Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Golden hammer


 * 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The result was   Withdrawn by nominator. Non-admin closure.— S Marshall  Talk / Cont  08:04, 8 April 2009 (UTC)

Golden hammer

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I've been unable to find any good sources that define "golden hammer" as this articles does, and it has been long unsourced; recent sources for related concepts don't mention "golden" in them at all. Dicklyon (talk) 23:32, 29 March 2009 (UTC) 
 * This article appears to be an original blend of multiple different recognized and properly documented (by sources) concepts: functional fixedness, silver bullets, the Einstellung effect, and Kaplan's Law of the instrument. Since
 * we're lacking an article on the fourth,
 * sources do not call this confused and novel mish-mash of multiple concepts a "golden hammer" (At most, a very few clearly inexpert sources call the single "everything is a nail" aphorism a "golden hammer rule". But then many other sources do not, or make up their own nonce names for it that there is no actual agreement on.  And it's patently not a coherent subject in its own right, being an aphorism that is employed, but not treated as a topic itself, in discussions of several of the aforementioned actual subjects.), and
 * the ground covered by this article outside of Kaplan's law is already covered by other articles,
 * renaming this to Law of the instrument and refactoring the article to focus upon that (observing that this article doesn't actually cover it in the depths that sources do, yet) seems to be an appropriate course of action. Uncle G (talk) 02:17, 30 March 2009 (UTC)
 * Comment This is one of the only references I can find, unfortunately the article seems to steal a bit from this, so it'd be a delete anyway! Dylanfromthenorth (talk) 09:17, 30 March 2009 (UTC)
 * Redirect to Law of the instrument and move apropriate content there. Nixdorf (talk) 17:46, 1 April 2009 (UTC)
 * Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion so consensus may be reached. Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks, Ron Ritzman (talk) 23:59, 2 April 2009 (UTC)


 * Keep and perhaps move/redirect as suggested by Uncle G. I find this phrase repeatedly used matter of factly in reliable sources .  Notability seems assured, and an article explaining the idiom seems warranted.  There also seem to be (several?) Golden Hammer Award(s), which seem to be unrelated to the idiom, and make searching news sources difficult. - Smerdis of Tlön (talk) 15:25, 3 April 2009 (UTC)
 * Move to Law of the instrument and refocus. The uses of "golden hammer" in a few reliable sources seem to suggest it's a bit of a neologism (it seems to appear mostly in books on Java programming, so someone there may have come up with it).  To get beyond that to notability would require a source about the term, or the concept referred to by that term.  That's what I haven't been able to find.  The "law of the instrument", however, is widely discussed and attributed in books, so that would be a good title to move to and re-focus the contents on.  Doing more work, it appears that the "law of the instrument" comes from a 1998 book, while "Maslow's hammer", originating in Abraham H. Maslow's 1962 book Toward a psychology of being, is widely cited before that; so maybe "Maslow's hammer" is the right new topic to move it.  I went ahead and did some cleanup and added some sources, preparing to move, probably to Maslow's hammer, when we're done here. Dicklyon (talk) 00:12, 4 April 2009 (UTC)
 * Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion so consensus may be reached. Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks,  MBisanz  talk 00:00, 8 April 2009 (UTC)


 * Comment – since I, the nominator, no longer want to delete it, and have worked on it to save it by moving it, I'll just go ahead. Dicklyon (talk) 03:49, 8 April 2009 (UTC)
 * Done. Moved to Maslow's hammer and made redirect from Law of the instrument as well as Golden hammer. Dicklyon (talk) 03:54, 8 April 2009 (UTC)


 * 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.