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The result was nomination withdrawn; article has been rewritten to take a more realistic and properly sourced view of the topic. Bearcat (talk) 21:47, 15 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Friending (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) – (View log)

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This appears not to be a real, properly referenced encyclopedia article, but an original research essay trying to extrapolate a concept from social networking websites into a neologistic analysis of social interaction — which is, for the record, quite separate from the age-old concept of just becoming friends; rather, it seems to be a really bizarre new marketing theory with little discernible correspondence to the real world outside of Facebook, setting forth unattested subconcepts such as "outdoor friending", "indoor friending", "print friending", "mobile friending" and "souvenir friending" (um, er, you want to what now?), and grasping at straws to cite "examples" as diverse as smartphone boot screens, cardboard robots, public art installations, video display technology and — I kid you not — Buddhist prayer wheels (but failing, of course, to explain how the prayer wheels actually do anything that could be characterized as "friending".) As always, Wikipedia is not the place to publish original thought and unreferenced cultural studies essays; we should not have an article about something like this until there's actual social and cultural research published into it as an actual thing. Delete, though I'd also settle for a redirect to friend or social networking service or some plausible existing topic (it was actually a redirect to social networking service until this user came along; the primary reason I'm bringing it to AFD now is that I initially redirected it again, but the user then came back and undid that edit, so I'd prefer to get a consensus rather than getting into an edit war.) Bearcat (talk) 16:48, 15 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]

• Delete - WP:OR whether by synthesis or not; basically an uncited WP:ESSAY with a lot of examples from the web, if that's not a contradiction in terms. Chiswick Chap (talk) 17:34, 15 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]

It isn't a contradiction. Just to clarify: he does provide citations for the existence of some individual things that he lists as examples of the concept in action (although not all of them — frex, the cardboard robots and the magazines that pay you to read them are uncited, and the Buddhist prayer wheels are cited to a virtually empty page), but he fails to provide any cited evidence that this concept of "friending" actually has anything to do with any of them. Bearcat (talk) 18:07, 15 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This debate has been included in the list of Internet-related deletion discussions. • Gene93k (talk) 18:37, 15 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]

• Update: Another user has revised the article to a more valid and properly sourced version of the topic; accordingly, I am withdrawing this nomination. Bearcat (talk) 21:47, 15 February 2012 (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.