The result was delete. Happy to userfy to be worked on prior to a mainspace return under the usual conditions, but consensus at this time is that this article is not suitable for Wikipedia Fritzpoll (talk) 20:45, 11 June 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Unencyclopedic original research and synthesis. Most of the quotes do not explicitly claim that that these cultures are patriarchal. They offer one ethnographer's (quite possibly biased, but that's a different issue) observations on practical actions. Furthermore, there are no references citing who claimed these cultures were matriarchal. (The Iban, Iroquois & Tlingit descriptions cite Wikipedia as a source?!)
So this article could more aptly be titled "List of cultures we have claimed are patriarchal and which we claim have been claimed to be matriachal"
Even if one ethnographer has claimed explicitly that they were patriarchal, a better title would be List of disputes about the patriarchal or matriarchal nature of certain cultures. Why would the first ethnographer to record details automatically be correct? Ethnographers can and do make mistakes... see Social Darwinism.
TheMightyQuill (talk) 14:29, 2 June 2009 (UTC)[reply]
It seems this page was originally called List of patriarchal societies, and indeed that link now redirects to the title in question. In other words, this was once a perfectly encyclopaedic list. But then, for reasons that stretch my comprehension, a discussion at patriarchy led to the List of patriarchal societies being given this new, and totally unencyclopaedic, title.
The problem here is that there aren't any sources that discuss "patriarchal cultures that have been claimed to be matriarchal" as a topic in its own right.
I recommend that what we do here is simply to reverse the rename/move and return this to its correct place, as a List of patriarchal societies.—S Marshall Talk/Cont 17:10, 3 June 2009 (UTC)[reply]
My basic point is that a list of patriarchal societies seems encyclopaedic to me, and the current article title just isn't. I feel that we need to WP:PRESERVE the sourced content here, but to do it in an encyclopaedic way, so I remain convinced that a rename is the way forward.—S Marshall Talk/Cont 18:51, 3 June 2009 (UTC)[reply]
An article without WP:SYN would rely primarily on sources trying to make that general point. Instead, this article pieces together bits of information from a very wide variety of sources to counter unsourced claims to matriarchy. - TheMightyQuill (talk) 17:55, 8 June 2009 (UTC)[reply]