Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Intellectual Darwinism


 * 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   no consensus. –MuZemike 19:43, 12 December 2011 (UTC)

Intellectual Darwinism

 * – ( View AfD View log )

This article was flagged for deletion. I want to include the wider community to get a second opinion.--Coin945 (talk) 12:43, 4 December 2011 (UTC)


 * Delete per WP:NEO. The sources are not reliable or have tangental relevance and whilst one or two of the references are okay they're not actually being cited and seem to have been put there just as a weak attempt at preventing deletion. A little bit of WP:OR as well - the Software Architecture analogy is just... weird. - Rushyo  Talk  13:40, 4 December 2011 (UTC)
 * Yes, the article is not perfect, it is a very basic stub. I think we should base this decision though on its notability disregarding the actual article itself. Otherwise an article may be deleted not because the subject is non-notable, but because of its current state. I am not the most esperienced person in this field so I made a very basic stub instead of investing a lot of time into something I didn't understand. Despite the basic article, doing a quick serch guarantees this article notability. I just think it just needs some love and care from more experienced people. I think culling it now would be a shame. P.S. the Software Architecture analogy was taken straight from the source. No original research there.--Coin945 (talk) 14:14, 4 December 2011 (UTC)


 * Keep Used by reliable sources  . Alessandra Napolitano (talk) 19:02, 4 December 2011 (UTC)
 * Delete It's not enough for a neologism to be used in secondary sources. The sources must actually engage in substantial discussion of the term itself, which I don't see happening here. Not ready for prime time at this point. Nwlaw63 (talk) 19:18, 4 December 2011 (UTC)
 * "At this point?" What about article development? You haven't even given the article a chance to grow. A notable topic has the right to be on Wikipedia regardless of its current situation. If the only issue is with its current situation, I retain my original view (as the author), keep.
 * Comment What I mean by 'at this point' is that currently, there are some reliable sources that use the term in passing, but I can't find a substantial number that DISCUSS the term, which is necessary for inclusion. If this evolves to sources actually discussing the term, rather than a few using it briefly in passing, then this may be more appropriate at that point. Nwlaw63 (talk) 20:35, 8 December 2011 (UTC)


 * Delete: There has to be more than just reliable sources using the term. SL93 (talk) 23:23, 4 December 2011 (UTC)
 * Keep "There is an intellectual Darwinism among us that believes if only all that can be said or thought is permitted, right thinking will out...", "Nerds love the idea of intellectual Darwinism because they think they're smarter than everyone around them", "Some studies contend that rich live longer because of intellectual Darwinism.", "Without the hammer of orthodoxy, intellectual Darwinism can bring forward the most popular ideas; acceptance by a broad constituency may be achievable.", "This story reflects a kind of intellectual Darwinism—an epistemological survival of the fittest", "We internalize the cultures of which we are a part, and these days the dominant culture of most academic health centers might be characterized as "intellectual Darwinism," or the pursuit of excellence through competition and human sacrifice.", "At times this ideological tribalism resembles a form of intellectual Darwinism - a communal solidarity of shared intellectual ideas engaged in the struggle for survival against competing attitudes.", "Thus, if one does adopt the viewpoint that modern natural philosophy is optimal, or near optimal,5 then within the framework of intellectual Darwinism the methods of modern science eventually would have been developed without Galileo.", "There is no indication, for example, that Dan's cheerful embrace of the freefloat of intellectual Darwinism that seems to drive Silicon Valley (p. 322) is intended at all ironically"--Coin945 (talk) 23:54, 4 December 2011 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of Philosophy-related deletion discussions.  • Gene93k (talk) 00:03, 5 December 2011 (UTC)


 * Keep I'm with Alessandra Napolitano and Coin 945 on this one. Whatever else we say I do not think we can regard this as a neologism when the earliest example we have seen is from the Harvard Crimson in 1971, and the slightly throw away use of it there suggests that it was not a new coining. That 1971 article contains a concise definition that demonstrates that it was being used in the same sense as in the WP article. There are the other examples scattered across the years since demonstrating that it has entered the lexicon. --AJHingston (talk) 00:07, 5 December 2011 (UTC)
 * Note Anyone care to help me use these sources to build on the basic stub?--Coin945 (talk) 00:20, 5 December 2011 (UTC)
 * Why don't you do that, instead of creating piles of - un-sourced, or poorly sourced - stubs, eventually causing some waste of your, and our, time with these deletion discussions, that wouldn't have happened in the first place if you wanted to. - Nabla (talk) 13:07, 5 December 2011 (UTC)
 * For the record, almost all the articles which were put up for deletion have all had a keep consensus, or are heading that way, so I know that on the whole the issue is not with my articles, but with rash nominations. It is not my fault that these AFD's might be a nuisance to you. It is because people make rash nominations that I have to contest because I know the notability of the articles. There is nothing wrong with creating stub articles. I am doing what was done by many many editors early in the game, its just that now, 5 years down the track, suddenly standards have shot up and there is no such concept as stub improvement anymore. It's all - what you put in the mainspace has to be perfect. Well it doesn't. It's all about growth. You do what you can, and then others come along and build upon what you've done. That's the spirit of Wikipedia. I'm contributing to Wikipedia as much as anyone else, in my own way. Many other editors make legions of stub articles, I don't know why these particular ones are being targeted.--Coin945 (talk) 14:16, 5 December 2011 (UTC)
 * I agree with you on stubs being fine, no article needs to be perfect (ever, let alone after 1 hour). That IS the spirit! I think your stubs are being targeted not because they are stubs, but because they are *poor* stubs. Take a few minutes to format them, e.g. avoid bare URLs - as you did in theis discussion! - and the stubs will look much better. Use better sources than answers.com and the likes, because those are not reliable (sometimes they keep for years hoaxes that were here for a few days or even hours). If you can't find them, move on or search deeper. By doing that you'll spend more time writing good and needed stubs, instead of defending likely valid but very poor stubs. Make it look good. That is also the spirit, I'd say! - Nabla (talk) 15:14, 5 December 2011 (UTC)
 * Ahh well that's where I was sorely mistaken. I thought people would see past the article and instead analyse the concept itself. So you're saying the article's facade is really what gets you over the edge? So be it.--Coin945 (talk) 16:02, 5 December 2011 (UTC)
 * I have made some major edits. Any thoughts?--Coin945 (talk) 16:34, 5 December 2011 (UTC)
 * We can not - not completely - see past the article. Imagine a article about Portugal: «Potugal iza koutri in europa» (In big bold red letters). We should have an article about Portugal (most surely :-), but should we have that article? Evidently not. Your's are not that bad, naturally, but if you do not put any much effort in making it a decent looking article, it will not look credible. Thoughts? Yes. You ignored my suggestion to avoid bare URLs and then ask for comments? You are joking, right? - Nabla (talk) 02:08, 6 December 2011 (UTC)
 * I honestly have no idea what you're talking about. I have reformatted all the references in the article, in the proper format. I have also included many sources and lots of information. I fixed up the bare URL problem. I have put in effort to make the article a decent stub. What's not to like? --Coin945 (talk) 06:48, 6 December 2011 (UTC)
 * The article does look much better NOW, thank you. I note that you formatted the bare URLs 4 hours AFTER my previous comment, and you sure know that, becaue you did it after your comment. - Nabla (talk) 13:45, 6 December 2011 (UTC)
 * Yeah I know, but I thought you were referring to the sources under "References" (which were already formatted by the time you wrote the previous comment), not the sources under "External Links". Sorry, my mistake. At any rate, now they're both formatted.--Coin945 (talk) 15:14, 6 December 2011 (UTC)


 * Delete, not notable, refs do not establish notability. You can add "Darwinism" to countless different words, that doesn't make this a particularly noteworthy idea, even if more than one person has used this term for similar ideas. Hairhorn (talk) 03:26, 5 December 2011 (UTC)
 * How do you know that they're not all talking about the same thing?--Coin945 (talk) 10:36, 5 December 2011 (UTC)
 * Even the entry itself seems confused about what the term is supposed to mean, conflating "ideas" and technology, and confusing the process of technological change with intellectual sparring. Hairhorn (talk) 15:06, 5 December 2011 (UTC)


 * neutral - the article is (despite the large improvement it had) a mess. It is a stream of « said in  that ». They are not even related. There is intellectual Darwinism as a factor is selecting theories; there is some loosely related sentences about technology evolution; and there is intellectual Darwinism as survival / success of the smartest (richest) people. All in all, clearly "intellectual Darwinism" is a nice sounding catch phrase, and is used out there. But the current article completely fails to clearly tell us something about it. I bet we will have a good article about this some day, I am not so sure if this stub will help it to evolve in that direction, or if it will prevent it. - Nabla (talk) 13:58, 6 December 2011 (UTC)
 * It's a work in progress. My job during the major edits before was just to stuff info into the article. Now that we have good sources, we can refine the article, linking up sources relating to similar things and improving the article from there. What we have is a good starting point to an article for a notable topic. There's no point going back now. I say give the article a chance to grow.--Coin945 (talk) 14:08, 7 December 2011 (UTC)
 * Still neutral, but now leaning on delete. It is a bad start. There is a good - I mean, bad... - chance it will take years before it gets into something other than a bunch of loose sentences copy & pasted together. - Nabla (talk) 21:35, 8 December 2011 (UTC)
 * What about these sources? Describes the term and talks a bit about it, explains the philosophy behind the concept, use of the term in 1872--Coin945 (talk) 23:59, 8 December 2011 (UTC)
 * Coin945, whatever you are doing... please, stop. Wouldn't your energy be best spent writing articles instead of unloading loads of web search results on several AfD's about crappy stubs, wasting everyone's - your included - time? - Nabla (talk) 00:58, 9 December 2011 (UTC)
 * test: me starting to get random refs - -Nabla (talk) 01:00, 9 December 2011 (UTC)
 * Jason Menard, in Intellectual Darwinism Doesn’t Always Cull Weak, says «While it would be nice to think that {...} intellectual Darwinism culls the weakest from the herd, the sad fact of the matter is that the rest of us often suffer the brunt of a bad decision made by someone else, out of our control.», Daniel Swanson, from The Harvard Crimson writes that, «There is an intellectual Darwinism among us that believes if only all that can be said or thought is permitted, right thinking will out and the best will come to the fore, But history has shown that there is an economics of ideas as surely as there is an economics of goods», Elaine Schattner, M.D. in Health Tips, News, Opinion, writes at On Media and Intellectual Darwinism in the Blogosphere, «There is value in blogging: Open coverage of news in all fields — including science and medical reports published in top-tier journals — by writers who may think “out of the box” promotes careful analysis from more varied perspectives, critical discussion of developments and, ultimately, progress.», Rocky Kolb,Edward W. Kolb, in Blind watchers of the sky, stated that «if one does adopt the viewpoint that modern natural philosophy is optimal, or near optimal,5 then within the framework of intellectual Darwinism the methods of modern science eventually would have been developed without Galileo.
 * and bang, in 8 minutes only, without really reading any sentence, a referenced article! - PS, OK 10, I forgot to paste the links. But hey! It even has links to real books! - Nabla (talk) 01:12, 9 December 2011 (UTC)
 * I promisse I did NOT took my above references to make a Coin945-style articel from the article. I siomply picked the first few reasonable links from a Google search. Strange thing that these are the article ref's? Is it? Coin945, to get the first google results, there is already Google, thank you very much. changing my vote to delete - Nabla (talk) 01:18, 9 December 2011 (UTC)
 * For the record, I have been swayed towards delete throughout the discussion. I was just trying to find more sources to see if the article was salvagable. Theres no point stuffing info into an article if it is not good info, so that is the only reason why I listed the sources in here first. I have been sufficiently convinced. I will henceforth not contribute to this AfD and let you guys battle it out. You're right. This is wasting everyone's time. Sorry about that. Whatever the result is, so be it.--Coin945 (talk) 03:56, 9 December 2011 (UTC)
 * Thank you - Nabla (talk) 22:43, 9 December 2011 (UTC)


 * Delete as WP:OR. There are many references that use this bigram, but in hugely divergent ways. The article basically just lists what each says. Stuartyeates (talk) 08:46, 9 December 2011 (UTC)
 * Weak Keep It's a pretty lame article as it stands, and virtually the work of a single editor, but it does deal with a genuine phenomenon and cite some adequate references. DaveApter (talk) 15:04, 12 December 2011 (UTC)
 * Keep - Not a neologism, several quality sources. Article needs work, but AfD is not for cleanup.  &mdash;SW&mdash; spout 17:26, 12 December 2011 (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.