Talk:Menstruation and the origins of culture

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Articles for deletion This article was nominated for deletion on 30 December 2006. The result of the discussion was no consensus.
Articles for deletion This article was nominated for deletion on 13 May 2007. The result of the discussion was no consensus to delete, re-direct....
  1. 2006

Contents

[edit] Citations

I don't know if the authors have read WP:OR#SYNTHESIS, but it was brought up in the deletion discussion. Most of this article references published material on a variety of sources, and then ties those sources together in a way that violates this Wikipedia policy.

I believe that this synthesis was actually published in the various works of Knight, Power, and Watts, but the citations need to make that clear - they should be either to both the original source and a Knight, Power, and/or Watts work that made it part of this theory, or only cite the Knight, Power, and/or Watts work.

For the book, page numbers would be helpful, too. From Wikipedia:Citing sources#Full citations: Page numbers are essential whenever possible. Lyrl Talk C 02:30, 5 January 2007 (UTC)

The first request for citation is superfluous, as the reference is given: Blood Relations. The enrire book is about the relationship between menstruation and the origin of culture - page refs would not be appropriate. Another thought: this is one of the more heavily referenced articles I can find on this/similar topics, and has been singled out for criticism from day one. Why not actually 'contribute' to the improvement rather than flagging it for merger, deletion, unbalance etc.? I cannot rid myself of the impression that there is something less than objective going on here. Compare this to the article 'culture and menstruation' - which ranges across all world religions in a paragraph, has very few references, but has attracted far less intervention. Is this fair?195.69.214.5 11:44, 10 January 2007 (UTC)
The problem here is the issue of academic colonization of Wikipedia. A person or group with a particular theory comes along and claims an entire article topic for their own research without putting it into the broader context of the discourse or providing balancing critique. As Wikipedia is so prominent on search engines, this is an effective way of spreading their own ideas - this is to their own advantage but is not an acceptable way of using Wikipedia. 12:27, 10 January 2007 (UTC)
Martinklopstock has been an important contributor to this article. A Google search for "Martin Klopstock" only turns up 84 hits (rather unique name), almost all related to a man who works for Pearson Education, a publishing company specializing in educational materials. This does make it look like Wikipedia is possibly being used to try to promote a commercial agenda, as well as the self-promotion likely on the part of Chris d knight. Lyrl Talk C 03:53, 12 January 2007 (UTC)
Chris Knight's book is published by Yale University Press - nothing to do with Pearson Education! If you are going to make libellous comments like this you had better substantiate them. In my naivety I didn't think twice about revealing my name as a sign-on. What a mistake! What next - will Lyrl delve into my private life as well. What exactly am I 'using' Wikipedia for? Would you like my address? Just back off, and get on with dealing with the article instead of exercising your paranoid fantasies. I have to say I am rapidly losing faith in the whole Wikipedia project. It opens to the door to self-appointed 'guardians' who seem to take some kind of 'ownership' of certain articles - not the democratic formum I thought it was going to be.195.69.214.5 08:27, 13 March 2007 (UTC)

If any editor believes I am violating WP:OWN or any of Wikipedia's other policies or guidelines, I would be happy to discuss the issue on my Talk page. I agree with 195.69.214.5, the talk page of this article is an inappropriate forum for such discussions. I apologize for my previous inappropriate comments. Lyrl Talk C 21:46, 15 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Balance

In addition to the concerns raised above by User:Lyrl (and recognizing with appreciation his/her attempts to improve the article), this article as it currently stands reads as if it is advocating and arguing for a particular theory. The article needs a proper criticism section (rather than summarising just a couple of objections just to knock them down), especially if it is novel and controversial) and the whole article needs to rewriting to avoid the "persuasive" tone. Bwithh 06:57, 9 January 2007 (UTC)

Why don't you then contribute to making these changes? If it's simply a question of style (and not substance), why flag it for balance? See point above re references etc. This article is neither POV (refuted), nor OR (refuted), and as such should simply be improved by whoever feels so inclined. 195.69.214.5 11:44, 10 January 2007 (UTC)
Expansion requests are for articles which are 'embarrasingly short' of information, e.g. stubs, articles with sections with little/no content. This article is not short of information. Any additions should be made at the point at which they are required. Otherwise, virtually every article should have an 'expansion request' placed on it (e.g. Culture and Menstruation).195.69.214.5 11:49, 10 January 2007 (UTC)
You can't simply "refute" people's concerns about the article by declaring them "refuted", particularly as these issues were raised in the last afd and have not been addressed since then. Please don't remove the balance tag (unless you rebalance the article) and criticism section-to-be-expanded (I don't see any reasonable cause to remove this). This article IS short of a certain kind of information as I point out above. These kind of tags and stub indicators are important to to the way Wikipedia articles are processed by the community as well as by new readers And obviously balance is affected by an article's style. The concerns that Lyrl and I bring up were also voiced by others in the recent afd. Wikipedia is a *group* effort - active wikipedia editors raise concerns about dozens of articles a day. We have a backlog of articles we are concerned with. We use stubs and tags to flag articles for the benefit of other editors and users. Bwithh 12:27, 10 January 2007 (UTC)
Some users in the deletion discussion expressed the opinion that the POV issues in this article could be fixed. None of them claimed that it did not have a POV. And a "no consensus" result is not exactly praise. I'm not sure where anonymous got the impression that the POV that several editors have seen in the article had been refuted.Lyrl Talk C 01:49, 11 January 2007 (UTC)
Neither of the above points address the point made by user 195.69.214.5 that the Wikipedia criterion for expansion tags is reserved for articles which are substantially incomplete, or 'embarrassingly short' of information. This applies much more to stubbs and articles which are in an early state of completion. I don't see expansion tags being placed on lots of other articles which are clearly not 'complete'. In an important sense, no article is ever complete - to expansion is only meaningful as a concept if a major part of the content is missing - not just a section of 'criticism'.Martinklopstock 07:58, 11 January 2007 (UTC)
Wikipedia expansion tags (in this case, a section expansion tag, not an overall expansion tag) are not "reserved" for use in the way you suggest. WP:RFE makes a distinction between stub tags (for very incomplete articles) and expansion tags (for non-stub articles) and section expansion tags (for requested section expansion in any article), and furthermore says about the requests for expansion page - a higher level of flagging than just adding a tag - : "Almost every article in Wikipedia could do with some expansion - the aim of Wikipedia is to have every article at featured status. This page is for listing those for which there is a specific request. It is an excellent venue to publicize important articles which are embarrassingly short or insufficient for an encyclopedia of the stature to which Wikipedia aspires." This definition suggests that requests for expansion are especially important for "embarassingly short" of information or encyclopedically "insufficient" articles, but it certainly does not exclude articles which do not fall in these categories. Furthermore, as I emphasized above, a lack of a criticism section does make this article encyclopedically insufficient. Bwithh 10:18, 11 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Notability

Articles in Wikipedia are required to be notable: A topic is notable if it has been the subject of multiple, non-trivial published works from sources that are reliable and independent of the subject itself and each other.

This article does not currently provide examples of such third-party commentary. During the deletion discussion, several editors who voted to keep the article expressed the belief that such commentary existed, based on citations numbers from an ISI search. It is important to add a few of these sources (praise or criticism or both) to the article, so I've put a notability tag on the top. Lyrl Talk C 01:41, 11 January 2007 (UTC)

The articles by Alcorta and Hovers in the Further Reading section are direct discussions either of the entire theory or of the archeological evidence supporting it, but with direct reference tot he theory. This, plus the USU citation numbers should satisfy the notability cirterion. The notability issue was furthermore dealt with in the discussion on deletion - as lack of notability was one issue that was raised. I therefore propose to delete the notability tag - as otherwise the same discussion simply gets revisited under different headings.Martinklopstock 07:52, 11 January 2007 (UTC)
The Alcorta paper, out of 27 pages of text, spends one page discussing ocher as evidence of early human ritual. They find that evidence convincing. Menstruation, however, is not discussed. I'm unclear on how the Alcorta paper is a discussion of the "entire" theory, or even a significant part of it. My reading was that Alcorta and Sosis took the ochre-ritual connection as an independent theory, and ignored the rest of Knight et al.'s work. Although summaries of the Hovers paper seem to indicate a similar approach as the Alcorta paper, even if it does discuss the entire theory as presented in this article, it does not fulfill the notability requirement. Because Knight, Power, and Watts were co-authors of the paper [1], it is not independent.
The citation numbers discussed in the AfD suggested to editors that the notability requirement could be met. Not that it currently was met. Wikipedia requires articles to assert their notability, and this article currently does not do that.
Martinklopstock, what did you mean about the same discussion getting revisited? Lyrl Talk C 03:33, 12 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] de Waal and sharing

Recent revisions to the "Reproductive burdens of human females" sections implying the conclusions of de Waal fit in with the theory of Knight, Power, and Watts. de Waal actually draws opposing conclusions - he considers deliberately placing food within reach of a caged companion ape to be active sharing, even though the food was not placed from one hand to another. Similarly with complete lack of resistance from one ape when another takes food with it - he considers that active sharing, even though the food was not handed. With meat distribution, he concludes from field observations that the distribution of meat is deliberate because friends and allies of the hunters get the biggest shares, not the strongest-ape-gets-the-spoils you would expect if it really was a free for all.

While this is a controversial subject, I believe it is misleading to present only one side, and that the current wording of the section misrepresents de Waal's writing on this topic. Lyrl Talk C 03:37, 24 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Menstruation and the origins of culture (2nd nomination)

Per my statement there, I've re-directed this article, but feel free to merge further. I've kept this talk page here for now to allow discussion on this. If desired, it can simply be re-directed to Talk:Culture and menstruation. Petros471 14:31, 13 May 2007 (UTC)