Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Josip Pečarić


 * 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. obvious consensus  DGG ( talk ) 04:00, 27 June 2016 (UTC)

Josip Pečarić

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Not notable, factual accuracy disputed, no primary resources. The article written as an advertisement. For details: see the talk page Vujkovica brdo (talk) 18:23, 12 June 2016 (UTC)
 * Automated comment: This AfD was not correctly transcluded to the log (step 3). I have transcluded it to Articles for deletion/Log/2016 June 12.  —cyberbot I   Talk to my owner :Online 18:46, 12 June 2016 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of Academics and educators-related deletion discussions. Shawn in Montreal (talk) 20:12, 12 June 2016 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of Mathematics-related deletion discussions. Shawn in Montreal (talk) 20:12, 12 June 2016 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of Croatia-related deletion discussions. Shawn in Montreal (talk) 20:12, 12 June 2016 (UTC)


 * Delete. Per prpopsal.--Vujkovica brdo (talk) 04:52, 13 June 2016 (UTC)
 * Keep. His citation count is good enough for WP:PROF in a low-citation field, the national awards may be good enough for #C2, and his membership in the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts (see ) is definitely enough for #C3. —David Eppstein (talk) 21:38, 12 June 2016 (UTC)
 * Comment WP:PROF says: The person's research has made significant impact in their scholarly discipline, broadly construed, as demonstrated by independent reliable sources. Not a single independent reliable source verifies him as a scholar. The opposite is true. In the discussion I gave clear example of the WP:PROF citing a piece of the Todorcevic's biography. This Pecaric is not nowhere near a serious scholar. The membership in the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts is a third rate institution membership.--Vujkovica brdo (talk) 04:40, 13 June 2016 (UTC)
 * Keep?. Stunning pass of WP:Prof. Subject's talk page has been turned into attack site by nom. Bad faith nomination. Xxanthippe (talk) 22:38, 12 June 2016 (UTC).
 * Comment I see here a blind attack on the deletion proposal. What is stunning pass of the WP:Prof -- see the Todorcevic's biography. The same WP:Prof says:  The person has made substantial impact outside academia in their academic capacity. As an educated mathematician, I was not able to find source verifying Pecaric's impact on anything academic. We need here people who are professional mathematicians to discuss the issue, not Xxanthippe-type commenters who are capable of spitting out generic and meaningless phrases.--Vujkovica brdo (talk) 04:48, 13 June 2016 (UTC)
 * David Eppstein is a professional mathematician. Xxanthippe (talk) 05:33, 13 June 2016 (UTC).
 * No, he is not.--Vujkovica brdo (talk) 05:54, 13 June 2016 (UTC)
 * Well, he is presumably paid a salary for performing as such. Xxanthippe (talk) 07:06, 14 June 2016 (UTC).
 * It's a borderline case. My appointment is in computer science, not mathematics. But it's very much the mathematical end of CS, and I have degrees in both subjects. And even if one disagrees with our article theoretical computer science's claim that TCS is math, a significant minority of my publications are in subjects like graph theory that are clearly math not CS. Anyway, I don't think it should matter here and I don't particularly care what Vb thinks of me. —David Eppstein (talk) 07:18, 14 June 2016 (UTC)
 * If you mean Stevo Todorčević, then he is also unquestionably notable, but his citation counts on Google scholar are not any more impressive. Comparisons to other notable people make bad arguments at AfD, because there is no requirement that all notable people be equally notable; see WP:WAX. Arguing about credentials of editors here is even more pointless. Anyway, I note that Todorčević is Serbian, and I really really hope that this kerfuffle has nothing to do with continuing Serb-Croat rivalry. —David Eppstein (talk) 05:56, 13 June 2016 (UTC)
 * "but his citation counts on Google scholar are not any more impressive"!! Since when the Google Scholar counts of the citations something relevant for the academic ranking? I did not compare Todorcevic to Pecaric, I used Todorcevic's biography to illustrate the idea and criteria of the Wikipedia's notability. Simply put, Pecaric is not notable 'cause there is nothing that can be used to substantiate his notability using purely academic criteria, therefore the Wikipedia criteria.  Editors' credentials are essential to this discussion 'cause unqualified editor is only a burden to the discussion.  Please, do not insinuate bad intentions mentioning "Todorčević is Serbian".  Here is my illustration of academically notable vs. not notable things Notable:Todorcevic earned his PhD at the age of 24, advised by D. Kurepa, a world renown mathematician Not notable: Pecaric earned his PhD at the age of 34 advised by anonymous P. Vasic, forced to work three years to fix the PhD dissertation faults. Notable:Todorcevic got his prominent academic post at the age of 28 at Adolph C. and Mary Sprague Miller Institute for Basic Research in Science on the University of California Berkeley campus. Not notable: Pecaric got his first academic position at the age of 39 at Faculty of textile technology which was before a two year community college upgraded to a four year study Notable:Todorcevic's two PhD students got the world-renown Sacks Prize and Goedel Prize for their PhD work. Not notable:Pecaric mentored Viddosava Simic (61 year old teaching instructor at the same Faculty of textile technology) Notable:Todorcevic contributions to the mathematics clearly outlined and professionally described at http://www.fields.utoronto.ca/press/11-12/111214Todorcevic.html Not notable:No one ever clearly outlined and professionally described Pecaric's work. I saw only one place (Dragomir's monography) reviewing professionally Pecaric's (and others) work, based on which I see that this Pecaric has a very narrow perception of mathematics limited to Calculus, Polish spaces and operators with no clear distinction what belongs to him and what belongs to the co-authors of the articles cited.--Vujkovica brdo (talk) 08:30, 13 June 2016 (UTC)
 * You're welcome to have your own idiosyncratic standards for who is a serious mathematician and who is a poseur, but the rest of us here have WP:PROF, which both subjects clearly pass. If you're not going to argue based on Wikipedia policies and guidelines, you're not going to make much headway here. You might also find WP:IAC relevant. —David Eppstein (talk) 06:14, 14 June 2016 (UTC)
 * I do not have my own idiosyncratic standards about this case. This Pecaric, as we see, had a great difficulty to earn his PhD in math, mainly for not being educated as a mathematician. After, he was rejected for five years, when trying to get a teaching position at Belgrade University. At the Faculty of mathematics at Zagreb University his work is limited to two hour weekly Mathematical inequalities seminary which is not part of this Faculty curricula. He formally meets Criteria 3 and 8 of WP:PROF. But it's highly questionable to call Croatian Academy of Sciences a highly selective and prestigious scholarly society or the Mathematical Inequalities and Applications a well-established academic journal in their subject area,  Then, you should read details of the WP:PROF you are calling upon. Your understanding of the Google Scholar does not verify the Citation metrics: A caution about Google Scholar. This caution is against the long list of self-published Non-fiction books in his biography.  I see you are speaking on behalf of "the rest of us here" and about "Wikipedia policies and guidelines" without reading the same.  Now remains to address the core of the problem: what kind of mathematician is this person? I cannot see it neither from the biography nor from 1000 articles written by other people + himself. Excuse me, I'd like to discuss this issue with educated mathematicians, not "with rest of us".--Vujkovica brdo (talk) 12:51, 14 June 2016 (UTC)


 * Comment. WP: No personal attacks. Xxanthippe (talk) 22:53, 14 June 2016 (UTC).
 * Keep, quite an unusual case, but certainly passes WP:PROF, per David Epstein's comments above. Nsk92 (talk) 01:01, 15 June 2016 (UTC)
 * Changing to Neutral for the moment. Nsk92 (talk) 01:09, 17 June 2016 (UTC)
 * Comment. In my response to Epstein's comment I elaborated why #C1 and #C3 are not substantiated. Now let me touch the national awards may be good enough for #C2. The Annual State Award for Sciences (1997), and the Order of Danica Hrvatska  are awards given by a political body (to Pecaric), not by academia. There is no clear idea publicly given what the Award an the Order given for, 'cause we cannot see even what are original Pecaric's contributions to mathematics, if any. Out of 1000 articles he boasts with, he authored solely no more than dozen of them, all the rest are co-authored. Going back to Todorcevic, we can read inside the Stevo Todorcevic (Toronto) receives 2012 CRM-Fields-PIMS Prize clear academic explanation of his work the prize was given for. Therefore #C2 is not substantiated by strict academic means.--Vujkovica brdo (talk) 20:13, 16 June 2016 (UTC)


 * Comment. There may be some additional BLP and WP:FRINGE issues here that are not reflected in the article and have not been mentioned by the nominator but are perhaps worth considering. It appears that the subject may also be a proponent of some WP:FRINGE views and historical theories. There is a news-report mentioning him having signed a petition to the President of Croatia in favor of Croatia restoring the traditional Ustaše salute. I have also found additional reports of the subject making speeches in support of the same position. He has written a book  which appears  to try to drastically minimize the number of deaths at the Jasenovac concentration camp during WWII. There is probably more here if one digs further. If we are dealing with a significant WP:FRINGE case here, then perhaps the situation needs to be re-evaluated from scratch. It would be helpful if the nominator stayed out of the discussion for the moment, to keep things calm and prevent another escalation. But I would really like to hear what other discussion participants think. Nsk92 (talk) 21:24, 16 June 2016 (UTC)
 * If the subject has engaged in Neo-Nazi advocacy, this would make him more notable, not less. But the material should be added to the BLP. Xxanthippe (talk) 00:18, 17 June 2016 (UTC).
 * WP:FRINGE cases are quite complicated, particularly because of BLP implications, and especially in situations where most of the sources are not in English. My general understanding is that in WP:FRINGE cases the notability bar is set somewhat higher than usual, and special care is made to make sure that if the article is retained then sources uses are largely WP:RS sources themselves, that is, non-FRINGE sources. That often proves difficult in situations where the subject is not very notable, and where most of the coverage available is in WP:FRINGE sources, and even more difficult in cases where most of the coverage is in non-English sources. Then it becomes impossible to write a properly balanced and properly sourced article, and to avoid numerous BLP pitfalls, and, unless notability is overwhelming on other grounds, it may be better to delete the article. This may or may not be the case here, I am not sure. I tried to read the google-translate versions of some of the sources in Croatian and Serbian, but it is very hard to understand what's what there. Somehow this case feels very different to me from say Anatoly Fomenko, another notable mathematician with prominent WP:FRINGE views advocacy. In Fomenko's case both the case for his mathematical notability is more clear-cut, and, more importantly, there is much better coverage by genuine non-fringe WP:RS sources (both in English and in Russian) of Fomenko's historical revisionism. In the case of Pečarić, especially on the latter score, I would not know what to say and the entire thing looks like a BLP minefield. To omit a discussion of his books about WWII, views on the Ustaše regime, etc, would seem to violate WP:WEIGHT and WP:NPOV. However, with the sources as we have them, particularly with the apparent scarcity of English language sources, it would be very difficult to write something that is properly sourced, neutral, and BLP compliant. We may be better off deleting the entire article. Nsk92 (talk) 01:00, 17 June 2016 (UTC)
 * I'm glad to see that the discussion of this subject becomes focused to the facts. One of the facts is that "the international journal, Mathematical Inequalities and Applications" Pecaric founded is not the international one, rather a Croatian journal in English funded by Croatian government. Most of the 1000 articles he co-authored are published in the same journal of which he is editor-in-chief. The statement He is considered "...a great name in the theory of inequality" from the article Main work section comes from Pecaric himself. Pecaric claims, in the interview given to one of his students who authored the Pecaric's Wikipedia biography, that the statement about his "greatness" came from some unidentified reference journals from 1990-ies.  Now about WP:FRINGE and Pecaric's Non-fiction books ( "Pečarić has authored numerous newspaper articles and books dealing with journalistic and historical topics" the article says). All his books (or better "books") are self-published. What kind of (pseudo)historic topics he handled in his books is possible to locate from the book titles: Priznajem, Hrvat sam! (I admit, I am Croat!), Serbian myth about Jasenovac, Književnik Mile Budak sada i ovdje (Mile Budak, the writer, now and here) etc. Croatian investigative journalist D. Pilsel wrote in his Sveti Ante Pavelic article that Pecaric, during his unsuccessful career in Belgrade (my words), used to identify himself as a Serb. Moved to Croatia thanks to support and help he got from his father-in-law who was an influential Jugoslav People's Army officer. In his book about Mile Budak he attacked the "haters" of the Croatian people, i.e. all those who were demanding removal of the street named after Mile Budak and the Budak's monuments erected in Croatian towns and cities. Pecaric, in order to substantiate his attacks, claimed that Budak did not sign Independent Sate of Croatia racial laws, Budak just applied them, therefore Budak is not the war criminal. Pilsel referenced the document showing that Budak signed that infamous law ( Narodne novine from 4. june 1941. with full text of the  racist law titled as "Zakonske odredbe o zaštiti narodne i arijske kulture hrvatskog naroda" signed by Budak)  I've spent some short time to review his book "Zločinački sud u Haagu" (The criminal Hague Court). One of the book sections contains a short rant against the Hague Court. This rant was earlier a content of some blog, signed by 260 anonymous people, then commented by readers. Some of the comments were unintelligible or meaningless. Pecaric copied the whole blog content and pasted in his book.--Vujkovica brdo (talk) 14:18, 17 June 2016 (UTC)
 * None of the things in your first paragraph is particularly relevant here. This is not about whether he is a great mathematician. It is not about whether he has issued self-congratulatory statements. It is not about whether some of his publications may be puffed up from not much. It is not about the overall strength of the Croatian academy. If those things can be sourced to reliable publications, they can be included in the article; otherwise no. But none of them addresses the question we are actually trying to consider here: does he meet Wikipedia's standards for inclusion of articles on academics. Please either address that question, or stop leaving your off-topic walls of text here, because you're not helping, and your unsourced attacks are arguably in violation of our policy on biographies of living people. —David Eppstein (talk) 18:15, 17 June 2016 (UTC)
 * I'd like to discuss the issues of factual accuracy disputed, no primary resources type particular to this biography with someone who is a professional mathematician as I were for 40 years. My first paragraph is all about it. Moreover the WP:PROF is about the notability and a reason for addressing the "the international journal, Mathematical Inequalities and Applications". This is not the first case where you attacked me accusing me for not following this or that Wikipedia rule, irrelevant to the discussion. I'm going to ignore you here for good.--Vujkovica brdo (talk) 19:49, 17 June 2016 (UTC)
 * Given your apparent refusal to admit areas of mathematics you feel snobbish about as being true mathematics, I don't think you're going to find anyone you recognize as a true mathematician to talk to here. There is at least one Fields medalist who regularly edits Wikipedia, but I've never seen him contribute to deletion discussions and I don't care to bother him about this. —David Eppstein (talk) 20:57, 17 June 2016 (UTC)

 Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion and clearer consensus.
 * Comment. I think we can separately discuss his potential academic notability from his fringe politics; if he is notable for the one, we can keep the article regardless of the other. I don't have a well informed view on his political opinions other than that the article does not succeed in demonstrating their notability — merely having published books is not the same as being notable for them. If this article is kept, but no evidence for notability for his non-mathematical works is uncovered, we should consider removing the list of them from the article. —David Eppstein (talk) 18:23, 17 June 2016 (UTC)
 * Comment. A difficult issue. Subject passes WP:Prof, but should the English Wikipedia be allowed to be used as a battleground for Balkan politics? I disregard the nominator's arguments as I do not see evidence that he has mathematical qualifications. Xxanthippe (talk) 22:50, 17 June 2016 (UTC).

Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks, North America1000 08:48, 19 June 2016 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of Authors-related deletion discussions. North America1000 08:49, 19 June 2016 (UTC)


 * Keep Evidence of notability. 23 editor (talk) 17:50, 20 June 2016 (UTC)
 * Comment @23 editor. I don't see any evidence of notability given. Wikipedia notability criteria called upon above, like WP:PROF, must be seriously substantiated, which is not done. The starting point of that substantiation shall be Pecaric's contributions to mathematics, clearly outlined, verifiable, elaborated, evaluated and written professionally by a mathematician. As an example, I referenced Todorcevic's contributions to mathematics from his biographies. For Pecaric, I was not able to find anything like that. Needless to say his academic credentials in use at the Zagreb university Faculty of mathematics are reduced to a Mathematical inequalities seminary (2 hr a week) what is not part of any Faculty curricula. A long list of "Non-fiction books" is all about the self-published books. The books content is widely rejected by historians in Croatia and outside Croatia. If we accept negative reactions to his 'non-fiction' ideas as a form of notability, then the biography shall include the reactions to his non-fictionalism, not the self-published books.--Vujkovica brdo (talk) 19:23, 20 June 2016 (UTC)
 * Comment Delete his biography, it does not have a valid encyclopaedic content. I think Pecaric is a poseur, extremely vocal in his pro-Ustashe ads and an insignificant contributor to mathematics.--178.223.78.167 (talk) 09:15, 23 June 2016 (UTC)
 * Here is a Pečarić's interview "KAKO JE BILO BITI HRVAT-MATEMATIČAR U BEOGRADU" (What was it like to be Croatian - mathematician in Belgrade). A funny stuff. Read it if you know serbo-croatian. From this interview it's visible that a negative view of Pečarić's math credentials had Đuro Kurepa and his PhD student Miroslav Asic, late mathematics professor at Ohio State University when Pečarić appled for a teaching position at Belgrade University . — Preceding unsigned comment added by 178.223.78.167 (talk) 10:01, 23 June 2016 (UTC)
 * Is spa 178.223.78.167 a sock of the nom? Xxanthippe (talk) 11:10, 23 June 2016 (UTC).


 * Keep. Pečarić is a full member of the Croatian Acadamy of Sciences and Arts (HAZU) - more specifically, the Dept. of Mathematical, Physical and Chemical Sciences, which is limited to 24 members per the Academy's statute. I believe that this constitutes a membership in a "highly selective and prestigious scholarly society or association", and that Pečarić therefore meets WP:PROF #3. WP:GNG is met too. (Also, I'm not aware of any previous instance in which a full HAZU member's bio has been challenged - let alone deleted - on the grounds of notability.) Therefore, I'd say Pečarić is Wikipedia-notable (as opposed to just real-world-notable, which we're not discussing here and is something else entirely). GregorB (talk) 14:10, 23 June 2016 (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.