Talk:Online dating

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Requested move 14 March 2023

 * The following is a closed discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. Editors desiring to contest the closing decision should consider a move review after discussing it on the closer's talk page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

The result of the move request was: MOVED. Hadal (talk) 16:33, 21 March 2023 (UTC)

Online dating service → Online dating – WP:CONCISE as the article details both the method in general as well as the services. -  C HAMPION  (talk) (contributions) (logs) 07:48, 14 March 2023 (UTC)
 * Support. This article talks about online dating in general, not the companies that provide the services that facilitate it. Should be moved according to WP:PRIMARYTOPIC. 〜 Festucalex • talk • contribs 15:44, 14 March 2023 (UTC)
 * Comment: The article is primarily about online matchmaking rather than online dating. The dating service is online, but the dating itself is typically not online. —⁠ ⁠BarrelProof (talk) 20:59, 14 March 2023 (UTC)
 * But that is the overwhelming common name for the concept. "Online matchmaking" (including quotes) only has ~5000 results on Google News compared to >300,000 for "Online dating". -  C HAMPION  (talk) (contributions) (logs) 23:48, 14 March 2023 (UTC)
 * Support per WP:COMMONNAME. As a side note, there's some weird duplication of scope between this article, Online dating application, and Mobile dating. Probably in need of some merging. Colin M (talk) 23:14, 14 March 2023 (UTC)
 * There is also Timeline of online dating services, which IMO would also be better if the 'services' was dropped from that title, as it is not exclusively about the services either, Comparison of online dating services on the other hand, makes sense as it is. -  C HAMPION  (talk) (contributions) (logs) 03:01, 15 March 2023 (UTC)
 * Support Per nom. ᴢxᴄᴠʙɴᴍ (ᴛ) 16:28, 15 March 2023 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Harry Benson / Marriage Foundation reference: reliable?
Relative Strangers, Harry Benson 2021

favors the inclusion of this source in the article, but I think it's sketchy. The author has published it through the Marriage Foundation, an marriage counseling company that he is employed by.

CommonKnowledgeCreator says that this is OK because Savanta Comres is the source of the polling data in the article. Edit summary here.

However, Benson is the one who has made the interpretive analysis of the data, and I have no reason to believe his analysis was subject to any kind of peer review, being published by his own employer, a marriage counseling company. I also can't find evidence that Harry Benson has any expertise in data analysis.

From this vantage point, it looks like an unreliable source. Your thoughts? Amaebi-uni (talk) 05:04, 19 June 2024 (UTC)


 * First, according to his Marriage Foundation website profile, Benson is a doctoral student in social policy at the University of Bristol School for Policy Studies. If true, he probably has some education in statistics. More importantly, it is unclear to me why this article's references would or should require publication in a peer-reviewed academic journal since the subject is not an academic, medical, or scientific topic but is a consumer product. The Pew Research Center and Consumer Reports surveys cited in the article are not subject to peer review and release the results of the surveys they conduct on their own websites, just like most polling and survey organizations do. Per WP:SPS, the references in question are not blog or social media posts and self-published sources can be considered reliable when they are produced by subject-matter experts who have worked in the relevant field. Provided that surveys are done with representative sampling and conducted by professional survey organizations, it is unclear why such surveys would need to be peer reviewed for them to be included in related Wikipedia articles.
 * To argue that they shouldn't would be like saying that election polls polling data should not be included in Wikipedia articles about elections because the polls are not peer reviewed and published on the polling organization's website, or that a government census data should not be included in Wikipedia articles about a country's demographics because the government census agency's surveys are not peer reviewed and are published on the government census agency's website. Pew and CR are professional survey organizations and Savanta ComRes is a professional market research and consulting firm. The Pew and CR references cited as far as I can tell at least meet the WP:SPS standard since they are doing nothing other than surveys with representative sampling and are not experimental studies of some kind. While Benson may not have a PhD, many polls and analysis of them are conducted by people who only have a master's degree. Also, the full results of the poll are also available on Savanta's website if there are questions about the survey data itself. As far as I can tell, the data cited in Benson's analysis do not appear to deviate from the poll results. -- CommonKnowledgeCreator (talk) 13:48, 19 June 2024 (UTC)
 * Also per its website Per its website, the Marriage Foundation is a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization registered charity in England and Wales rather than a for-profit company, as opposed to eHarmony, which was also founded by a marriage counselor. -- CommonKnowledgeCreator (talk) 18:25, 19 June 2024 (UTC)
 * This is highly speculatory, but even if it were true, it would still fail WP:EXPERTSPS, which says:
 * Self-published expert sources may be considered reliable when produced by an established subject-matter expert, whose work in the relevant field has previously been published by reliable, independent publications.[g]
 * Possibly having done a class on statistics does not make one an 'expert' in this field. Using Goolge Scholar, I am unable to find evidence that Benson has ever published anything on this field through an independent, reliable source. Most of what he has written consists of self-help books published in Lion Hudson.
 * Lastly, this is not the same thing as election polling results, when released by a reputable publisher, such as Pew Research Center. What we are talking about here is a self-published analysis of data, by Harry Benson.
 * Wikipedia would not want someone like Dr. Phil's analysis of U.S. election data, published through his own website, which is closely approximate to what this is. Wikipedia always gives priority to high quality secondary sources, while discouraging SPS, including for seemingly mundane topics like video games and movies. Amaebi-uni (talk) 01:41, 20 June 2024 (UTC)
 * Wikipedia would not want someone like Dr. Phil's analysis of U.S. election data, published through his own website which is closely approximate to what this is. I think this is an inaccurate analogy to Benson's analysis (since Benson supposedly is a doctoral student in a related field). However, considering that Benson has not published anything in a related field, then fine. It can be removed. -- CommonKnowledgeCreator (talk) 12:08, 20 June 2024 (UTC)
 * In light of this discussion, I've now added a summary of 8 9 studies I found using Google Scholar on associations between online dating, internet access, or mobile phone access and divorce or marriage quality. I searched for meta-analyses but did not find any. This doesn't appear to be as extensively researched of a topic as associations between digital media use and various mental health disorders and other human factors issues. -- CommonKnowledgeCreator (talk) 22:32, 26 June 2024 (UTC)
 * Your recent contribution was overall quite excellent. Thanks for taking the time to cite these works. Amaebi-uni (talk) 11:35, 27 June 2024 (UTC)
 * Your recent contribution was overall quite excellent. Thanks for taking the time to cite these works. Amaebi-uni (talk) 11:35, 27 June 2024 (UTC)