Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Mental contrasting


 * 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 Delete. --MelanieN (talk) 02:11, 4 October 2015 (UTC)

Mental contrasting

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Article is written like an advert, was created by an editor with a clear COI and relies heavily on primary sources samtar (msg) 19:29, 27 September 2015 (UTC)

Full disclaimer, I am the author of the article put up for deletion, however I contest that the article is written like an advert. Links that would lead to potential monetary or status gain (such as a link to buying a book recently written about Mental Contrasting) are NOT included. Further, false claims about the effectiveness of Mental Contrasting are NOT made and contact information is NOT included. In fact, each claim in the article is backed up by referenced scientific research. While I acknowledge that there may be a slight conflict of interest, according to Wikipedia's guidelines this isn't necessarily a cause for deletion. The information written is presented by me in good faith that the information is relevant and important. This belief is founded in the numerous amounts of news articles that have been written about Mental Contrasting as well as about WOOP. Importantly I will add links to said news articles so that references are not predominantly those of the author of Mental Contrasting. Please note however, that the papers referenced have all been reviewed by top scientific journals in the field of Psychology who have found the findings to be consistent, relevant, and important. Further, hundreds of other psychological papers have cited these articles according to a google scholar search of Mental Contrasting. Lastly, the article in question is relinked from the term WOOP, a page which was put up for deletion several months ago see: here. Consensus on the deletion of WOOP was in no way unanimous and a compromise, namely, linking WOOP to Mental Contrasting was agreed upon. During this time the authenticity and importance of Mental Contrasting was NOT questioned. Removing Mental Contrasting would thus remove not only Mental Contrasting, but also WOOP from any reference on Wikipedia. Furthermore, according to wikipedia traffic statistics (the number of viewers of the page), Mental Contrasting and WOOP have each been searched on average 500 times per month since the beginning of 2015, making an average of 1,000 views to the page a month. In conclusion, I believe it would be a disservice to the Wikipedia community to remove Mental Contrasting. See here. Most of all, I would appreciate any advice of how to continue to improve the page so it is up to Wikipedia's standards AntonGollwitzer (msg) 16:05, 27 September 2015 (EST)

Those interested in this deletion discussion may wish to the the PLOS blog entry Promoting a positive psychology self-help book with a Wikipedia entry which specifically discusses this article.&mdash; Rod talk 19:03, 29 September 2015 (UTC)
 * Delete - there appears to be wide but shallow coverage as criticism of a fringe theory. Bearian (talk) 16:13, 30 September 2015 (UTC)
 * Delete - For all the above reasons . In almost any other article, I would tend to regard the reference list as citation spam - every ref has one author's name in common. There is a question in my mind whether this is also WP:OR?  Velella  Velella Talk 16:38, 30 September 2015 (UTC)
 * Delete- For all of the above reasons and more. The author fails to reveal he is a family member of the author of a self-help book for which the article is coordinated with press releases and an extensive publicity campaign. 19/20 references are to his mother's work. I agree with the other commentator who noted there is a much larger relevant research distinguished only by it not adopting this author's mother 's label and appropriation. Much of this literature is not supportive of the points made in the article. This article indeed reads like an advertisement . If students relied on this article for an understanding of the processes the author subsumes under "mental contrasting," they would get low grades for failing to provide a balanced review and cherrypicking of available literature, choosing only supportive findings. (talk) 19:07, 30 September 2015 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of Behavioural science-related deletion discussions. • Gene93k (talk) 19:40, 2 October 2015 (UTC)


 * Delete 19 out of 20 references are to works by Oettingen, and are therefore primary sources. Wikipedia articles should be mainly based on secondary sources to establish the topic's notability and avoid novel interpretations of primary sources.--Victor Chmara (talk) 11:31, 3 October 2015 (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.