Talk:Intimate relationship

Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment
This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 28 March 2019 and 8 May 2019. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): TT in NYU.

Above undated message substituted from Template:Dashboard.wikiedu.org assignment by PrimeBOT (talk) 00:44, 17 January 2022 (UTC)

overreliance on one source
Fully two-thirds of the citations made in this article are to works by David Perlman. The remainder are dominated by pop-psych books, articles, and blogs. Surely that can't be good. Weeb Dingle (talk) 00:11, 11 February 2019 (UTC)
 * Looking at the References section before my edit that tweaked, cut and sourced parts of the article, we can see that "The Cambridge Handbook of Personal Relationships," Cambridge University Press source was also used extensively. It still is. I wouldn't classify such a source as a pop-psych book. And I'm wondering which sources you consider a pop-psych book. We go with the sources that are adequate for this topic, the ones that are usually available for this topic while also being reliable for it. It's easy to see that when looking for sources on the topic of "intimate relationships" (and its forms) and "intimacy" on Google Books or Google Scholar, the sources are psychology books, sociology books, guide books (which may or may not be psychology or sociology books), sexuality books, and books we shouldn't even consider using for the topic. When it comes to the psychology books or similar, some are college-level sources, but such sources are acceptable for this topic. Some of the sources are reprints. When it came to my recent sourcing of the article, I used the best sources available. If you have "better" sources, then do present them here on the talk page. Flyer22 Reborn (talk) 03:52, 12 February 2019 (UTC)
 * Apologies, my archaic English can occasionally baffle some; clearly, commas are confusing nowadays. By "pop-psych books, articles, and blogs" I meant
 * pop-psych books, AND
 * pop-psych articles, AND
 * pop-psych blogs.
 * As well, when I say that the population of a list is DOMINATED BY a commonality (thereby, incidentally, indicating a potential bias toward a particular viewpoint), that would once have been intended to indicate that while the commonality is not shared by ALL or perhaps even MOST of the individual instances in that universe, it stands out as a recurring theme, a sort of voting bloc if you will that is not inherently representative of each resident in the universe.
 * That is to say: picking out a single example that doesn't happen to possess that commonality in no way invalidates the summary description. (Waving that example around doesn't improve its value.)
 * The article relies far too much on articles and books written and/or edited and/or co-written and/or co-edited by a lone individual. That would not be surprising for some abstruse topic, but is immediately questionable (at best!) here.
 * (Sorry, highfalutin' words again. Britannica Online: The term universe is used to denote whatever body of people is being studied. I'm a stats guy; others might prefer to think of a set (mathematics).)
 * I'll return eventually to address issues more directly — feel free to note any other troublesome concepts. Weeb Dingle (talk) 03:16, 24 February 2019 (UTC)
 * Again, the sources currently used for this topic in the article are fine for the most part. I explained above that these are the types of sources available for this topic. The vast majority are not sources I would classify as pop psychology. In fact, the "How to Make Anyone Fall in Love with You" source seems to be the only pop psychology source in the article. When I sourced and cleaned up the article somewhat, I removed some poor sources. To repeat: "It's easy to see that when looking for sources on the topic of 'intimate relationships' (and its forms) and 'intimacy' on Google Books or Google Scholar, the sources are psychology books, sociology books, guide books (which may or may not be psychology or sociology books), sexuality books, and books we shouldn't even consider using for the topic. When it comes to the psychology books or similar, some are college-level sources, but such sources are acceptable for this topic." When I stated that, I should have also mentioned academic journals seen on Google Scholar. I'm not sure what other type of sources, what "higher quality" sources, you are expecting for this topic, but they are not there. With regard to "The article relies far too much on articles and books written and/or edited and/or co-written and/or co-edited by a lone individual.", if one looks around at our Wikipedia articles, most of the sources have one author. A source having one author is not a problem as long as, per WP:YESPOV, the author's statements are not presented as fact when they are opinion and the author is not given WP:Undue weight. If what the author is stating is that author's opinion, it should be presented as such via WP:In-text attribution. Looking at the literature on "intimate relationships" (and its forms) and "intimacy," I see that enough of what the sources in the article state is supported by other sources on the topic; so it's not the author's lone opinion. And some of the sources have more than one author and/or other contributor. I don't think that sourcing in the article is a big issue. Coverage is. There are some other things that should be covered in the article. And, of course, there are parts of the article that need tweaking and the primary studies material is something we should try to replace with more general information from the literature. So that means also getting rid of those primary sources. Flyer22 Reborn (talk) 13:59, 24 February 2019 (UTC)

what the article is about
The beginning of the article concerns close interactions between human beings by which I assume the focus is those that are emotionally close — if, say, you are undergoing thoracic surgery, every person up to their elbows in your duodenum is definitely in intimate contact with you, even though you may never see their faces.

Let's set aside for the moment that close interactions between animals is given short shrift, even though most WP articles about human behaviors delight in comparing to the lessers (often to literally ridiculous extreme: Monogamy brings the parallels and precedents up repeatedly despite the existence of Monogamy in animals). And there certainly ought to be more space granted to close interaction &/or emotional attachment between human beings and animals.

However, as Intimate relationship progresses, it morphs ever more into the wonders of social research on human relationships. This is obvious hatracking (or, as it's called hereabouts, coatracking). As stated previously, this looks to me like
 * contributors simply pasting in whatever random bits they haven't forgotten from Sociology 1-02.

Irrelevant filler related only tenuously to the article's actual purpose, squirrelled in to pad the contributor's "cred."

Hence, changes. Weeb Dingle (talk) 22:01, 31 March 2019 (UTC)


 * Preparatory to overhaul, I've blanked the three sections that are almost entirely about social research, NOT intimate relationships proper.


 * But there still remains much salted throughout, such as the fourth sentence in the body:
 * Dalton (1959) discussed how anthropologists and ethnographic researchers access "inside information" from within a particular cultural setting by establishing networks of intimates capable (and willing) to provide information unobtainable through formal channels.
 * Much remains to be done. Weeb Dingle (talk) 22:42, 31 March 2019 (UTC)


 * What???? I reverted you on this. Followup note here. You blocked out the "Empirical research" section, stating "rewrite so it's actually RELEVANT to article topic." Empirical research on the topic is relevant to the topic. If you think you can write it better, then do so. And with reliable sources. You hid the "Current studies" section stating, "Article is about human relationships, NOT the study of them." Again, what???? Exactly what topic on Wikipedia that is partly academic in nature does not have information about studies, current or otherwise, on the topic? WP:SCHOLARSHIP would not exist if it wasn't the case that we are going to report on studies. Research on a topic is going to concern studies. We are not going to create a Wikipedia article specifically about studies on a topic, unless it's specific to what aspect it concerns and it's the case that the topic should have its own article. For example, we have a Prevalence of teenage pregnancy article. You hid the History section, stating "first get a better title, else content would be 'the history of intimate relationships'; second, as article IS NOT about social research, place the RELEVANT bits properly in the article; third, remove section." Again, what???? We cover history material in the article on the topic, often with a section titled "History." This is easy to see from various articles on Wikipedia. Where else should the history material go in the article? Per WP:Spinout, WP:No page and WP:No split, we are not going to create a "History of" article unless necessary. It is not necessary in this case. And even in such cases, we still have a "History" section in the main article per WP:Summary style. And given that the topic of intimate relationships is a sociology topic in addition to being a psychology, sexology and anthropology topic, of course it's going to include social research; this goes back to what I stated about studies/academic research. Flyer22 Reborn (talk) 21:36, 1 April 2019 (UTC)


 * And looking at something like this (which I will tweak per WP:Dated and WP:In-text attribution), you know that we include material on research in our articles. Flyer22 Reborn (talk) 21:46, 1 April 2019 (UTC)


 * More tweaking to the Intimate relationship article by me is seen here. I will look to access the "Miller, Rowland & Perlman, Daniel (2008). Intimate Relationships (5th ed.). McGraw-Hill" source to get the exact page numbers. I will also look to add more sources to the "Other studies" section so that the section has more variety. As you know, it currently almost exclusively relies on the "Intimate Relationships (5th ed.)" source. Flyer22 Reborn (talk) 22:07, 1 April 2019 (UTC)


 * Apologies for repetitiveness, but the fact remains that the article IS NOT about social research. (If it were, the page title would be different.)
 * mentioning specific studies that have led to conclusions about (ahem) intimate relationships is obviously germane, and painting me as being somehow against that is not only irrelevant here but (to be polite) obviously unsupportable.
 * detail about vague groupings of study that might (or might not) at some point have something to do with intimate relationships is kinda pointless and will readily lead to trivia about such trivia as whether a given statistical method is generally acceptable, the sort of thing that bores even sociologists to tears.
 * raising issues about general techniques of social research and methods is in the wrong article entirely.
 * In short, loading this up with chaff is an activity that flies directly against W'pedia's supposed intent to inform a general audience. Weeb Dingle (talk) 17:44, 7 November 2019 (UTC)
 * I don't have anything else to state on this matter other than what I've stated above. I disagree with you and I've been clear why. Flyer22 Reborn (talk) 19:58, 7 November 2019 (UTC)

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The following Wikimedia Commons file used on this page or its Wikidata item has been nominated for speedy deletion: You can see the reason for deletion at the file description page linked above. —Community Tech bot (talk) 00:24, 22 August 2022 (UTC)
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Wiki Education assignment: Psychology 220A
— Assignment last updated by A.mollusk (talk) 22:46, 16 October 2023 (UTC)

Hi everyone! Just wanted to write here that I plan to work on this article fairly extensively in the next few weeks. I hope to address some of the issues raised here and add more diverse and updated sources. Looking forward to feedback and improving this article! — Preceding unsigned comment added by A.mollusk (talk • contribs) 18:41, 20 October 2023 (UTC)


 * Hi wikipedians! I've given this page quite the overhaul in terms of both structure and sources. I'd be very grateful for feedback and I hope to continue to improve this article based on any thoughts anyone has! A.mollusk (talk) 03:34, 25 November 2023 (UTC)
 * Thanks for your improvements! I think you've added a lot to the article. —Ganesha811 (talk) 00:28, 3 December 2023 (UTC)