Talk:Ideonomy

COI tag (January 2026)

Created by user named "Gunkelfan". TurboSuperA+_[talk] 10:12, 17 January 2026 (UTC)

I am an independent researcher and the biographer of this unique American who is now deceased. Gunkel has had a website continuously hosted by MIT since the late 1990s because a number of MIT academics and others believed in what he had created.

If my username was RedSoxFan would you tag as COI an update to the Red Sox website? This is pettiness. Look at the sources.

I am the right person to be making these edits. This is exactly what Wikipedia is supposed to be. Gunkelfan (talk) 11:56, 17 January 2026 (UTC)

I came across the page via WP:NPP and I'm trying to follow Wikipedia's P&G. I made the mistake of PROD-ing the article, when I meant to send it to WP:AFD. Other editors will give their opinion on whether the article should be kept or deleted, you can also join the discussion here. TurboSuperA+_[talk] 12:11, 17 January 2026 (UTC)

I understand. I am going to add more secondary sources this morning. I deleted the unpublished source you referred to, as it was not critical to the article. The New England Monthly article you questioned as an LLM hallucination is absolutely real. I am not sure why "can't find in Google scholar" is the criteria that separates legitimate from illegitimate. Gunkelfan (talk) 12:26, 17 January 2026 (UTC)

Fair. I removed the LLM tag. It's just strange that it can't be found on Google Scholar nor the web archive, when one can find journal articles from the 19th century on there. TurboSuperA+_[talk] 12:30, 17 January 2026 (UTC)

Dear @TurboSuperA+

Please withdraw your deletion proposal for this page. You are allowed. I agree the page needed a bit of work when you found it, but I have worked hard to bring it up to spec. At the present moment, nobody who is participating in the AfD discussion is actually looking at the sources I have provided. They are just doing drive-by comments after hitting the “search” button and looking for five seconds. It reflects poorly on the Wikipedia process and community.

According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:My_article_got_nominated_for_deletion!

“the general inclusion threshold is whether the subject is notable enough for at least two people to have written something substantive (more than just a mention) about that subject that has been published in a secondary and reliable source.”

I have repeatedly provided more than the required sources:

- 1985 New England Monthly article focused on ideonomy

- 1987 Wall Street Journal Article focused on ideonomy

- 1989 Book Future Mind (Jerome Glenn) page 137 (you can find this on Google Books)

- Discussion of ideonomy in 1992 Charles van Doren book A History of Knowledge (you can search this on Google Books)

- MIT ideonomy website that was created and funded by Whitman Richards, MIT Faculty advisor, not Gunkel (the creator of ideonomy), and curated by an independent webmaster (Om Gnawali, professor, University of Houston).

- Marvin Minsky, an MIT professor and AI pioneer, referred to ideonomy as “perhaps the most extensive study of ways to generate ideas“ in his book The Emotion Machine (2007).

- 2023 Guido Enthoven book “Towards a Science of Ideas” has a substantial discussion of Gunkel and ideonomy

- Dozens of secondary sources in peer review literature citing ideonomy beginning in the 1980s to the present time (I have added more on the website and can keep doing so, but why bother if nobody is even looking at the sources?)

I have not used any lower-order arguments to argue in favor of the page and I have I have refuted the central point of the deletion issue, which is that this is not a notable article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Arguments_to_avoid_in_deletion_discussions

It is a notable article.

I will personally email you the Hapgood article you originally claimed was an LLM hallucination if you would like. Please don’t refuse to see the evidence and then continue to keep the discussion open however.

Thank you. Gunkelfan (talk) 01:21, 23 January 2026 (UTC)

This is not how to go about this. You do not WP:BADGER editors to do what you want, especially not when you're a single-purpose account. I don't have an obligation to do what you want just because you want it really really badly. Wikipedia works according to WP:CONSENSUS.

You need to read Wikipedia's notability guidelines, especially parts about WP:SIGCOV, WP:TRIVIAL, WP:INDEPENDENT and WP:LASTING. I am not sure passing mention in the 80s counts as significant coverage or lasting impact, which is why I sent it to AfD so we can get opinions from other editors. MIT website is not an independent source because Gunkel worked there.

If I am wrong then other editors will !vote keep and the article will stay. An outcome of AfD can be merger into the Patrick Gunkel article, where there is already a section on Ideonomy that can be expanded and the current Ideonomy article would become a redirect to that section. So the information won't be deleted, just moved to a different place.

Wikipedia is about writing an encyclopaedia. It is up to editors to decide how best to categorise and present information. It is't a promotional website for people and ideas. TurboSuperA+_[talk] 06:19, 23 January 2026 (UTC)

I am sorry you feel badgered. I acknowledge being a new and naive author here and I recognize that you must deal with hundreds of crazy self-promotion attempts every day. But I ask you to consider who is really “going about this” wrong? I did read the notability guidelines because I quoted them to you. And you are still not bothering to look at the sources I provided and as a result you are misrepresenting the subject. The subject continues to be cited today and has been foundational to a number of peer reviewed academic studies including in a machine learning context. Re: the MIT website, it is an independent source because if you actually. click the link and look at it, you will see at the very top that it was not Gunkel’s project but the project of a colleague who understood what Gunkel was doing, and had work done on the site as recently as 2006. Gunkel left MIT in 1974 and did not work there again.

The reason I am turning to you is because you initiated the conversation but now you are not taking any responsibility for it and instead you are relying on others who seem equally disinterested. You said I could participate in the conversation. Perhaps I would choose not be a “single purpose account” if the experience were not so awful. Gunkelfan (talk) 08:24, 23 January 2026 (UTC)

I am sorry you feel badgered.

You're not going to get far on Wikipedia with that attitude. You also need to read Wikipedia's policies and guidelines, because you didn't even !vote properly on the AfD. I suggest you also read WP:NOTHERE. TurboSuperA+_[talk] 09:17, 23 January 2026 (UTC)