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GA Reassessment

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Article (edit | visual edit | history) · Article talk (edit | history) · Watch

Reason why article does not meet the good article criteria

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I am challenging the rating because:

  • the article is not well-written - the prose is not clear

The article is a hopeless mix-up of sentences and paragraphs which are refering to one or other of several different dictionary meanings of the word culture. The trouble is that adjacent sentences or paragraphs may be referring to different uses of the one word, see http://www.thefreedictionary.com/culture and scroll through listings of the word culture in several different dictionaries. It has as many as seven distinct meanings, and at least three of them are being referred to by contributoers to this article.

  • Although the article is "Broad in its coverage:" it is too broad, because it covers several different meanings of the word without distinguishing between them, but it fails to meet the "it stays focused on the topic" because there are at least three different topics and it mixes them up.

There probably needs to be a disambiguation page because these three meanings are each quite big topics --AlotToLearn (talk) 07:45, 17 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Philcha's comments

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I haven't even thought about the prose, because a larger-scale problem is more urgent - the article does not differentiate clearly between the various meanings of "culture" and does not signal clearly which it's talking about at particular points. For example:

  • Section "Culture and anthropology" begins, "Culture is manifested in human artifacts and activities such as music, literature, lifestyle, food, painting and sculpture, theater and film". From an anthropological point of view I suspect these would be rolled up into e.g. "patterns of consumption", and anthropologist would also be interested in allocation of status and authority, economic management (communal property rights, individual property rights, no concept of property in some areas), reproductive and child-rearing behaviour, belief systems, ethics, etc. In fact the 2nd para says something similar.
  • "These definitions, and many others, provide a catalog of the elements of culture. The items catalogued (e.g., a law, a stone tool, a marriage) each have an existence and life-line of their own. They come into space-time at one set of coordinates and go out of it another. While here, they change, so that one may speak of the evolution of the law or the tool" (and anthropology Section "Culture_and_anthropology") is unreferenced. It's also pseudo-philosophical twaddle, confusing class (category of idea / thing) and instance, e.g. in " evolution of the law", "the law" appears to refer to a class but only instances can have space-time coordinates.
  • I think section "Culture as civilization" confuses two ideas that may be causally linked but are conceptually distinct. The "inequalities between European powers and their colonies around the world" were often pure racism but were regarded by some as temporary phenomemena which should be removed as fast as possible by education and training. Any educated European would have been aware that within both advanced and less advanced civilisations there were "high" and "low" / "popular" cultures in the intellectual / artistic sense.
  • Section "Culture as worldview" has no refs and does not convince me. I think most of it describes ideologies adapted from certain philosophers and imposed by authoritarian governments. Of course if you can prove me wrong by finding good refs, that would be an improvement.

A good start would be to list all the relevant meanings of "culture". The ones that occur to me right now are (? out of the 164 definitions referred to?):

  • culture vs instinct (3rd para of lead). For example chimps and some cetaceans have cultures in this sense.
  • patterns of (approved) behaviour - the social anthropology concept (1st 2 paras of lead). Complex, because of divisions within a society that are based on social class, ethnic origin, etc.
  • a group of people who follow an identifiable pattern of behaviour, e.g. the Amish. Similarly complex, e.g. one can talk about both "Western culture" (? actual rule of law, actual equality before the law, actual respect for property rights, etc.) and "British culture" (no comment, I'm a Brit)
  • "the arts" - which gets into discussions about "high culture" vs "popular culture", and often has some links to ethnic / social class divisions.
  • organisational culture. This has its own article but is clearly a sub-class of the "behaviour patterns" meaning.
  • the history of the concept of "culture". Probably most relevant to the social anthropology sense, but the article notes the origin of "organisational culture", and the "high culture" / "low culture" distinction goes back a long way in at least some countries, see e.g Noh vs Kabuki in Japan.

Like AlotToLearn, I think this article may have to be split. I don't this is going to be a quick job. I'd start by opening 2 threads on the Talk page, one to hammer out structure and the other to catalogue sources. --Philcha (talk) 10:34, 17 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Recent revisions

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I could not agree more with the various criticisms, above. This article has become a mess - too many cooks. I think some of the suggestions are well-intentioned but unconstructive, but they all highlight real problems. I have made some changes. The most major was simply deleting the material on different religions and countries - for one thing, very few social scientists and practically no anthropologist uses the word "culture" so crudely to conform to political boundaries. And most of that material just belongs in other articles, indeed, is already in other articles. I tried to keep the focus on what the word culture means and how it is used. This is hard because it means many things and the meaning has changed over time, so i have tried to highlight the major people/groups/academic disciplines that make "culture" a central concept for themselves, I hope people consider this reasonable! I have done what I could to eliminate redundancies and sort out contradictions. Slrubenstein | Talk 22:41, 19 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]

I see that you have done a substantial re-write of the whole Culture article. I am worried that, with so many changes at once, and so little discussion of best approach to resolving the problems there were with the article: (1) some worthwhile material may have been lost; and (2) the article now seems to cover the subject as a history of development of US/UK (and a bit of other Western) academic thought. It does not seem a very worldwide approach, even historically. Surely the topic must have been thought about and studied in other parts of the world! It seems a bit radical to add so much material and delete so much material from an important article in one run. Would it not be best if solutions to the pre-existing problems are arrived at by discussion and tackled bit by bit? Under the verswion you have put up, many items are not referenced and there are several important aspects of the topic, to my way of thinking as a non-academic - which are not covered. In my view, your changes should be undone as they are too radical, but the contents of your new version of the article should be preserved as a communal resource in fixing the previous problems. Would that be OK with you? --AlotToLearn (talk) 00:10, 20 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]

I responded on the talk page to the article, as my revisions were not part of the GA process. I also explain why my personal opinion is that the previous version should not be restored. The changes I made today can be improved on, but at least a student can read it without being unduly confused, and a scholar can read it without laughing. The previous version was so full of fringe views, needless repetitions, and mixed up notable views, that no article at all would have been better. Slrubenstein | Talk 00:26, 20 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]


Philcha's comments on the revision of 22:37, 19 January 2009

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When I looked at the changes made by this edit I did not recognise the article. The result appears to be more like a potted history of the word "culture". When I looked through the diff I also thought that quite alot of baby had been thrown out with the bathwater. However "culture" is a very broad term, so I had a look at the Merriam-Webster Disctionary and found:

  1. cultivation, tillage
  2. the act of developing the intellectual and moral faculties especially by education
  3. expert care and training (beauty culture)
    1. enlightenment and excellence of taste acquired by intellectual and aesthetic training
    2. acquaintance with and taste in fine arts, humanities, and broad aspects of science as distinguished from vocational and technical skills
    1. the integrated pattern of human knowledge, belief, and behavior that depends upon the capacity for learning and transmitting knowledge to succeeding generations
    2. the customary beliefs, social forms, and material traits of a racial, religious, or social group  ; also : the characteristic features of everyday existence (as diversions or a way of life} shared by people in a place or time (popular culture) (southern culture)
    3. the set of shared attitudes, values, goals, and practices that characterizes an institution or organization (a corporate culture focused on the bottom line
    4. the set of values, conventions, or social practices associated with a particular field, activity, or societal characteristic (studying the effect of computers on print culture) (changing the culture of materialism will take time — Peggy O'Mara)
  6. the act or process of cultivating living material (as bacteria or viruses) in prepared nutrient media ; also : a product of such cultivation

Of these only 5.1 even touches on the first meaning that struck me, as I am rather interested in evolution - behaviour patterns that are learned and transmitted rather than instinctive (genetically determined). So I asked Google Scholar and got on the first page alone:

Organizational Culture: Mapping the Terrain] (Joanne Martin; Sage, 2001; ISBN 0803972954)

  • Theorizing Masculinities (Harry Brod, Michael Kaufman; Sage, 1994) - what it means to be a man (as opposed to woman or child)
  • a couple of items about e.g. microbial cultures.

For all its faults, the previous version of this article did a better job of outlining the scope of the term "culture". That scope is so huge that this "top-level" article needs to be part of a package of articles that deals with "culture" in all the relevant fields, and the article for each field will need a few supporting articles per WP:SUMMARY. --Philcha (talk) 00:32, 20 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]

PS That list does not even touch the issue of cultures in non-human animals, for which this search an dThe Question of Animal Culture may be useful starting points. --Philcha (talk) 00:37, 20 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Definition 1 is archaic and mentioned in the first sentence; the last definition is handled by the disambiguation page. Definitions 2 and 4 are related and emerged and had greatest currency in the 19th century, and are covered in the latest revision - in fact, i added some new material on these meanings of culture (I cut only repetitions of the same material).
Beyond that, I think that the dictionary and google scholar are poor tools for developing this article. We wouldn't use this method for the articles on evolution or the theory of relativity. There is indeed a good deal of scholarship on and using the concept of culture but most of it is not represented at Google Scholar; GS does not distinguish between highly significant, less significant, and minor research; moreover, GS presents articles out of context. What we need is what we have at the evolution and theory of relativity articles: some editors who really know the research on the topic and can distinguish between distinct points of view, and also between more and less significant views. All I did in my revision was to delete redundancies and fringe material, and to organize what was left into identifiable points of view. In a few cases I added substance. I did not delete any significant substance. I agree that there is much more to add, but whatever is added, we need to distinguish between major points of view and approaches, and also distinguish between mainstream, majority, minority, and fringe views. I think the current revision provides a foundation for that. Slrubenstein | Talk 18:31, 20 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]
One of the Wikipedia:Good article criteria is "broad in its coverage". While that is less than the Wikipedia:Featured article criteria's " comprehensive: it neglects no major facts or details and places the subject in context", I don't think Culture can pass GA if it has significant gaps. Etymologically it's easy to see the connection from "tillage" to microbial cultures and from "tillage" to the "training and development" senses, which include physical culture as well as the intellectual sense. The article should explain why social anthropology uses the term "culture" to refer to behaviour patterns.
It also needs to explain how to identify types of behaviour as regarded as cultural, as opposed to both idiosyncraties and genetically determined behaviours that are often labelled reflexive or instinctive. The border between culturally and genetically determined behaviours is not clear-cut, and I suspect the article will have to touch on sociobiology while decribing that fuzzy border. From a sociobiological point of view the capacity for culture is an evolutionary "tool" that has enabled us flimsy humans to survive in a world where there are much tougher, faster animals. The evolutionary aspect raises the question of whether some sort of capacity for culture has arisen in other animals.
Returning to humans, the article needs to describe how different cultures are identified. In the present, observation is possible, and in the recent past there are written accounts of others' obersvations. Further back in the past, archeology distinguishes cultures mainly on the basis of their tools. Evidence of different toolsets among different chimp troops again raises the question of whether any non-human species have culture(s).
Back to the present agian , few humans are members of just one culture, and in Western culture there are several types of sub-culture, e.g. ethnic and / or class-based, youth, criminal, and organisational sub-cultures. The division between "high" and "low" / popular culture in the arts and entertainment sense seems historically to have been class-based, with a tendency for the "elite" to co-opt some aspects of popular culture and turn them into shibboleths.
I think culture needs to be a WP:SUMMARY article that covers all this ground. I appreciate that the outline above does not adequately distiguish between specific cultures, culture as a class of behaviour patterns and the capacity for culture. The article would have to do that in orde rto provide coverage that is both broad and focussed, per the Wikipedia:Good article criteria. --Philcha (talk) 20:33, 20 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]
I agree in principle with virtually everything you wrote (you are mistaken only in your minor comment about sociobiology - the substance of your point, that culture was an evolutionary adaptation, is probably correct, I mean only that this point was made by anthropologists long before sociobiology was proposed as a theory, for example Ralph Holloway's Culture: A human domain," in Current Anthropology, 10:395–412 is a good example but this is not by any means the first such claim, Malinowski made this argument in the 1920s although I do not have the specific reference). Of all the points you raise, most of them were not in the previous version. I did remove one mention of chimpanzee culture only because this is a controversial topic and the article cited and accompanying text did not provide an adequate account of the controversy. We may differ only in approach (but I would still like to convince you of my approach!) I just believe that we need to lay out the mainstream points of view, and also lay them out in context, first. Once this is done adequately (and I think my revision was a first step, I acknowledge there is still some more work to be done even to accomplish this), we can then go for breadth in the manner you describe. But I feel strongly that is premature. My concern is that the result will be lose to what we had a few days ago - a jumble of information with inadequate context, inadequate distinction of mainstream and minority views, and no discussion of what is controversial and what is not. I feel that the breadth you want can be accomplished in a very effective way if we first focus on laying out a framework for mainstream points of view. I am not at all arguing against your intentions or aspirations for the article, but i am asking to take things one step at a time. Slrubenstein | Talk 23:13, 20 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]
I suggest you start with 2 sections in the Talk page:(a) structure outline (bullet list works well); (b) categorised list of potential refs, with 1-line commments on what they're good for. That's what I did at Talk:Evolutionary history of life], and I already suspect Culture is an even bigger topic! --Philcha (talk) 23:42, 20 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]
I don't think you afford to ignore animal cultures. In addition to chimp tribes with different toolsets, Japanese macaques are a strong contender, and IIRC bottlenose dolphins have different "dialects" and killer whale pods have favoured techniques and hunting grounds, although cetaceans are a more difficult case becuase they can't use tools. --Philcha (talk) 23:50, 20 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]
I do not think I am ignoring animal cultures. I do not think what I wrote suggested in any way that the article ignore animal cultures. Or did you mean to say something else? Slrubenstein | Talk 00:10, 21 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Sorry if I read too much into your "I did remove one mention of chimpanzee culture only because this is a controversial topic .." --Philcha (talk) 00:26, 21 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Okay, here is what I think: you have some good ideas and I can easily envision a set of sections or subsections: "the evolution of culture" (using mainstream sources like Holloway and Deacon, but to make the point you suggested); followed by "Culture and tools" (which would include a discussion of processual archeology, introducing the concepts of "assemblage" and "matrix" and "material culture, and including a discussion of tool-use among other primates, such as the cases you describe; followed by a section on "Culture and language" going into the current theories in ethnolinguistics and sociolinguistics. All of these could precede or follow parts of what is currently in the section "American Anthropology" (which could be changed to "cultural anthropology." Allow me to point out that none of this was in the version of early yesterday. But I would be all for adding these sections as long as different views were properly identified and contextualized. I deleted the one reference to chimpanzees because it was not adequately contextualized, and the controversy - there is a real debate about the interpretation of these findings - was neglected, so there were serious NPOV problems. We would need someone competent in linguistics, and someone knowledgable about archeology, to work on much of this. However, you express a strong interest and desire to work on it. I have proposed a number of ways to expand the article (and I reiterate that I refer not only to my recent revision but to the previous version). If you think this makes sense, I would like to propose that you work on th section, or subsection, you are most interested in in your sandbox and I will help as much as I can by suggesting some citations, and when you are ready we can just cut and paste it into the article. I do believe you would have to do much more than was in the previous version ... but I am not expecting that you would have to do a lot. Just in this GA1 section you have sketched out more ideas than was in the article I revised. I just think that whatever we add in has to comply with NPOV by clearly identifying different points of views, providing their context, and addressing any controversies, at least briefly. How does this sound to you? Slrubenstein | Talk 00:50, 21 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Actually, looking back over my revision, I see that I kept the reference to research by primatologists. I never deprecated this line of research. But I still maintain that it should be developed in a way that provides context, acknowledges any controversies, and clearly distinguishes between mainstream and minority views. Slrubenstein | Talk 19:15, 21 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Result of GAR - why article has been delisted

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It is now a week since the Good Article Reassessment procedure was initiated. During that review several other editors have agreed that the article was unsatisfactory, because it dealt with many meanings of the word "culture" without distinguishing between them, and one editor has rewritten a substantial portion of the article, removed much of the old the material, and removing material that related to religion and culture. In my view, the quality of the article as it now stands is far from Good, and is only C-Class (see Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Assessment#Grades). Currently, the article addresses the history of the meaning of Culture for the purposes of some academic disciplines for which Culture has relevance, for example, Cultural Studies. I believe that the article on Culture needs firstly to follow the usual (dictionary/ordinary) meanings of the word Culture, distinguishing between them and illustrating those meanings with examples and links to the many other topics in Wikipedia. Those many examples and links in the text might range from (Australian) "Aboriginal culture" or other cultures which have been facing extinction, to "Sculpture", to rap culture, and so on. After the article has dealt with ordinary concepts of culture, it may deal with culture as seen in many research or academic disciplines, including sociology, anthropology, etc. I would happily assist with the improvement of the article, but am at present engaged in other articles which also require improvement. I will come back to the article to assist whenever I get a chance.--AlotToLearn (talk) 09:35, 24 January 2009 (UTC) I also mention my belief that religion, philosophy or cosmology often does play a significant part in defining a culture. For example, Confusianism has had a profound effect on Chinese (and Japanese) cultures for two thousand years, Judaism has a profound effect on Jewish culture, and the Dreamtime spirits and stories of Aboriginal Australians play an important part in their culture, possible over a much greater period of time.--AlotToLearn (talk) 09:42, 24 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Well, Wikipedia is not a dictionary. Anyone can go to Wiktionary or Answers.com for a dictionary definition - but where will people go for an account of the tremendous body of scholarly literature on "culture?" I think we need to start with mainstream scholarship. The article on "gravity" does not start with popular beliefs about gravity, it begins with mainstream scholarship. That is how it should be in a great encylopedia.
Also, most people who study culture consider statements like "Chinese culture" to be misleading, problematic, or at least of limited use. "Culture" consists of diverse traits that are distributed unevenly. One part of China and another part of China may be very different, culturally. Moreover, parts of Vietnam and parts of China may be very similar culturally. The bottom line is: culture is not the same thing as nation, and is not bounded by state borders. To suggest otherwise is to promote a fringe view.
That said, Confucianism does not "influence" Chinese culture, it is part of Chinese culture.
Finally: it is true that many nation-states make claims of cultural distinction. However, there are tens of thousands of distinct societies today on earth. This article cannot have separate sections on the cultures of every society. It would be wrong to single out Han culture, Ashkenazi culture, or Gabi Gabi culture, without discussing the cultures of the 100,000 plus other societies. Even if we devoted only one sentence per society, this article would be too long. It makes much more sense to have separate articles on different nations, ethnic groups, and societies, with sections on their culture. In short, this is an article on "culture," "not "every culture of the world" and it cannot and should not be the latter. Slrubenstein | Talk 14:19, 24 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]
The article needs to focus on the subject(s), not the literature about the subject. Yes, we need the literature for refs, but that's its main role. The article has enough to do in explaining the relevant meanings of "culture", including the complex relationship between cultures and nation-states, and summarising current thinking about each of these.
Re national cultures, in principle I agree that "the article cannot have separate sections on the cultures of every society". However a few well-chosen examples are needed, for the benefit of the average reader who is less familiar with the concepts than you are. --Philcha (talk) 15:53, 26 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]
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