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. Clear delete - I would not be averse to userfication, but this does read as an essay of OR (✉→BWilkins←✎) 11:43, 4 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Evolutionary Psychology of Sex Differences / Mating[edit]

Evolutionary Psychology of Sex Differences / Mating (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) – (View log · Stats)

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Proposed deletion contested by creator; originally proposed by me: "Reads more like a scientific paper than an encyclopedic article, possible original research/synthesis". - Mike Rosoft (talk) 19:55, 19 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]

• Delete - If it's not WP:OR, it's almost certainly a copyvio of something. Very poorly phrased and lacking in any unique encyclopedic content; also a totally useless search title. Lukeno94 (tell Luke off here) 20:10, 19 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • The only one of those several points that is likely there is that it's a copyright violation. I've not found it, if it is. However, I don't have Buss' book to hand. Uncle G (talk) 22:30, 19 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
• This isn't original research; it isn't poorly phrased; and if the page title is "useless" that isn't fixed with the deletion tool as we should all well know by now. It's fairly easy to open a book on evolutionary psychology and see that far from this being original research, this is a fairly reasonable attempt to write up the view of David Buss on the subject. It is, after all, mainly sourced to one book, written by Buss. This article is in fact better written than much of Wikipedia, and Wikipedians are exemplifying the oft-made mistake of seeing prose that is written in an academic style (in contrast to the badly-flowing broken English with bare URLs that one finds in so many Wikipedia articles) and mistaking unusual for bad.

  The real problem here is the one book. This is clearly someone at Loyola Marymount University with Buss' book to hand, writing up the subject of evolutionary psychology of mating and reproduction based on that book. Not reading around the subject is a well-known undergraduate failure, and this is possibly an example of it. EP doesn't have just one view on this, as reading just Simpson & Oriña 2013 would reveal.

  It's risible to suggest that this isn't notable, by the way. Thankfully, no-one yet has. But in case anyone says anything so foolish, I point to an entire chapter on "Mating and Reproduction" in Palmer & Palmer 2002 — which its jacket explains to be one of the "major topics within the field". There are plenty of other fair to good sources dealing with this subject in depth, including an entire chapter in Workman & Reader 2004. We have evolutionary psychology#Mating and, with the title fixed as per the suggestion above (if no-one comes up with a better one), this is a reasonable, albeit one-sided, narrow, and incompletely researched, breakout sub-article on the topic that is in need of some attention from someone who has read the rest of the literature on the subject. It goes alongside evolutionary psychology of kin selection and family (a break-out sub-article of evolutionary psychology#Family and kin), evolutionary psychology of non-kin group interactions (a break-out sub-article of evolutionary psychology#Interactions with non-kin / reciprocity) and the incorrectly speedy-deleted evolutionary psychology of kinship and family (broken out of evolutionary psychology#Family and kin and not a verbatim copy of it).

  The only reason for deletion would be if this class project at LMU turned out to be taking the easy route all-too-often taken, and copying word-for-word straight from the textbooks. That's an unequivocal no-no here at Wikipedia, even if it isn't at some university courses. If anyone here has Buss' book available, which I have not, I recommend checking for copyright violation.

  To the students: You need to read some encyclopaedias, to see how encyclopaedias generally entitle articles. You also need to read Wikipedia, to see the existing conventions here, including the avoidance of capital letters in article titles for things that aren't proper nouns, the use of substantial introductions to introduce an overview of a subject in an article, and the fact that we don't use level-one section headings. And you also need to read around your subjects a lot more. Your teacher should also be aboveboard about your class project, which xe has not been. Refer xem to Wikipedia:School and university projects, please.

  By the way: minor changes in formatting to use the correct markup for Wikipedia make a huge difference. Wikipedia editors are, unfortunately, influenced in their content decisions by the superficial visual appearance of an article. I've seen editors start the "original research" hue and cry simply because a new article used Harvard-style citations without our handy ((harv)) template, before now.

  Uncle G (talk) 22:30, 19 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]

  • Simpson, Jeffry A.; Oriña, Minda (2013). "Strategic Pluralism and context-specific mate selection in humans". In Sterelny, Kim; Fitness, Julie (eds.). From Mating to Mentality: Evaluating Evolutionary Psychology. Macquarie Monographs in Cognitive Science. Psychology Press. ISBN 9781135432126. ((cite book)): Invalid |ref=harv (help)CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
  • Palmer, Jack A.; Palmer, Linda K. (2002). "Mating and Reproduction". Evolutionary Psychology: The Ultimate Origins of Human Behavior (2nd ed.). Allyn an Bacon. pp. 106 et seq. ISBN 9780205278688. ((cite book)): Invalid |ref=harv (help)
  • Workman, Lance; Reader, Will (2004). "The evolution of human mate choice". Evolutionary psychology: an introduction. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 9780521805322. ((cite book)): Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Q: is evolutionary psychology really as sexist, reductionist, and essentialist as this article suggests? I suggest that the author(s) temper(s) the rather generalizing statements found in the article ("This is one of the reasons why men are a lot bigger and stronger than women" is just one example) by perhaps more correctly summarizing their source, and involving more sources. Drmies (talk) 23:42, 19 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]

• No idea, but this article is centred around two people's views at best, and is clearly not written neutrally. I'm not buying Uncle G's general argument (or his enormous wall of text), anything encyclopedic will almost certainly be already here, this is a duplication at best, and given its language, I strongly suspect copyvio. Lukeno94 (tell Luke off here) 07:32, 20 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This debate has been included in the list of Sexuality and gender-related deletion discussions. • Gene93k (talk) 13:09, 20 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This debate has been included in the list of Behavioural science-related deletion discussions. • Gene93k (talk) 13:09, 20 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]

• Keep and continue working on it. Not bad as a start, and superior to most coursework here. Uncle G has correctly pointed out many of the faults, and suggested additional sources--and the title needs to be changed. I appreciate his detailed analysis, and so should the author. I wish we saw more of it here, rather than snap judgments. Much of this is here to some degree in various places, true, but this is a very broad topic that needs to be looked at in different aspects. It's relatively difficult to cover subjects like this systematically with zero duplciation. This can take its place as a relatively general article. (The main problem I see is the tendency to jump to conclusions without giving sources for them--this is caused by the mismatch between writing for WP and writing a normal term paper, in which one is expected to come to a conclusion. It's a recurrent problem in the ed program. ) Whether E.p. is sexist is a much discussed topic, ; some consideration of the views on this aspect really do need to be included, tho not a full discussion, which would overwhelm the article. DGG ( talk ) 04:49, 24 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
• Keep, rename to something less unusual (since that causes quicker judgments like formatting does), and keep working on it, hopefully adding more sources to reduce POV. If it doesn't improve (as it is classwork after all) I'd consider deleting. Ansh666 21:55, 24 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]

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Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion so a clearer consensus may be reached.

Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks, King of ♥ ♦ ♣ ♠ 03:59, 26 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]

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• Comment --- Well, it's an ESSAY, and many whole paragraphs remain uncited. The tone is rambling. The long title gives a clue that the topic is basically part of sexual selection, in which it could frankly form a single crisp paragraph, if deleted and rewritten. I'd be happy to support Uncle G in the TNT strategy, though clearly it could be rewritten in situ (i.e., the hard way) or better, we could userfy it and await a rather better-edited article. It's great to see students learning all kinds of things but perhaps this example is rather too publicly hanging out the laundry before washing it. Chiswick Chap (talk) 11:21, 26 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
• Delete Poor undergraduate essay posing as a wikipedia article. It is a fork of Evolutionary psychology#Mating and was previously deleted in February as Evolutionary psychology of sex differences. There is no need for this type of inadequate fork article written without providing a proper context. If somebody wants to improve their grades in Psychology 452 at Loyola Marymount University, they should do so within the framework provided by that Jesuit College instead of placing their essay on Wikipedia as has happened here. Mathsci (talk) 00:04, 2 May 2013 (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.