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. If this is felt to be something that can be restarted per WP:TNT, no prejudice against that. The BushrangerOne ping only 04:52, 23 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]
As with Inverted Synergy, this is part of a group of low quality personal essay-type articles that likely fail WP:NOT as primarily the work of a single author. Likely self-promotion and possibly fails WP:GNG as well. Of the articles in this group, this one has the greatest number of outside sources which may establish notability, but it is difficult to tell whether these sources establish notability or simply are citations for various claims within the article. See discussion at the help desk for discussion on this and a related group of articles. 0x0077BE [talk/contrib] 16:06, 14 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]
Keep. This concept, which is related to Meaning (psychology) and Posttraumatic growth, seems to be motivated by a concern that its contents are promoting a single author. Amazon.com has more than 5,000 books for sale that contain the words "meaning making" (quoted phrase)—including more than 150 in which that quoted phrase is in the title. Google Books claims 895K ghits on "meaning making" -kusan; I've verified that it gives more than twenty pages of results. There is actually the possibility of two articles here: one on making meaning out of emotional/psychosocial experiences, and another on the process of learning in an educational setting. There is a pretty wide scope here. The dozen or so books on applying this psychological concept to marketing and business management goals (e.g., ISBN978-0321552341 and ISBN978-0142004098) happen to interest me more than self-help books, but any of them might be useful in building the article. WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:35, 14 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]
Delete The article is called "meaning-making" but many of the sources cited are not using this term. For this article to be kept, I expect the following:
Someone should present multiple sources using the term "meaning-making" and defining it. These sources should be about the concept. Note some of the best sources here before doing anything else!
Cut out all parts of this article which are personal essay arguments, which is most of the article. If there is one salvageable good paragraph here, start with that, use it to pass AfD, then add everything back and sort it out. Right now there is so much essay content here that this article is a net problem and if I have to search for a passable paragraph and initially find several non-passing ones, I have to suggest deletion.
I cannot look at this and establish that it meets Wikipedia inclusion criteria. I appreciate the time taken to develop this article but Wikipedia has minimal standards and I cannot recognize this as meeting those at this time. Blue Rasberry (talk) 22:11, 14 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]
Delete and block from re-creation from the first five words "People are inveterate meaning-makers" it is an essay (I'd say pseudo-essay) arguing a point, an obscure and probably absurd point, using jargon that would choke a hippo. When you get a sentence like "Meaning-making occurs, then, at the interface of intra-subject processes and the culturally coded object world [51][52][53][54][55][56]" with six "sources" you are running into hoax territory.
Editors should look at this site, which generates such pseudo articles based on a random algorithm. Every time you refresh that address you get new versions. μηδείς (talk) 01:49, 15 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]
Delete without prejudice - As per WhatamIdoing, meaning-making is a notable concept, but the article is void of content. Blow it up and start over. Robert McClenon (talk) 02:43, 15 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]
Delete This makes my top 10 list of articles most deserving deletion. Capitalismojo (talk) 02:45, 15 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]
Redirect to Narrative identity#Components of identity narratives. "meaning-making" has different interpretations depending on the context of study, but the one here has to do with the field of personality psychology and is connected with the idea of a narrative identity. As WhatamIdoing notes, this is a highly notable field--there are 102,000 hits on GScholar for "meaning making" and plenty of articles where this is the primary subject. In response to Bluerasberry's call, 3 secondary sources with a lot of citations about this topic are [1], a intro article to an entire issue on the topic, [2] which is about mental health aspects of the topic, and a book [3]. So a solid article could be written on this topic based on independent RS. The article itself has serious problems. It is dense with unexplained jargon, it synthesizes many primary sources, it is non-neutral and somewhat promotional, and gives undue weight to ideas of Kusan, a non-notable researcher in the field. There are also likely COI problems and the prose needs to be better wikified and split into sections. In theory, the article problems are surmountable, but in practice, it may be easier to rewrite from scratch from just a few high quality secondary references. Thus I am tending toward redirect until a better article can be written, but will happily keep this article if stubified/rewritten in a neutral, verifiable manner. Narrative identity has 12 occurrences of the term and seems the best target for now. --Mark viking (talk) 07:08, 15 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]
nothing worth salvaging - although no bias against a recreation from start. perhaps a DAB with Epistemology as one of the targets. -- TRPoD aka The Red Pen of Doom 14:00, 15 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]
Delete and/or redirect - term is broad enough in its broadest sense to be a dictionary definition, and I don't think that there is consensus on any narrower definition than that. We have pages on understanding and narrative identity for starters. Cas Liber (talk·contribs) 19:28, 15 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]
Comment Yes, I can't speak to the notability myself, not being particularly familiar with the subject matter, but I think that given the low quality of the article, we can delete the article and start over again. If notable, I think the ideal solution would be to ask WhatamIdoing or some other subject matter expert to find a few sources indicating that the concept is notable and determine whether Meaning-making is the most appropriate term for this concept. If it's notable, we can move it to the most appropriate place and strip it down to a stub. If no one is available to do this, though, I don't think it hurts to delete the article and leave it to a future editor to create it from scratch, as I think there's a clear consensus so far that the content of the article is beyond repair. 0x0077BE [talk/contrib] 15:54, 18 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]
I'm not a subject-matter expert, either, but this appears to be the right title.
I agree that the article needs a good copyedit for tone. But WP:Deletion is not cleanup, and there is some suitable matter in there. For example, "Research on language and mind, learning and teaching, mindfulness, metacognition, place and social space, mental health literacy, resilience, the social construction of health and various constructs associated with positive psychology has reconfigured the constellation of key mental health variables, placing meaning-making at its center" is a pretty flowery way of saying "Meaning-making is a central concept in positive psychology and other fields", but the fact is both correct and encyclopedic.
I strongly disagree that the current content is beyond repair, because I'm pretty sure that I could repair at least a good deal of it, and probably anyone willing to spend an hour with it could do quite a bit of good. WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:30, 18 February 2014 (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.