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 delete. no objections to something meaninful being written in its place per Ungle G or a redirect if anyone can be bothered, Spartaz ^Humbug! 02:46, 12 January 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Etherealization[edit]

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This is just a dicdef. It is two dicdefs but isn't anything that is going to grow into an encyclopedia article. It was deleted as a PROD, asked for userfication (out of curiousity, not out of intent to improve it) but restored to main. I am assuming the requesters curiousity has been settled. SchmuckyTheCat (talk) 23:47, 4 January 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Delete Unsourced and, worse, remarkably uninformative. Claims to notability are limited to a statement that Buckminster Fuller first used the word. This one dates from the days when an IP could create an article. Mandsford 00:51, 5 January 2011 (UTC)[reply]
- Now now! Not having an account is not an automatic indicator of either bad faith or incompetence. (Although getting the wrong name for Fuller's concept is an indicator of not knowing what the Heck one is writing about.) Uncle G (talk) 00:55, 5 January 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Buckminster Fuller's concept is properly named ephemeralization (for which sources are abundant). It was Arnold Toynbee who wrote of etherealization ("a consequent transfer of energy, or shift of emphasis, from some lower sphere of being or of action to a higher" — A Study of History, Volume 1, pp. 198), which he also called simplification ("Perhaps we shall be describing it in a more illuminating way if we call it not simplification but etherealization." — op. cit.). Lewis Mumford talked about a similar but not identical concept that is the opposite of materialization, and also called it dematerialization (ISBN 9780807116500 pp. 104). Spiritualists also have a (third!) concept of etherealization, which is (roughly) not quite a materialization (ISBN 9781564597762 pp. 40).
Since our dematerialization article covers at least Fuller, that seems to be the appropriate place to redirect to right now. Yes, it's confusing and imperfect, since the target doesn't (yet) explain Mumford and Toynbee and it isn't the right place at all to cover the spiritualists' concept. But perfection is not required and at least it doesn't tell the reader the downright wrong information that this is Fuller's concept. Of course, this is no prejudice against writing about the spiritualist's concept here (albeit that that seems better discussed in some larger context), or making some kind of disambiguation article distinguishing amongst this lot, in the future. Uncle G (talk) 00:55, 5 January 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Delete per nom. Wikipedia is not a dictionary and I don't see the article going beyond a definition. If the problems being discussed can be fixed, transwiki first. --Pnm (talk) 04:56, 6 January 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Note: This debate has been included in the list of Language-related deletion discussions. -- • Gene93k (talk) 19:05, 6 January 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Note: This debate has been included in the list of Computing-related deletion discussions. -- • Gene93k (talk) 19:06, 6 January 2011 (UTC)[reply]
The original correct meaning of etherealization seems to be "the act of making (something) wikt:ethereal", which is a dictdef, but "etherealization" seems to have been found a derivative meaning as a technical term in a computer language called CORBA. Anthony Appleyard (talk) 16:43, 11 January 2011 (UTC)[reply]

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.