier today in another VfD, where you were supporting an article about a patently nonsensical "theory" due to another (?) German engineer. If by "legitimate physicist", you mean that Sarfatti did earn a Ph.D./ in physics, as a matter of fact, you are right about that. If you mean he is worth paying attention to, I disagree. (I know noone who actually reads his incomprehensible Usenet posts. As someone who knows the jargon, I claim they are incomprehensible because JS doesn't make sense, not because physics is hard.)---CH (talk) 19:28, 11 September 2005 (UTC)

I note that several of the people above who vote for deletion have done so making personal attacks on Sarfatti as a "troll", a "hoaxter", a "kook" a "quack" etc. Does this not violate Wikepedia rules? Why the obvious double standard.

Sarfatti wrote: "Caveat: This glimmer of "RV" advanced action-at-a-distance FROM the future from Dick Bierman's "presponse" signal nonlocality violating linear entangled unitary quantum non-mechanics of lifeless closed systems is still half-baked "speculative" with low decoding signal-to-noise ratio and is in danger of being not even wrong. Proceed at your own risk. Nevertheless we must oppose the Victorian Station Masters who prematurely censor what may prove to be ideas of vast importance. Talking about an idea does not mean that one professes that the idea is true - only that it might be of some utility as it matures." woodymarble@mac.com

• Delete. Jack Sarfatti is not a physicist (at least not a notable/significant one as claimed by the article). A quick search in Citeseer shows that Jack Sarfatti did not produce / coauthor in any scientific publication. Thus, it appears highly likely that the article material is nonsense (which would qualified for speedy delete). --Hurricane111 14:10, 10 September 2005 (UTC)

Not clear if Hurricane111 changed his/her vote, so I removed "s" pending clarification by Hurricane111.---CH (talk) 19:50, 11 September 2005 (UTC)

Sorry, my mistake, I see now that Hurrican111 did change his vote, so reverted slash.---CH (talk) 21:18, 11 September 2005 (UTC)

• • Reserved. A few newspaper article including, San Francisco Chronicle [1] did show that such physicist existed and is notable. Thus, subject pass notability test. However, since I am not a physicist, I cannot verify claim as listed in article. So, I am open for keeping it and tag it for verify.

Indeed whoever wrote that Sarfatti never published is wrong, whether deliberate misinformation or not I don't know. Sarfatti has been involved in deep cover intelligence operations since 1973 or so when he virtually disappeared from conventional academia. For the record Sarfatti wrote an important paper with A.M. Stoneham "The Goldstone Theorem and the Jahn-Teller Effect" (1967) that is cited in the American Institute of Physics "Resource Letter on Symmetry in Physics". Ray Chiao credits Sarfatti's Phys Lett A paper on self-trapped laser filaments as analog to Type II superconductor magnetic vortices as stimulating his experimental work on the phenomenon. Sarfatti predicted the recently observed "supersolid" in a paper published before Antony Leggett's. This will be confirmed by George Chapline, Jr at LLL. Leonard Susskind of Stanford will confirm Sarfatti's essential role in Susskind's first published paper on quantum phase operators at Cornell in 1963-4. Sarfatti is in several TV shows and is in Paramount's Star Trek IV DVD on "Time Travel: The Art of the Possible." Sarfatti is an informal consultant to the new National Intelligence Directorate MASINT. [Comment by anonymous user, possibly woodymarble@mac.com]

• Abstain. I agree with several comments above:

1. DS is correct: Sarfatti is well known in some UseNet physics.* newsgroups as a frequent poster, who rarely if ever replies to criticism in the groups (except by email threats to file suit for defamation of character-- in the interests of full disclosure I should say that I have been the recipient of at least one such threat). Most would call his behavior cranky, but he is not a "troll", since his aim is apparently to promote his "ideas", rather than to foment flame wars and such like. Anyway, on this basis, he is perhaps notable, although not in a very laudable fashion.
2. OTH, I agree with JIP that the present version of the article is patent nonsense. (Lumidek, you can't be serious--- this article "contains what everyone wants to know"?!) The problem seems to be that JS reacts very badly to what most would consider an NPOV characterization of his writings as incoherent and highly dubious. Is there any way to rewrite the article to remove the nonsense and express what I just said as nicely as possible, cite a few of Sarfatti's published papers and link to his website, and then lock the content? If not, I'd have to change my vote to delete.
3. Let me call attention to the possibility that several anonymous commentators are socks of the same user (perhaps JS himself). Jack, if that is indeed you, we appreciate your financial support of Wipedia, but you do tend to be very excitable and sometimes your behavior is in my opinion inappropriate. If you attempted to delete someone else's "delete" vote above, or if you are trying to vote here under multiple names, these would be examples of clearly inappropriate behavior. I think you recognize that your ideas are not mainstream, so in my opinion the place to try to sell them is in published papers, or barring that on your website, not here. Also, contrary to what one anon said above, it appears to me that the non-anons are pretty much of one mind about the dubious stature of Sarfatti's "ideas".---CH (talk) 19:50, 11 September 2005 (UTC)

As per several user's suggestions above, I just rewrote the article to be more NPOV. Sarfatti fans, please keep your cool! I think a good compromise is to say right away that most who have encountered JS's writings consider them cranky, but I balance that by stating second that he does have a genuine background in physics. I took some basic biographical infro from his own website, made a list of claims from the previous version of the biography, (plus one from one of his books), and cited his entry in crank.dot.net but also some of his own websites. I think that's NPOV and I propose that an admin now lock the contents, at least until this VfD is over.---CH (talk) 20:43, 11 September 2005 (UTC)

Keep After completely rewriting the article myself, and reading some minor improvements by Chan Ho and Apyule (thanks!), I am changing my vote, since the current version of the biography appears to be sufficiently NPOV and we three seem to agree that a sufficiently prolific UseNet poster is perhaps notable simply on the grounds of being so prolific that many newsgroup readers will have encountered his posts.

One comment: I am suspicious of Chan Ho's claim that Wikipedia's coverage should be different from that of a paper encyclopedia (at least without knowing more about what kind of differences he has in mind), but I have to agree that I can envision the possibility that some newbie might encounter a Sarfatti posting, notice all the impressive buzzwords combined in apparent gibberish, wonder "is it just me?", and search Wikipedia to find out something about Sarfatti.

We'll need to monitor this page for incoherent, non-NPOV, and unwikified additions by our anon (which greatly marred the version which I revised). And anon, if you're reading this, please keep your shirt on! The biggest problem with your contributions to previous versions of this page has been, I think, that you haven't bothered to investigate how we do things in the Wikipedia and you seem to tend toward impulsive edits which are too thoughtless to help readers. So if you want to modify the article again, please research Wikipedia policies first, read some other biographies here, and think hard about how to keep your contributions NPOV. Fair enough?---CH (talk) 21:56, 13 September 2005 (UTC)

Keep. Just because one doesn't agree with him or regards him as "unworthy" somehow of a Wikipedia article does not negate the fact that he is well known in certain Internet communities, such as Usenet. Brittanica would not have an article on him, but I thought Wikipedia took a different slant than a standard encyclopedia. And yes, as someone pointed out, this is a very useful page to learn what Sarfatti is about. --C S 02:38, September 12, 2005 (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 an undeletion request). No further edits should be made to this page.