Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Ego (spirituality)

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. Ryan Postlethwaite^{See the mess I've created or let's have banter} 23:35, 26 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Ego (spirituality)

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A sea of original research and editor synthesis, this comes across as a hash of personal essays and bits cribbed from a variety of primary sources (most prominently Eckhard Tolle) rather than a coherent, single topic. Mangoe (talk) 14:36, 18 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This debate has been included in the list of Buddhism-related deletion discussions. • Gene93k (talk) 15:57, 18 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This debate has been included in the list of Spirituality-related deletion discussions. • Gene93k (talk) 15:57, 18 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Keep I'm going to have to oppose deletion here. This is certainly not a wonderful or comprehensive article, but the topic is legitimate and at least some of the material would be usable for constructing a better article. Looie496 (talk) 16:10, 18 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Keep This is a very legitimate mainstream issue. 150 people a day visited. However atheists just don't get it.Drg55 (talk) 17:48, 18 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Drg55, please stop using the number of people who have visited an article in your arguments about the quality of articles and whether edits should stand. Wikipedia is not a popularity contest and the fact that some number of people visited an article does not mean that they all read all of it or that they were pleased with what they read. How can the problems raised by Mangoe be addressed? MartinPoulter (talk) 19:08, 18 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I agree with MartinPoulter. View count has nothing to do with quality. Bots, article reviewers, and people who see a bad article being discussed will all drive up the numbers. The heart of the issue is that the article reads more like a blog post than an encyclopedic article. Andrew³²⁷ 20:29, 18 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]

My point is that 5000 people a month find this an interesting topic and they all had a chance to edit it. My contribution may have had some flaws but it got deleted after I made edits to another page, Bare Faced Messiah. I would hope that people would allow those with an inclination to the subject matter to have the main say and not go after other editors whose views they don't share. I don't take Ignore all rules as open slathers, rather that I find excessive use of rules against people whose views others are trying to suppress. Ignore all rules is about creating an interesting encyclopedia and rhetorical prose can achieve that. Frankly there are three positions, egocentric, godcentric and balance between the two. I thought this was both logical and moral to add in this (sane) position. And then I barely say "OK I'll have a go at rewriting it", and someone wants to take down the page altogether.Drg55 (talk) 07:56, 19 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]

There are Wikipedia articles which get thousands of hits every single day and which are very poor. Only a small proportion of readers are contributors. You can't take those thousands of views as any kind of endorsement or statement of quality. I don't think this is at all about sharing or not sharing personal views. Our personal views on these topics might motivate us to write about them, but are unimportant in deciding how or what Wikipedia articles should be written. Wikipedia is not for original research, no matter what view it promotes. You're not helping your case by speculating about the private views of people ("atheists just don't get it") who question whether this is an appropriate article for Wikipedia. MartinPoulter (talk) 14:07, 19 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Tear down and rebuild. This article should be completely started over, possibly even as a stub. The subject appears to meet GNG, but its current version is too full of original research to save. Andrew³²⁷ 20:20, 18 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Alternately, the article could be deleted and the references to specific religious beliefs be incorporated into their respective articles. Andrew³²⁷ 20:24, 18 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Delete per WP:NOTESSAY. Some well-intentioned person was obviously trying to explain the ego's relationship to a broad range of spiritual influences, but they were unaware of WP:SYNTHESIS and WP:OR. - LuckyLouie (talk) 21:35, 18 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Delete per mangoe and luckylouie. No predjudice against recreation as a non-OR discussion of the topic. I do think that it has merit (a discussion of ego as it relates to various spiritual traditions). --Rocksanddirt (talk) 21:41, 18 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Keep The claims of synthesis and OR are unsupported by evidence or specifics. And, even if there are difficulties of this sort, no cogent reason is given why they cannot be better addressed by ordinary editing. As an example of a paper which discusses such material, and so demonstrates its notability, see Selfhood and Identity in Confucianism, Taoism, Buddhism and Hinduism. Warden (talk) 21:55, 18 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Half of the references are citing directly the person quoted (WP:OR), the other half are citing numerous works of a single fringe occultist. Get rid of that material and there isn't enough left to edit around. I don't dispute the possibility of a legitimate article being written on the subject, but if it is to be done, it needs to be done from scratch. Agricolae (talk) 22:27, 18 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Delete: Personal essay based on OR and synth, and editor's own interpretaion of primary sources. Lots of lumping oranges and apples together as if unrelated concepts that concidently have the same or similar names have anything to do with each other. Whatever synthesis there is certainly does not come from reliable independent secondary sources. Nothing worth saving or merging, and IF there is a coherent topic here, of which I remain to be convinced, this article would not serve as a useful starting point. Not exactly convinced that reliable secondary sources will ever be found, though. Dominus Vobisdu (talk) 21:58, 18 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Religion is not science, it is wholly what people believe or construe. Therefore there are no "reliable sources" a source is ok in so far that a point of view exists. So even a carpenter from Nazareth can have a point of view. Probably accepted points of view are the ones not to be trusted. However when it comes to giving evaluations of other points of view would a rock and roll journalist know anything about religion, or a journalist who just wrote a biography of a sleeze bag pornographer (Miller), or a Jewish psychologist who can't get his facts right in a book about Israel, or a sociologist who believes in demonic cults - the sort of sources I have been battling against by people who are clearly pushing their prejudices on Scientology and gang up on you to defeat your edits. But sometimes we make progress. The article should be a shopping list of ideas distinguished by not being psychological concepts. Freud did not believe in God so he should be out of it. It just maybe needs brevity. I still think my idea of balance of ego and God is valid, if only because I googled it and found it wasn't original research. Which I admit dented my ego a little.Drg55 (talk) 13:41, 20 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]

This is a misunderstanding about reliable sources. Religion, in its different aspects, is the subject of many academic books, journals and university courses. These are the reliable sources, not personal opinion. Please don't attempt any major edits to articles without grasping the reliable sources policy first. MartinPoulter (talk) 16:26, 21 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Delete without prejudice regarding recreation, or blank and start over. If we are to have an article on this topic, it should be scholarly, broad and inclusive, both culturally and historically, not a listing of what an arbitrary collection of obscure self-styled 'spiritual teachers' had to say, as selected by one fringe occultist. If there is a page to be written on the topic, this isn't it, and so little of the content of the current page is likely to end up in the finished product that it will only get in the way of someone doing it right. Agricolae (talk) 22:27, 18 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Comment A large part of the problem with this is the title itself. "Spirituality" covers, well, all of religion that has any notion of a spiritual world. I don't see how this is going to deal with having Christianity, ancient Egypt, Hinduism, and everything else into a stew with various New Age/Theosophist/whatever ideas. Perhaps it's possible to write up something on the latter (without trying to make a synthesis of everything but Islam and fundagelical/Catholic Christianity) but this isn't the right name for such an article. Mangoe (talk) 13:01, 19 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]

The main point about this Mangoe is simply that it is from ego (disambiguation).Drg55 (talk) 10:32, 20 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Delete without prejudice as per comments above. Wikipedia needs content about the different conceptions of ego in different spiritual or religious traditions, but this can be in articles about those traditions, or about specific religious concepts such as Atman. The concept of "ego" is going to differ wildly across different traditions and conceptions of spirituality: so much so that I doubt reliable sources will justify a unified topic. Thanks Warden for providing a specific example of a relevant reliable source, but "Eastern spirituality" is a long way from "spirituality" as a general topic. (as Mangoe rightly spells out) MartinPoulter (talk) 14:13, 19 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Keep - The subject is unquestionably notable, and some of the content can be salvaged. WP:NOTESSAY does not apply to the entire article, but I acknowledge that the article needs to be stripped down to the first couple of paragraphs and then expanded, mostly with scholarly secondary sources. - Mr X 16:28, 25 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Delete: without prejudice to recreation. The easiest way to build an article from scratch is to, well, build it from scratch. That the subject may be notable, and that there might be content worth salvaging, is beside the point. As it stands, this is a steaming heap of WP:OR and WP:SYNTH. Ravenswing 05:25, 26 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Delete - This is a very good WP:OR and WP:SYNTH A m i t ❤ 15:52, 26 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Delete or userfy per MartinPoulter. It has possibilities, but needs rescuing by somebody who knows the topic. Bearian (talk) 17:53, 26 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Delete: as per WP:OR and WP:SYNTH. Stormbay (talk) 21:34, 26 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Merge with Ego (religion), unless someone can convincingly explain the difference. Merger should probably come to "spirituality". The topic itself is highly notable. MartinPoulter makes a good point that "Ego" can be covered within specific religious traditions; but why exclude those discourses that use the word Ego? In addition to Eckhart Tolle, I'm quite sure that Aldous Huxley refers to "Ego" in The Perennial Philosophy. Indeed, "Ego" may be the term of choice for English proponents of the (lower case) "perennial philosophy". More reliable secondary sources should (as usual) be sought in order to provide a broader perspective. groupuscule (talk) 23:03, 26 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]

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.