User talk:ViolinGoddess

A belated welcome!

Here's wishing you a belated welcome to Wikipedia, ViolinGoddess. I see that you've already been around a while and wanted to thank you for your contributions. Though you seem to have been successful in finding your way around, you may benefit from following some of the links below, which help editors get the most out of Wikipedia:

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Again, welcome! Yngvadottir (talk) 03:52, 24 March 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Hi! Thank you for your effort at Mermaids: The Body Found, but I reverted back to the version before the IP editor had changed it to "documentary" and removed the criticism section. Reliable sources agree it was a hoax, and we don't put in personal observations or reactions, just the facts as the reliable sources have them. Yngvadottir (talk) 03:52, 24 March 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Help request

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I have a lot of questions about editing the Otherkin page. I have web sources and book sources to reference. But since the Otherkin Community are a group of people, there are many changes and edits I can change because I AM Otherkin. To be precise, I'm Elven and Angelkin. I've been an active member of the Otherkin community for 15 years. I can inform people more completely about who those who believe themselves to be Otherkin are, what we believe, why it's not a religion, and why this started decades before the internet was born. Closer to the time the personal computer was born, actually. The Identity of being Otherkin is similar to being Transgender. You feel like you were born in the wrong body. You look in the mirror, and your face "feels" wrong, your body feels wrong. You don't feel at home when you're "home". Some of us feel more at home in forests, swimming, rock climbing, and in high places. Some of us have good night vision, some burn easily in the sun, or their eyes are photosensitive, some have accurate hearing, directional hearing (like if you've ever seen a cat pivot their ears when they hear something), One friend that keeps his anvil in his car, and another friend who had pushed her bed into the corner of her room, and put her fish tank along the outer side so that the only way to get into her bed was from the foot. And you could see the way she had been sleeping, her blankets and sheets were all spun in a circle. And then it dawned on me, she was nesting. (That friends is a Dragon). The biggest point I'm trying to make is that there is SOME information that I can reference from the books that we have written out ourselves. But the entire experience about being Otherkin is just that, each of our individual experiences. We are so few and far between that we didn't know each other existed until the internet formed and we created groups where we could discuss these things that we have in common. And after a few years "The Definition" of "what is Otherkin" became the accumulation of the patterns that we saw in the Kin in our community. We discovered that many of us felt that J.R.R. Tolkien wrote about places that felt like home to us! We were amazed at how accurate he described the Elven forests, the Dwarven mountains, how the trees could talk, how intelligent the Dragons were (although severely shown as overly greedy and destructive). Others connections with the Olde Celtic Faery Lore. The Tuatha Dé Danann, the ones who can follow their family lineage all the back to ancient Ireland during the Mythological Cycle, when it was thought wise for the nobility to inter-marry with the Fae to strengthen the bloodline. I can even tell you who it was that first used the term "Elfkind", all those years ago. It was Zardoa and Silver Flame, also known as The Silver Elves. You see, like the Wikipedia Community, The Otherkin Community is always expanding and changing as each member delves deeper into him/herself and remembers more about who they were, or still are inside. And through that, we, collectively become a more well defined Kin. But the only way I can do that is by adding this information to the article because it is through my own experience as one who is Otherkin. That Otherkin is a community of people of are self-defined and ever-seaching for more about our "S'elves". You see my problem? Please tell me what I can do?! Thank you So much! {{ViolinGoddess (talk) 04:15, 7 May 2015 (UTC)}}[reply]

Welcome to Wikipedia. I have moved this down because new contributions to a talk page should go at the bottom, to keep the conversation in order.

No, sorry, Wikipedia cannot accept anything that is based only on your personal experience. The Wikipedia:Verifiability policy is summarised as "any material challenged or likely to be challenged must be attributed to a reliable, published source." The point of published is that a reader should, in principle, be able to check where Wikipedia's facts come from. Read the whole of WP:Verifiability, and also WP:No original research, which are two of the three fundamental content policies.

The third is WP:Neutral point of view, and you should be careful about that, too. As a member of the community, you have a WP:Conflict of interest in writing about them (see also the Wikipedia:Plain and simple conflict of interest guide, and should be careful not to write in a promotional style or to insert your own opinions. I'm sorry if all this seems discouraging, and gives you a lot to read, but Wikipedia is a neutral, factual encyclopedia and only an encyclopedia, and has to resist attempts to turn it into anything else. Regards, JohnCD (talk) 07:02, 7 May 2015 (UTC)[reply]

This help request has been answered. If you need more help, you can ask another question on your talk page, contact the responding user(s) directly on their user talk page, or consider visiting the Teahouse.

I understand all of the precautions you and your site has taken to make sure the information posted here is reliable, unbiased and well, encyclopedic. Would you consider information that has been collected by members of the Otherkin Community and either published in books, or posted on websites and our own yahoo groups coming from "a reliable published source"? (Me being careful to avoid "promotional" and "my or singular opinions" but rather the COLLECTIVE AND AGREED UPON INFORMATION that WE as the Otherkin Community Define Ourselves as. You see, when I read the Wikipedia page on "Otherkin", I found it, vague, confused, presumptive, judgmental, and found a lot of "guess work" by "scholars" that based statements "what we SEEM TO BE" not what we are! Some of the information was misleading, some of it was (honestly) offensive, and some of it was just plain incorrect!! This is what moved me to want to edit the page. I will say it again (but I CANNOT EMPHASIZE THIS ENOUGH!) The definition of "What is Otherkin?" is (in retrospect) a collaborative effort of the community itself to discover what we all have in common (this concept & feeling of "OTHER-ness). I can give you references of collective memories of over a dozen and more individual Otherkin that remembered THE SAME PLACES, MAGICKS, HISTORY, SPECIES, AND EVEN LANGUAGES. If you allow me to edit this page, I will do my utmost to stay Neutral, site ALL of my resources, and do not write in a promotional manner, or insert my own or any singular opinion. These are OBSERVATIONS OF A COMMUNITY I just happen to be a part of. If you wish, if you allow me to edit the page, I will send you the changes before I post them to the website, so you can see for yourself whether or not my additions (etc) meet you rules and approval. Hopefully some of it will. But if not all of it does, just let me know which part sounds "wrong" and I'll correct it. Or whatever is needed. I really want to do this right. By Wikipedia, and by the Otherkin Community (of which there are literally thousands of us across the globe!). Thank you {{24.156.62.69 (talk) 00:32, 11 May 2015 (UTC)}}[reply]

Whether the books you mention would be considered reliable sources would depend on the details: Who was the author, who the publisher? If it's a sociology textbook published by, say, Cambridge University Press, it would certainly be considered reliable. If it's a self-help book published by a publisher specialized in esoterica, that would be more dubious. And if it's self-published, it would probably not be considered reliable. "Websites" similarly aren't all the same; Yahoo Groups, for example, are not subject to meaningful editorial oversight and would not be considered reliable. See WP:Identifying reliable sources on how Wikipedia judges such things.

You can propose changes to the article at the article's talk page, preferably as specific proposals a la "change X to Y". Huon (talk) 22:58, 14 May 2015 (UTC)[reply]