Deletion of Florentin Smarandache (2nd nomination)

Comment: The citation counts in Google scholar are in the range for a pass of #C1, there is nontrivial coverage of him in sources, and his name is widely known. Because of all that, I'd like us to have a properly neutral article about him, one that accurately describes what mainstream mathematics thinks of his work. However, it seems particularly difficult to find sources that are actually independent of the subject and that say something nontrivial about him. Given his self-promotion I don't want to rely on non-independent sources for anything in the article — that would probably violate  — but without them what is there to say about him
Stance: delete
Cited policy: Wikipedia:Notability (WP:PROF||WP:NPOV)

Comment: probably. I won't open the can of worms about Smarandache's PROF notability, but just looking over the Romanian echoes of his contribution to literature, I get the sense that the man is very self-promotional, but much neglected by mainstream criticism. He only gets a handful of small-scale reviews in mainstream literary journals. For instance http://www.romlit.ro/n-ar_fi_exclus_ca_dumnezeu_s_trimit_o_dezminire this article, in the Writers' Union of Romania ''România Literară'', briefly mentions him as "Autorul (matematician român stabilit în SUA) pretinde că a creat un nou curent literar, "paradoxismul", pe care îl menţionează entuziast, ca o mare realizare, în cv-ul său. Are şi numeroşi adepţi devotaţi, situaţi, ca şi el, în afara adevăratei literaturi. Poeziile din recentul volum sunt (ca şi cele din volumele anterioare) rezultatul unei gimnastici lingvistice hazardate. Lipsit de bun-gust, Florentin Smarandache vrea să fie original, dar nu reuşeşte decât să fie strident, vrea să epateze, dar nu reuşeşte decât să provoace cititorului (cultivat) un zâmbet ironic .... Singurele momente în care atinge poezia sunt acelea în care îl imită pe Nichita Stănescu ..." That is: "The author (a Romanian mathematician living in the USA) claims to have created a new literary current, 'paradoxism', which he mentions with enthusiasm, like some sort of great achievement, in his CV. He also has many devoted followers, located, just as he is, outside the realm of real literature. The poems of his recent volume are (like those of his earlier volumes) the result of risky verbal gymnastics. Lacking in good taste, Florentin Smarandache wants to be original, but only manages to be glaring, wants to shock, but only manages to raise an ironic smile from the (cultivated) reader .... The only moments where he touches on real poetry are those where he imitates Nichita Stănescu ..." A more in-depth analysis in ''Observator Cultural'', http://www.observatorcultural.ro/Florentin-SMARANDACHE-Destin*articleID_4509-articles_details.html article by Paul Cernat, also reserves some brutal criticism for Smarandache and his pals: "graphomaniacs", "nonsense", "fauna" etc. are some of the epithets Cernat uses in reference to these guys. Cernat also http://www.observatorcultural.ro/*articleID_4510-articles_details.html briefly reviews Smarandache's memoirs, noting that the man has "a modest literary talent" and "an overinflated ego", and that, although he has good "Oltenian humor", his pages are "sordid". And so on. Now, I'm tired of searching for more - this is the type of reviews FS gets, and will probably get until the day he gives up on writing. Rest assured, there's not much more than that around. Maybe these validate keeping the article, but it would have to lean on the negative side, since there's nobody that thinks much of FS other than himself & comp.  in mind, it's probably better to invite the article out
Stance: delete
Cited policy: Wikipedia:Biographies of living persons (WP:BLP)

Comment: This article certainly has a colorful editing history, and some of the comments at the first AfD are laugh-out-loud funny, but I don't see that anything has changed since then to make me think that "keep" result wasn't the right one.  He certainly seems to be notable based on the evidence.  Per , we do generally allow some autobiographical information to be included in biographical articles, and in this case it is appropriately identified as such in the text.  For what it's worth (which may be very little in this case), Google News does turn up a few sources that appear to be "about" himhttp://www.google.com/search?q=Florentin++Smarandache&hl=en&safe=off&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&tbs=nws:1,ar:1&source=lnt&sa=X&ei=IVeCTYLcCJO6sAP08b2GAg&ved=0CA8QpwUoBQ: they're in Romanian, which I don't know, and they make even less sense to me after being run through the Google translator into English.http://translate.google.com/translate?js=n&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&layout=2&eotf=1&sl=ro&tl=en&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.revistanoinu.com%2FDin-perspectiva-limbii-romane-India-Magica.html&act=urlhttp://translate.google.com/translate?js=n&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&layout=2&eotf=1&sl=ro&tl=en&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.revistanoinu.com%2FEl-Smarandacheste-dedicat-Florentin-Smarandache.html&act=urlhttp://translate.google.com/translate?js=n&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&layout=2&eotf=1&sl=ro&tl=en&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.observatorcultural.ro%2FGheorghe-NICULESCU-Florentin-SMARANDACHE%3B-Vreme-de-saga-fabule-parodii-epigrame-catrene-distihuri*articleID_4508-articles_details.html&act=url  That seems to be par for the course with respect to this subject
Stance: keep
Cited policy: Wikipedia:Verifiability (WP:ABOUTSELF)

Comment: What do the numbers say? GS cites are 498, 149, 74, 72, 61 .... with h index of 20. Love it or hate it a clear keep on rof#C1. Lots of laughs in the article too! (But see below
Stance: keep
Cited policy: Wikipedia:Portal (WP:P)

Comment: Some contributors to this debate do not appear have a good understanding of the concept of notability. Notability means being noted, and if somebody has been noted they are therefore notable by Wikipedia standards. These academic AfD pages do not have the function of an academic promotions committee set up to determine who has done "good" or "bad" mathematics and reward people accordingly. It may be that the subject of the article is a master of self-promotion but, if so, he is a successful one. With a GS h index of 20 he has around 1000 citations to his work and not all of those are by himself. By the standards applied on these pages he passes rof#C1 easily and his other accomplishments contribute to W:GNG
Stance: comment
Cited policy: Wikipedia:Portal (WP:P)

Comment: After reading both the article and all of the above, I assumed I would probably side with the "keep" camp, but in looking a little deeper, I've found two problematic pieces of information. First, the gravity and impact of his work claimed (goes to  #1) in the article is contravened by WoS &ndash; which is squarely where we would expect such impact to show up for someone working in mathematics and physics. For example, the article speaks of the "Smarandache constant", "Generalized Smarandache Palindrome", the "Smarandache hypothesis" in theoretical physics, etc. WoS shows only 3 papers, having citations of 1, 0, 0: h-index = 1. That figure is quite literally "next to nothing" in terms of impact. It is true that there are quite a few citations in GS, although a large fraction seem to be self-citations and citations from other unpublished works. (I went back to Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Florentin Smarandache|first AfD, which also points this out.) I'll admit that one might argue ''impact'' on the GS findings, but my feeling is that self and unpublished cites are not what is conventionally meant by that term. Smarandache seems to be somewhat on the fringe and he may have some fame therefrom, but I don't not believe that translates to notability ''per se''...which brings us to my second objection. He is the editor of journals, which would normally satisfy  #8, but these journals are neither major, nor well-established, as the policy requires. The http://ceser.res.in/ijamas.html ''International Journal of Applied Mathematics & Statistics'' is a relatively new journal and its web page indicates it is ''not'' indexed by WoS. Progress in Physics is an "alternative" journal that seems to publish unrefereed, often "crank" articles, see e.g. http://www.mathematik.tu-darmstadt.de/~bruhn/toRabounski030508.html this. (Incidentally, the Progress in Physics article has no real sources, dead links, etc. &ndash; perhaps should be considered for deletion itself.) I think the conclusion that I come away with is that David's observation that Mr Smarandache is a relentless self-promoter is being kind. There's plenty of observation above and in the Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Florentin Smarandache|first AfD regarding his promotional prowess, in fact, this article was probably started by him (http://www.ip2location.com/64.106.24.51 Geolocate shows the anon creator account to be from his institution.) I would like to respectfully propose that he is so good at this that even some of the usually and rightfully skeptics among us have been snowed. In the end, the only legit argument for "keep" is that he is, in some sense, famous, but  suggests we should be dubious. Respectfully
Stance: delete
Cited policy: Wikipedia:Notability (WP:PROF||WP:PROF||WP:FAME)

Comment: I can't really add anything to what David Eppstein and Agricola44 said, except that you should read http://planetmath.org/encyclopedia/FlorentinSmarandache.html (PlanetMath), which probably qualifies as a BLP attack page, but 
Stance: delete
Cited policy: Wikipedia:Ignore all rules (WP:IAR)