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Janos Boros

AfDs for this article:
Janos Boros (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) – (View log)
(Find sources: Google (books · news · scholar · free images · WP refs) · FENS · JSTOR · TWL) * Note : This is the second, not the third nomination

Support Not notable. I don't see how this passes either WP:GNG or WP:POLITICIAN. He does not possess an article not even on Romanian Misplaced Pages Iaaasi (talk) 12:03, 7 February 2011 (UTC)

Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion so a clearer consensus may be reached.
Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks, T. Canens (talk) 21:35, 21 March 2011 (UTC)
  • Relisting comment: I originally closed this as delete, but in light of the previous AfD a fuller discussion is probably more appropriate. T. Canens (talk) 21:38, 21 March 2011 (UTC)
  • Comment I found this in the previous discussion, can anyone confirm if it was legitimate?
"As to the aspect of finding mention in Romanian media, 61 mentions in Evenimentul Zilei, 37 mentions in Adevărul, 41 mentions in Ziua, 200 mentions in Clujeanul - a newspaper from his own city, 128 mentions in hotnews.ro are significant." Hobartimus (talk) 00:07, 22 March 2011 (UTC)
Please don't manipulate the information. The correct data are: 4 mentions in Evenimentul Zilei, 8 mentions in Adevărul, 0 mentions in Ziua, 123 mentions in Clujeanul - a newspaper from his own city, 100 mentions in hotnews.ro (Iaaasi (talk) 08:05, 22 March 2011 (UTC))
Did you read the above? I said I found it being posted in the previous discussion. Obviously the listed results show the data at the time of the first Afd, which was in 2009. Unless they were manipulated in 2009. Seems a case of selective reading to me. Hobartimus (talk) 17:57, 22 March 2011 (UTC)
  • Delete What has changed here since the last AfD? Oh, yeah: mudslinging. Here I am, standing by my earlier comment: "I don't see how this passes either WP:GNG or WP:POLITICIAN. The coverage that he got in the press is, as far as I can tell, almost exclusively owed to a local corruption scandal which implicated him (an incident which, tellingly, is not even covered by the article). The news is of marginal interest even locally (in Cluj County, that is), and the text, which is most likely promotional, is horribly written. This is a quick way to make oneself look important, not an encyclopedic topic." Dahn (talk) 16:49, 22 March 2011 (UTC)
Comment Dahn, I reviewed the talk page comment that you cite and In my view it was an inappropriate remark. Without a doubt there are some legitimate concerns with this article, such as tone and it's creator's list of contributions making a description of "most likely promotional" accurate. However these problems can sometime be fixed by rewriting by someone else. I think the ideal solution here would be a stub written by someone like Dahn or Biruitorul. Hobartimus (talk) 19:40, 22 March 2011 (UTC)
True perhaps, but that only addresses part of my point, the other being that Boros is merely a vice-mayor of a reasonably large but still provincial town, and that the third-party sources which we could cite on him, the only ones on which we could base the article if it need exist, are either trivial or describing a passing controversy that is an embarrassment for Boros. These would be, if stretched, the only reasons why Boros would make the GNG cut. Dahn (talk) 20:59, 22 March 2011 (UTC)
Hobartimus, I appreciate your suggestion, but why would a stub be justified? "Deputy Mayor" (of a provincial city, no less) is not a notable position, per WP:POLITICIAN. And there simply aren't references confirming notability per WP:BIO, the standard there being Boros should have been the subject of multiple published secondary reliable sources. - Biruitorul 22:40, 22 March 2011 (UTC)

STRONG KEEP: @ Hobartimus, Yes this is a case of selective reading.One should look at the references and also the cross references of those articles in those news sites. For example Evenimentul Zilei, 4,340 mentions and cross-mentions, in Adevărul 1,170 mentions and cross-mentions, Ziua.net is now so the search there which is of news = 8,190 mentions and cross-mentions. The exmaples can go on and on.

One thing that also needs to be reckoned is the while has quite many citings not favourable to him, the local Hungarian papers have none. The right way to interpret this is that minority politicians stand to get maligned a lot in majority news dailies. Otherwise how is it possible that not only does have positive mentions in the minority Hungarian press, but also they are quite significant in number. This is considering only around 2 percent of the whole Romanian population(Mostly elderly Hungrains) form majority of its readers. Now take the example of Szabadsag = 89 mentions and cross-mentions if you search with with his family name second in the search string. If you search how a Hungarian would write and read - family name first the result for the same search is = 366 mentions and cross-mentions, in another local Hungarian paper Kronika = 53 mentions and cross-mentions.

There are many Romanian politicians and public figures who have entries in Misplaced Pages. Just a few examples of Romanian Politicians who are Vice-Mayors and have entires: - Camelia Gavril, Vice Mayor of Iasi - Romeo Olteanu, Vice Mayor of Zarnesti - Ioan Todiraș, Vice Mayor of a Sector in Bucuresti - Mircea Dolha, Vice Mayor of Baia Mare etc.

Anyone searching for "viceprimar" on Misplaced Pages.org will find a whole list of pages/entries of Romanian Politicians who are and were Vicemayors themselves. So why the differential treatment?

Warm regards, Hangakiran (talk) 21:50, 22 March 2011 (UTC)

All those examples are from Romanian Misplaced Pages. Can you please show me on en.wp an article about the Vice-Mayor of any other city from the world? (Iaaasi (talk) 21:54, 22 March 2011 (UTC))
    • WP:WAX is not a valid argument, particularly if you refer to articles from ro.wiki, which is rife with promotional material.
    • My Google searches of Romanian papers actually give 4, 8 and 199 hits (not 4340, 1170 and 8190), but regardless, see WP:GHITS for why that's not really relevant. The totality of those results seem more than trivial in nature. To take the four EVZ results for instance, one tells us that Boros and several colleagues misused city funds; one lists him as losing an election, one mentions he gave an order to fill in a hole, and one again is a candidate list. I'm afraid none of these is particularly useful in writing an article. The Hungarian-language sources appear of a similarly insubstantial nature, though you may correct me on that point.
    • In short, you'll want to present reliable, in-depth sources attesting substantive notability, not random bits of news coverage (remember, we are WP:NOTNEWS), if you want this article kept. - Biruitorul 22:40, 22 March 2011 (UTC)
  • Comment: This discussion seems to have been canvassed on the Meta-Wiki talk pages of at least three Hungarian users. Jafeluv (talk) 11:59, 23 March 2011 (UTC)
  • Comment@User:Iaaasi When Iaaasi nominated the article for under WP:Afd, no notification was sent to us User:Hangakiran. So the outcome was the article was deleted. Another reason for the intimations was to request Hungarian users who are interested about what happens to pages of their leaders and to avoid the discussion becoming one sided with contributions only from Romanian Wiki users. Hangakiran (talk) 14:49, 23 March 2011 (UTC)
  • Commment You should understand that what you've done (choosing invited users after a clear criteria like Hungarian ethnicity) is WP:Votestacking and it is illegal. You did not send neutral invitations, but requests "for help" in your attempt to prevent the deletion of this article. However this is not a vote (WP:VOTE) where the majority wins, but a "battle" of arguments (Iaaasi (talk) 15:06, 23 March 2011 (UTC))
  • It's a bit of a stretch to call a former vice-mayor of a Romanian city a "leader" of Hungarians anywhere. Also, will you kindly stop viewing everything through the prism of ethnicity? This is not a numbers game between "Hungarian users" and "Romanian Wiki users". It's an attempt to remove an article on a non-notable figure who fails to meet applicable standards (WP:BIO, WP:POLITICIAN, WP:GNG, etc). - Biruitorul 15:10, 23 March 2011 (UTC)
This is a lie. You know very well what you've done (Iaaasi (talk) 16:56, 23 March 2011 (UTC))
  • @ Iaaasi. Can you elaborate on what is the lie you refer to?
I am sorry, I owe you excuses, I thought you were saying that the account from hu.wp is not yours (Iaaasi (talk) 17:08, 23 March 2011 (UTC))

Request for more information: Can someone list the applicable standards under which the politician does not qualify? This nomination makes a blanket statement regarding qualifications with no supporting details; just leaves it up to everyone else to figure it out for themselves with their own interpretation of the criteria. That makes me uncomfortable when we are talking about deleting content. This politician doesn't seem to be one of those "common sense" deletions. There's quite a bit of information in the article. In the first nomination, I had written about what I thought was a meeting of criteria. No one responded. I would like to understand from the nominator what their interpretation is and how they see that the criteria is not being met. Thank you. --Stacey Doljack Borsody (talk) 18:47, 24 March 2011 (UTC) Note: User:Sborsody joined this discussion as a result of Hangakiran's canvassing (Iaaasi (talk) 22:03, 24 March 2011 (UTC))

  • Comment BTW, I'm not really Hungarian, just married to one and have ancestors from that empire who were minorities, as should be clear from my user page. I thought I was solicited for input because I commented on the previous nomination. While I don't agree with the canvassing based on ethnicity, I also don't agree with not taking the good-faith effort of reaching out to the major contributors of the article. --Stacey Doljack Borsody (talk) 22:00, 24 March 2011 (UTC)
  • If I may try to answer your question by looking at WP:POLITICIAN:
    • Boros has not held international, national or sub-national office, or been in the national legislature, so he fails point 1.
    • As for point 2: well, we know he wasn't mayor. We're told he was on the city council, but we have no source to back this up, and anyway, my reading is that in general, only city councillors of "a major metropolitan city" (of which Romania has but one, Bucharest) tend to be notable. Was he a "major local political figure"? Probably not: power in Cluj-Napoca city government is concentrated in the mayor and to a lesser extent the council, with the unelected vice-mayors serving more of an administrative role.
    • Finally, has he "received significant press coverage"? I tend to think he hasn't. Let's look just at the footnotes. I can't read Hungarian, but the two sources in that language seem to make only passing mention of him. Of the ones in Romanian, one is a quote in a news brief, one is a declaration about an obscure corruption scandal, one mentions his opinion on some highway project, one is a quote about housing, one looks at his allegedly corrupt deals, one is a quote about a city contract for a plot of land, one mentions him strictly in passing, one is a dead link, one is a news brief about a lawsuit filed against him by aggrieved tenants in two buildings, one mentions he ordered a hole to be filled, and one is an opinion piece that doesn't mention him. The one source in English is a news article that doesn't mention him. Oh, and almost all of these are in local rather than national newspapers. Can we say no one cares?
    • Some of the claims, by the way, tend to be overblown to the point of having nothing to do with the source. Take for instance this passage: "Though during the years of the Boc administration he no longer had to face constant ethnic provocations, his tenure was not fully void of ethnic disputes, either. Being the vice mayor he was tested time and again in his ability to reconcile disputes between the majority Romanian governance and the expectations of the minority Hungarians he represented". The source makes no such claim. "One such conflict was regarding restoration of the statue of Matthias Corvinus. The ex-mayor Gheorghe Funar was the one who started the controversy by changing the label of the statue of Matthias Corvinus from 'Matthias Rex Hungarorum' (Matthias King of Hungarians) to just 'Matthias Rex'." Again, nowhere does the article say this. "Being supported by the liberal Emil Boc, Janos Boros was able to diplomatically reconcile differences between the governments of Hungary and Romania, who together decided to finance the restoration of the historical statue group (of Matthias King) from the centre of Cluj-Napoca." The source (an opinion piece, by the way, which can't be used to support anything) makes absolutely no mention of Boros. So you see, not only is the sourcing trivial, it's been manipulated so as to endow Boros with an exaggerated importance.
    • As was brought up earlier, we don't really have articles on deputy mayors. OK, we do for London, as well as having a couple for New York, but one can't really compare Cluj-Napoca to those cities, can one?
    • Personally, I've written articles on five ethnic Hungarian politicians from Romania (László Borbély, Attila Cseke, Attila Verestóy, Iuliu Winkler, Péter Eckstein-Kovács), so it's not like the topic doesn't interest me. It's just that I tend to know a notable UDMR politician when I see one, and, for better or worse, Boros just isn't one of them. - Biruitorul 05:26, 25 March 2011 (UTC)
  • Suggest Merge/Weak Delete: Thank you, Biruitorul, for taking the time to write more about the criteria and address the concerns I raised during the first nomination for deletion. I learned from you that vice-mayors are non-elected administrative roles (really?) and that to me somewhat lessens the importance. The "significance" criteria always seem to be a sticking point on these AfDs because everyone has their own ideas of what is significant. What is really telling to me is the total lack of links in Misplaced Pages to the Janos Boros article. I guess I'm still concerned about a story here regarding events in Cluj-Napoca politics that may be lost by outright deletion of the article. The sources seem to suggest Janos Boros is a supporting character in that story, which indicates to me that it may be possible to preserve the story under other, more appropriate articles such as the article on Gheorghe Funar or Emil Boc. --Stacey Doljack Borsody (talk) 06:38, 25 March 2011 (UTC) Note: User:Sborsody joined this discussion as a result of Hangakiran's canvassing (Stacey Doljack Borsody (talk) 06:38, 25 March 2011 (UTC))
    • During 2004-2008, one of the main developments in Cluj-Napoca politics was the defusing of ethnic tensions built up by Mayor Funar. Indeed, by the end, the latter had managed to alienate pretty much everyone, Romanian and Hungarian alike, with his combative style, so that after a year in office, the technocratic Boc believed his main achievement was to bring about a "climate of normality" in city politics, whereas his populist predecessor had tended to file lawsuits against most decisions of the local council, the county council and the prefecture. No doubt, part of that process was in having a Hungarian for one of his deputies, in removing the Romanian flags one saw on every street corner, etc. If sources make the link, no doubt this can be mentioned at Emil Boc or even History of Cluj-Napoca.
    • But based on what I said above about the sources here being manipulated, I would caution against using any of this text in other articles. Let me give another example, if I may. We have this passage: "The issue of the statue has been a barometer to the sensitivity of the multi-ethnic groups cohabiting in Cluj-Napoca. It is wishful to think that this shared restoration brings a final resolution to Cluj-Napoca's ethnic conflicts, though efforts of leaders like Janos Boros and Emil Boc have eased tensions and have been successful in curtailing the nationalists from both Hungarian and Romanian sides to a great extent." The only problem is, it's completely unsourced, and was probably concocted by the author. Once we have an article on the statue (and we should), some of this should definitely be mentioned, but from a reliable source like this one, not the editorializing of a Misplaced Pages editor. - Biruitorul 13:52, 25 March 2011 (UTC)
  • just a few comments: I don't see what is the problem with notifying other editors about this AfD. English Misplaced Pages is too big for us to keep an eye on all Hungary-related articles, especially that there are only a few Hungarian editors here (also, most of us are used to the much smaller Hungarian[REDACTED] where it's relatively easy to watch all AfD pages). Hangakiran couldn't even be sure that we'll vote for the article to be kept. I think if the majority of the sources regarding a subject's notability are in a certain language, it is necessary to notify users who can understand that language (and I've seen enwiki sysops doing this.
  • Also, I don't see how Cluj is not a "major metropolitan city", it is stated that it's the fourth largest in Romania, with a population of about 400,000; seems to be significant even by European standards.
  • Boros has over 37,000 google hits in Hungarian, mostly about monument protection, local events, and losing an election. I'm not sure it makes him notable, though. – Alensha  21:25, 25 March 2011 (UTC)
    • I suppose everyone will have a different definition of "major metropolitan city", but how about using the list of Largest urban areas of the European Union? (Romania's next six largest cities are some six times smaller, correspondingly less powerful, and widely thought of as "provincial".) By that standard, Romania does indeed have just one, and I tend to think that's about right: members of the General Council of Bucharest maybe (as in, a few of them) are notable figures, but one simply doesn't see members of the Iaşi, Cluj, Timişoara, Constanţa, Craiova or Galaţi city councils exercising any sort of influence or having any kind of renown outside their own cities. Their mayors, yes, but not their city councillors.
    • I've never thought of Boros as being a nobody: he had a decent-enough career in politics and no doubt was well-liked by some voters and helped them out, while angering others (like the ones who sued him). But that's true for thousands of local politicians in mid-sized cities around the world, and it shouldn't necessarily follow that he gets a Misplaced Pages article. WP:POLITICIAN should be applied equally.
    • As for Google: well, from what you say, it sounds like Hungarian sources also mainly deal with his involvement in local issues and making the local news. Perhaps some of that has its place at, say, Matthias Corvinus Statue, Cluj-Napoca, but I doubt it rises to a particularly noteworthy standard, though feel free to correct me. By the way, we get lots of hits for (just to take an example) today's UDMR Cluj city councillors (Irsay, Somogyi, Csoma, Molnos and László). Of these, Molnos may be notable primarily as a writer and László is just possibly notable as a politician, but I wouldn't say the same of the first three, or of most of the other 22 members of the council. - Biruitorul 22:13, 25 March 2011 (UTC)
  • Keep - In my opinion the sources points to notability. I see no reason to delete this article right now.--BabbaQ (talk) 16:51, 26 March 2011 (UTC)
  • Delete While I think this person passes WP:GNG it is a borderline case. As I said I see some issues with the article, which could not be resolved at this time per comments above. I would have no problem with the article being recreated at a later time as a stub by an established editor, should someone change their mind or become interested. However this recreating user writing the stub, should be someone with interests in a few other topics as well, not just this single article. Hobartimus (talk) 17:00, 26 March 2011 (UTC)
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