Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Menstruation and the origins of culture


 * 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. Cbrown1023 00:06, 5 January 2007 (UTC)

Menstruation and the origins of culture

 * — (View AfD)

Non-notable theory. Authors of the page are Martinklopstock, Chris d knight, and at least one person editing from a dynamic IP address. Authors have resisted efforts to merge this information into other articles, and have also repeatedly deleted tagging of the article as POV.

I believe the topic of the article is not sufficiently notable to have its own article. The lack of notability also means no one has taken the theory seriously enough to criticize it, resulting in a very unbalanced presentation of the theory. I have looked into doing research on each aspect of the theory and citing sources presenting opposing viewpoints, but am afraid applying such citations to this novel theory in a piecemeal way would be OR. Lyrl Talk Contribs 03:11, 30 December 2006 (UTC)
 * Delete as per nom and WP:SOAPBOX. Academic colonization (WP:COI issues) of wikipedia space to support a particular theory without supporting evidence that the theory has had a major impact on discourse. The article presents a very simplistic view of the anthropological study of ritual, morality and kinship by suggesting that the origins of culture can be uncontroversially asserted to have emerged in this specific biological way. This discourse is actually highly contested. Most cultural anthropologists would be alarmed by the Darwinist/Marxist reductionism (as well by the sociobiologically-inclined author's apparent lack of fieldwork experience). If it is proved that this theory has had a widespread enough impact to justify an article, the article would need to be much more balanced. 03:42, 30 December 2006 (UTC)
 * Keep. If "this discourse is highly contested", that means people are talking about the theory. If they are it's notable whether you or I think it's right or not. We have articles on many heavily contested theories. I'm concerned that squeamishness about the topic (especially by editors who have never experienced the phenomenon personally and might think it should be "not talked about" or "isn't important" because they don't experience it) might influence the AfD. -- Charlene 23:33, 30 December 2006 (UTC)
 * Do you have any examples of someone contesting this particular theory? Bwithh was, I believe, talking in general about this entire "class" of theories, not this one in particular.  The lack of such examples is my primary reason for wanting to delete/merge the article.  The fact that no one has taken it seriously enough to criticise it means it is impossible to present the theory in a NPOV way - creating our own criticism would be (I believe) OR. Lyrl  Talk Contribs 15:14, 1 January 2007 (UTC)
 * What we as editors think about the theory is completely irrelevant. Anything we would add to the article would be WP:OR. The only relevant comments are the ones about the existence of reliable sources. ~ trialsanderrors 00:09, 3 January 2007 (UTC)
 * We could add (for example) a referenced source to a book from Frans de Waal noting food sharing between mates and the children of one's mate in two primate species, plus sharing food throughout the community in two additional primate species, in addition to humans. This could be added to the "Reproductive burdens of human females" section and would help make that section NPOV.  I don't think this by itself would be OR.  My fear is that doing this kind of thing point-by-point throughout the entire article would in aggregate be OR, since none of the sourced material would directly refer to this theory. Lyrl  Talk C 01:44, 3 January 2007 (UTC)


 * Delete per the above --RaiderAspect 03:45, 30 December 2006 (UTC)
 * comment about ORLyrl need not worry about OR, because locating opinions and putting them in the appropriate place in the article is not OR--if it were, how could any WP article get written? Giving and explaining his own judgement about the relative value of these opinions, or analyzing the details of their arguments, that would be OR. DGG 05:32, 3 January 2007 (UTC)
 * This discussion has been added as a test case to the proposed guideline Notability (science) ~ trialsanderrors 03:45, 30 December 2006 (UTC)


 * Keep it seems that the book bearing this title has been discussed in scientific circles and numerous reviews exist among established sources. So with great reluctance due to my personal beliefs I have to vote for keeping the article as I believe it can satisfy general criteria for notability (and the proposed WP:Science for that matter). TSO1D 03:51, 30 December 2006 (UTC)
 * If it is kept on that basis, it needs a major rewrite for NPOV - and in that case, why not cut down and merge into Culture and menstruation? I'm not yet convinced that the book/theory has had sufficient influence to give it so much weight for its own article. Bwithh 03:56, 30 December 2006 (UTC)
 * I agree, however concerns about neutrality should not lead to the deletion of an article. The reason given for the deletion was that the topic was not sufficiently notable. Other considerations can be addressed later. TSO1D 03:58, 30 December 2006 (UTC)
 * Okay, I take back the merge suggestion. The target page needs a lot of work, and I think a merge is not suitable at this time... Bwithh 03:59, 30 December 2006 (UTC)
 * Yes, I don't think so either. The article about menstruation and culture mainly discusses the treatment of this process in various societies, whereas this article is a theory that links the origins of culture to menstruation. TSO1D 04:01, 30 December 2006 (UTC)
 * A key reason for my support deletion is concern about whether this particular theory from this particular group of academics crosses the notability threshold. The cultural significance of menstruation is not a obscure or new topic by anthropology standards. Bwithh


 * Provisory Delete The two cited main contributions to the theory (Knight 1991) and (Power/Watts 1997) get ~40 and 3 cites on ISI, respectively. Color me unimpressed. 40 cites is pretty much "talking among yourselves". No sign that this has been picked up by the community at large, although I'll do a closer check of the Knight cites. ~ trialsanderrors 04:04, 30 December 2006 (UTC)
 * I don't know if I would be this skeptical about the number of citations. I mean for the humanities or human sciences such as anthropology you will find a much smaller number of articles than for scientific fields, and considering how obscure this topic is, I don't think that 40 cites is that low. TSO1D 04:15, 30 December 2006 (UTC)
 * Well anthropology may be a modest field in size (but certainly not as small as I dunno, Anglo-Saxon, Norse & Celtic studies, say), but within that field, the question of the origins/construction of culture/society in relation to understanding human drives and functions (such as menstruation) is the central theme Bwithh 04:22, 30 December 2006 (UTC)
 * But look at the impact factor for anthropology journals: http://www.in-cites.com/research/2005/november_7_2005-1.html. Even the 3 citations for one of the papers is above the average, and 40 citations is certainly more than the average, even for something like Nature or Science and that says a lot. So I actually think the number of citations should be taken as proof of the importance of the papers on this topic rather than the opposite. TSO1D 04:33, 30 December 2006 (UTC)
 * Average isn't a very good measure as it might be the result of a long tail rather than less cites even among top contributions. Sadly ISI doesn't have a record on the book, only counts so I can't tell where the cites come from. ~ trialsanderrors 06:20, 30 December 2006 (UTC)


 * Changed to Redirect with merger of appropriate content. Enough notability seems established that this can be seen as one point of view in a larger debate. The necessary threshold for a stand-alone article, that multiple researchers (or the general public) have weighed in with diverging points of view, has not been established. Also, there is no evidence that this article might attract editors with diverging viewpoints so that WP:NPOV can be ensured in the long run. ~ trialsanderrors 22:14, 2 January 2007 (UTC)
 * Delete Textbook OR. Just H 04:14, 30 December 2006 (UTC)
 * I'm sorry, but how is this original research? It is based on a published theory. TSO1D 04:17, 30 December 2006 (UTC)


 * Delete per WP:OR -- Selmo  (talk) 04:57, 30 December 2006 (UTC)
 * Keep I'm satisfied it meets notability requirements. I really don't see the original research, it could use inline citations though. Quadzilla99 10:27, 30 December 2006 (UTC)
 * Very weak keep changed to Delete and merge (as per Demiurge and Lyrl), provided that it can be rewritten to reflect more than one perspective and substantially revised in tone (Its proponents argue that it is at least testable and can be proved wrong. How might it be proved wrong?) so that it looks more like an encyclopedia article. Cited sources and JSTOR/AnthroSource seem to indicate that Knight is a notable enough scholar on the topic of menstruation.--Media anthro 12:35, 30 December 2006 (UTC)
 * Delete, although it is not original research, the article is written to advocate a particular theory and does not use an encyclopaedic tone, thus violating WP:NPOV. This theory may be worthy of a paragraph in Culture and menstruation. Demiurge 14:17, 30 December 2006 (UTC)
 * I think it may also be worthy of a paragraph in concealed ovulation, as its explanation of why concealed ovulation was a successful evolutionary feature is a central part of this theory. Presentation in that article alongside other theories also better lends itself to NPOV than a stand-alone article does. Lyrl  Talk Contribs 15:49, 30 December 2006 (UTC)


 * Comment, what notability guidelines current apply to this article?
 * Also, I'm not convinced this article meets the proposed guidelines in Notability (science), which has two sets of criteria, one general and one specifically for theories.
 * In the general criteria, this article does not at all meet #4-8. The first three criteria it might meet, but I think unlikely:
 * # 1 "generally accepted scientific knowledge" - I'm not familiar enough with the relevant field to tell for sure. But from my familiarity with fertility and the menstrual cycle, their theory seems biologically implausible.  From Bwithh's reaction, above, I would tend to think that people more familiar with this field also do not find it to have been "generally accepted".
 * # 2 is kind of vague, requiring "a number" of peer-reviewed papers, but I can only find two possibilities in the article's reference list ("The human symbolic revolution: A Darwinian account" in Cambridge Archaeological Journal, and "The woman with the zebra's penis. Gender, mutability and performance" in Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute.) All their other publications appear to not be peer-reviewed.  I don't believe two papers qualifies as "a number".
 * # 3 - supported by major scientific institutions. There is one issue of an online journal published by the New College of California supposedly related to this theory, though most of the articles actually appear to have only tangentially related topics.  I have not previously heard of the New College of California, and don't believe it is a major scientific institution.
 * In the theories criteria, this article does not at all meet #1 or #3-5.
 * As for #2 ("widely cited in its research area relative to other publications in the same area"), the debate above is not one I feel qualified to participate in. I'm not convinced, however, that possibly meeting this one criterion means it has sufficient notability to be its own article.
 * Lyrl Talk Contribs 16:21, 30 December 2006 (UTC)
 * I followed up on the New College of California link, and did a little reading. The college does not appear to be a substantial institution, though it does appear to have some form of accreditation. WMMartin 21:56, 3 January 2007 (UTC)

The deletion processes all focus on whether an article meets the criteria for existence on Wikipedia; that is, they are to determine whether it is not original research, its central information is verifiable, and it is capable of achieving a neutral point of view with good editorship. XfD (deletion) processes are not a way to complain or remove material that is personally disliked, whose perspective is against ones beliefs, or which is not yet presented neutrally. Using XfD as a "protest strategy" in an editorial or Neutral Point of View (NPOV) debate is generally an abuse of process and the article will usually be speedy kept. Many of the comments above fall, I believe, into this category. The article is clearly NOT original research (it is published); the information contained in this article is heavily referenced; there is reference to the theory in other publications (e.g. Watts, I. 2005. ‘Time, too, grows on the Moon’: Some evidence for Knight’s theory of a human universal. In W. James & D. Mills (eds), The Qualities of Time: Anthropological Approaches. New York: Berg, pp. 95-118.); and the style is capable of being made more neutral. On this basis, I propose to remove the deletion tag and engage with the content of this article, instead of threatening deletion.86.132.127.124 18:16, 1 January 2007 (UTC)
 * delete non notable to my eyes.Droliver 18:58, 30 December 2006 (UTC)
 * Delete, Wikipedia, as a general knowledge encyclopedia, does not need to go so deeply into the concept of menstruation to require an entire article on this topic. Recury 21:21, 30 December 2006 (UTC)
 * Delete Non notable, theory that appears to be a large OR Synthesis. --Wildnox(talk) 21:56, 30 December 2006 (UTC)
 * Keep, cleanup, delete massive swathes of WP:OR, and possibly merge. I am not an anthropologist, but the theory sounds very silly. However, it seems to have been the subject of a peer-reviewed book from YUP. I'm aware from my own field that having these kinds of articles is intensely irritating because of the weirdos they attract, but really that YUP text does it for me. Do drop me a line on my talk page if there is something going on I don't see. Sdedeo (tips) 22:49, 30 December 2006 (UTC)
 * Keep per TSO1D or Merge. While I agree that it seems like a relatively minor theory, I don't see how Wikipedia is harmed by having a mention of this theory.  However, the problems with tone in this article, combined with the fact that no other articles link to it, might make merging a good option.  --Jackhorkheimer 23:26, 30 December 2006 (UTC)
 * Merge anything useful and sourced to Menstruation. --Duke of Duchess Street 02:11, 31 December 2006 (UTC)
 * It's tough to decide when a scientific theory itself is notable enough for an encyclopedia entry. this answer is going make it obvious that I'm in law school, but here it goes.  I think any Frye-type general acceptance standard would be too stringent.  Instead I'd prefer something closer to the Daubert standard.  Of course, here we are not judging the reliability expert witnesses but evaluating the notability of a scientific notion.  Nonetheless, some of the same criteria that are used to evaluate reliability are illuminating for notability: is the theory peer reviewed?, is it falsifiable?, is it testable?, is it generally accepted?, etc.  This theory is obviously not generally accepted.  Only two proven peer reviewed articles for the whole theory does not indicate, absent any additional indicia, that the theory is sufficiently reliable or notable in the scientific community to warrant an encyclopedia article at this time.  Thus, Delete.-- danntm T C 06:10, 1 January 2007 (UTC)
 * Keep The tone of this article is now heavily influenced by hostile editing. The fact that the theory is published in reputable journals and a reputable book publishers (e.g. Yale U.P, Edinburgh U. P.) might not make it 'generally accepted', but it does indicate that the content of the theory clears the threshold of academic respectibility. As various 'Keep' proponents have suggested above, being a minor theory does not necessarily qualify it for merger or deletion. Merger with articles which are in no way focused on the origins of human culture (which is the specific focus of this article) makes no academic sense and deprives readers of a coherent theory on the subject. Right from the start, this article has been threatened with merger or deletion, and - significantly - none of the critics seem to be professional anthropologists. Much of the criticism is vague and unsubstatiated ('non notable to my eyes' etc.), and, in my view, suffers from the very symptom it accuses the article of: point of view. A little more neutrality and democracy would be appreciated. Who exactly is harmed by this being a separate article? Why so hostile? I cannot but think that this is a more or less personal vendetta by a few editors, and has nothing at all to do with the science in this article.86.132.127.124 18:02, 1 January 2007 (UTC)
 * Keep (Rm duplicate) I would like to remind readers of the 'abuse of the deletion policy' comments on this website: Abuse of deletion process
 * KeepI agree with the anonymous .124, and add that in the social sciences such as cultural anthropology, the distinction between notable theories and those that are not is not quite as marked as in the natural sciences. It depends a good deal on how other subsequently make use of it. Since the concept has found its way into mainstream literature, that's as much as we need. If the article needs improvement, improve it. It sometimes seems that we resort to Afd in order to get improvements made, which is not exactly the intent. It should get deleted only if they can be demonstrated to be be improvable enought to meet our standards.DGG 09:06, 2 January 2007 (UTC)
 * The originator of the theory published a book. Later, years after the book, he and his two partners seem to have published two peer-reviewed papers, amoung other (non-peer reviewed) publications.  No one other than these three people seems to have worked on the theory.
 * Others have commented that the book publisher (Yale University Press) is highly regarded. Not being familiar with them, does that mean that all 3,000 books in print from YUP are notable enough to deserve a Wikipedia article?
 * My main concern is that it is not possible to present this theory as a stand-alone article in an NPOV way, because there is no criticism of it. If someone could find a critique of this theory, or explain to me that piecemealing together other people's comments that contradict specific bits of this theory into a critique is somehow not OR#SYNTHESIS, then I would happily withdraw my nomination. ]  Talk C 13:41, 2 January 2007 (UTC)


 * Delete. Like Bwithh I feel uncomfortable with "academic colonisation". Feelings, however, are not what I use here. Here I support deletion because there is clear COI from at least one editor ( WP:SOAPBOX ). In addition, I have in mind the various comments of Jimbo Wales on original research. The WP:OR guidelines seem to me to be slightly biased towards the physical sciences ( dealing with perpetual motion machines and so on ), so in areas which are at best "soft" sciences I think we have to tread with a little extra care. In the soft disciplines people can advance all sorts of ideas in journals, and have them discussed, without these ideas forming part of the mainstream, or even a significant part of the broader dialectic. It seems to me, on the basis of reading the article and some googling, that the case for counting this idea as one sufficiently significant to have its own article has not been made coherently enough. For now I suggest the a brief paragraph be added to the article on Symbolic Culture noting this topic, but that we delete this article. In addition I'd like to encourage the authors of this article to expand the Symbolic Culture article, if they can resist theory-pushing, with more general information on this subject. Finally, as an entirely personal comment: I found at least six logical flaws and lacunae whilst reading the article before I stopped counting, which doesn't inspire much confidence in the subject of the article as a whole. WMMartin 15:55, 2 January 2007 (UTC)
 * Oh, I almost forgot: per Lyrl I also suggest slightly more in Concealed Ovulation than the current single sentence - not a whole paragraph more, just a couple more sentences on the main points. WMMartin 15:59, 2 January 2007 (UTC)
 * Keep Given that there are only slightly fewer 'Keep' than 'Delete' votes, can someone please explain how a decision is ultimately arrived at? The fact that this is clearly not a clear-cut case suggests that at the very least that there are genuine differences of view which cannot simply be settled by carrying on this kind of dialogue at infinitum. I therefore suggest that this article should be kept, that the content should be improved where it merits improvement, and that as the encyclopedia content for cultural anthropology grows the situation is reassessed in the future. (Merger with Symbolic Culture is a future possibility, but that article is currently a stub, and merger should only be considered when it actually improves the content). The main problem with 'merger' or reducing the article to a paragraph is that the theory itself is then all but lost. With regard to the point raised above about Yale Univ. Press, I can only surmise that the comment was made by someone who has no clue about social science publishing. Yale, Harvard, Stanford, MIT, Oxord, Cambridge and Chicago university presses are among the most respected English language academic publishers whose content is rigorously peer reviewed. While this clearly does not mean that all their publications merit inclusion in Wikipedia as articles, it does mean that this article is not some kind of crackpot theory that should be deleted just because attempts to find references to it on Google failed. A reference to the theory in the literature was given above. Can we make a decision and concentrate on improving the content rather than spending all this time on debating deletion?Martinklopstock 17:59, 2 January 2007 (UTC)
 * Martin, perhaps the first thing to understand is that this is not a "vote". Although most of us tend to express an opinion in AfD discussions, what we are looking for is some kind of consensus on what should be done about an article, working as closely as possible within the guidelines we use to decide what constitutes a suitable article for Wikipedia. You can understand why this article has been nominated for deletion by looking at the guide to deletion. It's very clear from the article's "talk" page that Lyrl ( the person who nominated this article for deletion ) has tried to engage you and the other major contributors to the article over the past several months, to get the article up to what he would feel is encyclopedic standard, and I can certainly understand why he has eventually, and presumably with some reluctance, decided to put the article up for deletion. ( Although I haven't checked with Lyrl, most people hate nominating articles for deletion after they've spent a while trying to get them improved, as deletion means all their work has been in vain. ) Nominating the article for deletion is not an attack on you, and in general it's useful to assume good faith on the part of editors.
 * Now, there's the question of "the facts". I'm here "assuming good faith", because I don't have access to the offline references cited in the article, but I'm quite prepared to take the existence of suitable academic references to this theory on trust. I'm sure that the theory has been written up in a paper in an academic journal, and cited in a few other papers. Are the references there ? Yes, I trust you when you say they are. As I noted earlier, it seems to me to be a poorly reasoned and logically weak theory, but that's because I'm from the hard sciences, and we don't expect the same kind of rigorous thinking in the softer disciplines. A similarly presented theory in physics or chemistry would not be treated seriously, but that isn't the point here. There are plenty of other articles about weakly reasoned theories in Wikipedia, ( Freudianism and astrology, for example ), but we keep them.
 * So, that the theory exists is true, and its logical quality is of no relevance. So why are we having this discussion ? Because we also need to establish a couple of other things: notability, and absence of conflict of interest. In this case it seems to me that the two things are closely inter-linked.
 * A notable theory is one that is widely discussed and cited in its field. Now, Chris Knight's theory is certainly discussed, but what worries me is the people who are discussing it. In particular, the two main people who have worked on this theory other than Knight were both PhD students of his, who would have had a clear vested interest in supporting their supervisor's work. The other people who seem to mention Knight and this theory are very often linked to something called the "Radical Anthropology Group" ( http://www.radicalanthropologygroup.org/class_lecturers.htm ), which seems to be largely run by Chris Knight himself, or share its fairly overt political stance. So whilst the theory may be, in some sense, "notable", it seems to be notable only in a kind of "walled garden" in which people are mostly talking to themselves. You can now see why I think there's a kind of conflict of interest going on: much of the google-hittage about this article ( once we ignore the mirrors of Wikipedia ) seems to have some kind of personal connection to the theory's originator. If you check my contributions to Wikipedia you'll see that I spend a lot of time looking at deletion debates: one thing that we see a lot is people putting in articles about themselves to somehow try to make themselves seem more significant, for a whole variety of reasons. As it stands, this article gives me that feeling: it gives the impression of trying to "big up" a particular theory, which is why I think it should go, at least for the moment. What would make me change my mind is this: a couple of good solid references to academic articles taking this theory seriously, not written by people close to Knight and his colleagues. Ideally, they should link this theory into broader currents in anthropological thinking, and show why this theory is different from, and should be taken more seriously than, any of the dozens of other theories that emerge from the minds of academics every day. If this theory is notable, it will be widely debated, not simply taken on board by its originator's students. So far, despite the efforts of Lyrl, I already forgot and others, it hasn't been shown clearly enough that this is the case.
 * I hope this is of some help. Feel free to contact me anytime. WMMartin 22:05, 2 January 2007 (UTC)
 * commment Despite the much greater detail and obvious subject knowledge, this is at heart similar to the statement above that menstruation isn't worth much coverage in WP.

I think judgments based on personal impressions about what theories are important are irrelevant. On the other hand, I think judgements based on discussions such as you've just given are OR. It is not our role to give our impressions of whether a topic is important, nor is it our role to evaluate the true scientific significance. It is our role to judge whether the evidence supplied about notability is sufficient. Numbers help--and 40 cites for a book in the social sciences in ISI is way above the average. Just check some other books. There is a certain tendency in these debates to be particularly strict aboutthe more recondite academic topics, or about topics that seem unusual. These sort of topics is what an encyclopedia is for--especially WP. DGG 02:12, 4 January 2007 (UTC)
 * DGG: I think you may have posted this comment in the wrong place, but if it is directed at me, here is a response:
 * (1) I'm certainly not saying that "menstruation isn't worth much coverage in WP". A careful reading of my comments will reveal that I don't use the word once, and, so far as I can tell, haven't referenced it implicitly - I've tried to keep to the topic of this debate, which is a theory about possible cultural phenomena arising from or related to menstruation, and not about menstruation per se.
 * (2) I agree that my personal impression of the theory is irrelevant, and explicitly say so ( "its logical quality is of no relevance" ). I have in the past participated in many deletion debates in which I have supported retention of an article despite poor logical content. I believe I understand the general principles applicable in this and other cases.
 * (3) So far as I can tell, I haven't done any OR in making my posting, I've simply stated my opinion. I have been careful to "own" my comments by using phrases like "I think" and "my feeling".
 * (4) I've tried to express clearly why I feel it would be better to delete this article, at least for now. To repeat and paraphrase a bit: my worry is that when I try to find evidence of a broad discussion of this theory I always end up with the same small circle of people. I believe a notable theory is one that is broadly debated or understood in its discipline, and at present I see no evidence to support this contention. I explicitly state what I feel would help ( "a couple of good solid references to academic articles taking this theory seriously, not written by people close to Knight and his colleagues" ). The problem is that despite the efforts of several people to improve this article over the past few months, there is still no evidence that this is anything more than an idea circulating among a small group, and that's why I think it's on balance not suitable for inclusion here.
 * I hope this is clear and helpful. If not, please get in touch with me. Please note, though, that I shall be online only intermittently for the next few days, so my responses may be a little slow. WMMartin 14:48, 4 January 2007 (UTC)
 * Comment I think we can all agree it could use inline citations. Quadzilla99 07:03, 4 January 2007 (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.