User talk:Whitewolfheathen

Nomination of A Walk With Our Ancestors for deletion
A discussion is taking place as to whether the article A Walk With Our Ancestors is suitable for inclusion in Wikipedia according to Wikipedia's policies and guidelines or whether it should be deleted.

The article will be discussed at Articles for deletion/A Walk With Our Ancestors until a consensus is reached, and anyone is welcome to contribute to the discussion. The nomination will explain the policies and guidelines which are of concern. The discussion focuses on high-quality evidence and our policies and guidelines.

Users may edit the article during the discussion, including to improve the article to address concerns raised in the discussion. However, do not remove the article-for-deletion notice from the top of the article. Bgwhite (talk) 06:01, 19 February 2014 (UTC)

February 2014
(( Case of mistaken identity; Whitewolfheathen aka Benjamin did not attack anyone. Sorry Benjamin! Crossing out, but leaving in place, so that nobody gets confused about what happened. 74.192.84.101 (talk) 00:43, 24 February 2014 (UTC) )) 30px|left|alt=|link= Please do not create pages that attack, threaten, or disparage their subject. Attack pages and files are not tolerated by Wikipedia and are speedily deleted. Users who create or add such material may be blocked from editing Wikipedia. Thank you.(!-- Template:Db-attack-notice --) Tokyogirl79  (｡◕‿◕｡)   08:34, 23 February 2014 (UTC)

I never attacked anyone.... Benjamin L.


 * Having now looked at the article history in detail, I can say that no, you didn't. If anything you wrote the article in too favorable a tone, which is why it got a WP:NPOV tag placed on it. The defamatory material was added by an IP in the edit dated 10 August 2010‎, and I have now removed it from the history (I'm an admin). Can you find any newspapers, books published by standard publishers, or TV stations covering this book? (Blogs, forums, and podcasts don't count as reliable sources). That is what it will take to save it. If you can, add them and then explain at the deletion discussion linked in the section above this one. Yngvadottir (talk) 14:03, 23 February 2014 (UTC)

Does reader's favorite review service count?


 * I don't believe so no - does it have any editorial oversight? But it can't hurt to put it in. Right now there is nothing.


 * By the way, sign on talk pages by writing ~, or by clicking on the signature or pen symbol that should appear above your edit window. I'm going to drop a welcome template in here that has information about rules, guidelines, where to ask for help, and stuff like that, because I see nobody ever thought to give you one of those. Sorry about that, here it is:

ok thanks... Whitewolfheathen (talk) 00:05, 24 February 2014 (UTC)

howdy
Nice to meet you Benjamin, please call me 74. Wow, sorry you got that totally incorrect template-spam from, looks like she was in too much of a hurry to ascertain the facts. Please accept my apologies on behalf of everybody, that is not fair and not right. Sometimes people get in a rush, there is a lot to do around here, and end up attacking people like yourself, Benjamin, which is a) extremely unfortunate and b) just makes people have to rush around even more in the future! Sigh.

In any case, I would also like to welcome you to wikipedia, a bit belatedly since you've been here several years now. :-)   I will do my best to help you figure out the ropes around here, if you are not put off permanently by this case of mistaken identity.  (The actual vandal in this case was 193 from somewhere near London, and Yngvadottir and Tokyogirl have dealt with them... the page was partially rescued by 79 from somewhere near Bonn, who tried to remove the attack-stuff.)  However, I won't try and soften what is most likely to happen:  as it stands, the article on your book will prolly be taken out of mainspace.  This is not permanent, and can be corrected.  There is no WP:DEADLINE for wikipedia, remember.

To explain why your article may not be suited yet for the mainspace-portion of wikipedia (as opposed to the WP:AFC/WP:Drafts portion of wikipedia) is not too complicated, so I will use bullet-points.


 * Zeroth of all, the attack-stuff added by 193 will *not* have any bearing on the article-decision. That was a mistake, and Tokyogirl should know better!  We have revdel for such things.
 * First of all, what WILL have an impact is coverage, by the press, by academia, that sort of thing. See WP:42 for the quick overview, and  the definition of wikiReliable (which is distinct from lowercase-reliable).
 * Second of all, over at the article-talkpage, you also mentioned that there was a bit of promotionalism in the first draft, back in 2010. That is worth fixing, of course, see WP:NOTPROMOTION, but the correct fix for overly-promotional language is revising the language, not deleting the page.
 * Third of all, you make a point about keeping the article, in an actually-academic-format, based on the informative nature of wikipedia. This is a correct point.  But (you knew there was a catch probably), wikipedia is a particular type of informative.  It is an encyclopedia, see WP:ENC.  That means there are some things that wikipedia is not; although wikipedia tries to collect informative articles together, so that the readership can gain knowledge, there is actually quite a lot of knowledge that is not yet ready for wikipedia.

In particular, we have "main" articles on


 * 1)  Odin
 * 2)  Germanic_neopaganism
 * 3)  Odinism, and
 * 4)  Wotanist.

Readers that are interested in those general subjects, read those higher-level articles, usually. *This* particular article, A Walk With Our Ancestors, is about a particular book of that topic-area. People that are looking for information specifically about the book, would read the article about the book, is the idea, right? However, we wikipedians (fully including yourself Benjamin when I say 'we wikipedians') are not infinitely powerful. There is only so much time in the day. There are plenty of people out there, like 193, that will add misinformation and vandalism to pages in wikipedia. To guard against such attacks, we have to keep the total size of wikipedia under control, relative to how many people actively edit: we don't have an article on every person who has ever lived, or every business that was ever created, or every book that was ever published. The reason is simple: there are only about 30k people that edit at least once a week (and another 90k who edit at least once a month), which means unless we keep a limit on how many topics are covered in how much depth, we will be overrun by vandalism.

In fact, we have pretty strict standards for what can go in, and what must be WP:NOTYET (moved into the WP:Drafts space until it is ready). These standards for mainspace-presentation are VERY unevenly enforced, as you may have noticed, which is NOT at all fair (I'm working on that quite seriously) which means that sometimes there are companies with articles, that do not satisfy the rules, or people with articles, or similar. In this case, the article is about your book. The basic rules are pretty straightforward: you have to have (roughly) three independent external reviews of the book, in some depth, by professionals. That means, newspapers, television, academia, places like that, with a reputation for fact-checking and peer-review. Which excludes most blogs, forums, amazon-reviews, and the like. See the one-sentence WP:42, or the more detailed WP:GNG and WP:NBOOK/WP:AUTHOR guidelines. (See especially point#3 of the nutshell of WP:NBOOK... which is a bit of an exception that might apply to your work... point#1 of NBOOK is similar to WP:GNG and WP:42.)

Basically, in a nutshell, what it boils down to is what Yngvadottir mentioned above. To keep the article in mainspace, we need to find newspaper-coverage, academic-papers, teevee-coverage, or similar mainstream sources, that have noticed your book in particular. Because your book was only published recently, and because the field is relatively small (compared to e.g. Buddhism), it is quite possible that such coverage does not yet exist. If that turns out to be the case, then the article will be "deleted" at the end of the week. This is what is called wikiNotable... and just like wikiReliable Sources, the meaning is *very* different from lowercase-notability and lowercase-reliability. Quite frankly, there is plenty of reliable notable stuff, which is kept out of wikipedia on pedantic wikiNotability/wikiReliability grounds, and plenty of unreliable non-noteworthy stuff, which makes it into wikipedia because of churnalism. But nobody said life was fair, I guess. In any case, to get through AfD, all that matters is coverage in wikiReliable Sources, which proves  wikiNotability.

Now, thankfully, even if "deleted" the article can be recreated, and in fact, it can be re-created just as soon as it is "deleted". We have a thing called drafts/afc which is explicitly for such things. If we don't find enough coverage now, today, we can still keep the article about the book as a draft, until such coverage *does* exist. Also, of course, wikipedia content is under a special kind of copyright-license. You can, as long as you give credit, move a copy of the article to a website of your own, such as a wordpress blog or a weebly homepage (both are free services much like wikipedia but with no WP:GNG restrictions).

So here is what I recommend. First, make a backup-copy of the article, so that you will have the prose for later, if necessary. That way, we can copy the material to drafts/afc, and optionally to weebly/wordpress. Second, search for press-coverage and academic-papers, specifically about your books and/or about yourself. The coverage has to be by professionals (not blogs/forums/facebook/youtube/amazon). But it can be in English/Spanish/German/whatever, and it can be online/offline/microfiche/whatever. I will also look for what I can, but as the author, you have a better shot at already knowing about such things. Let me know if you have any questions/concerns/needs, and thanks for improving wikipedia with your article, it's appreciated. :-)   &mdash; 74.192.84.101 (talk) 00:39, 24 February 2014 (UTC)


 * Benjamin, two points. First, if you want to save the article offline as 74 suggests, hit the "history" tab to find the version you originally created; it got shortened considerably when someone was trying to get rid of what the vandal had added. Second, you've been putting information and arguments on the article talk page, but since the article is not going to be speedy deleted, the place you need to put those points is Articles for deletion/A Walk With Our Ancestors - the discussion about the article that is due to close on the 27th, and where you still haven't made your point that it should be kept. Yngvadottir (talk) 23:22, 25 February 2014 (UTC)
 * I looked around, but couldn't find enough mainstream media-coverage to justify a separate article at this time. Benjamin, I suggest that we re-create the article about your book in the AfC/Drafts space.  I've done that before, I can show you the ropes, it's not hard.  Once coverage does come, the article can then be moved back into mainspace.  Alternatively/additionally, if you want to move the article to an off-wiki website, I can help wiht that, too.  Also-also, I have some ideas about how coverage can be found, if you want to hear them.  Sorry about the way this turned out, wikipedia can be a bear.  Thanks for improving her with your writing, though, it is appreciated. 74.192.84.101 (talk) 16:13, 28 February 2014 (UTC)

Any advice is suitable, if you want to move it into draftspace that is fine as well... 204.210.184.162 (talk) 17:07, 28 February 2014 (UTC)

question
We have an article on the Odin Brotherhood, which seems to have plenty of sources, but needs a good cleaning by somebody with writing-skills like yourself. Do you have any interest in helping me fix it up? 74.192.84.101 (talk) 16:13, 28 February 2014 (UTC)

I looked it over, the mode over-talks the audience and there are minor typographical errors... 204.210.184.162 (talk) 17:03, 28 February 2014 (UTC)

I made some edits... Most of it was fine... Appears to have multiple authors in writing style:

The Odin Brotherhood, who(organizations should be personified) practices Odinism or Ásatrú,[1] is a Germanic Neopagan secret society which allegedly "preserves genuine traditions of pre-Christian paganism".[1] The Odin Brotherhood has been referred to in a number of publications on religions or secret societies;(Semi Colon for main clauses)[2]the Odin Brotherhood is listed in the eighth edition of the Encyclopedia of American Religions of Dr. J. Gordon Melton, with members in many nations.[3] In the words of Dr. Melton, "The brotherhood has distanced itself from the racism that has infected Norse beliefs in the twentieth century and eschews the idea that there are either chosen peoples or master races." [4][5][6] From the beginning, the Odin Brotherhood has included women in its membership.[3] *Reference of women of note would help Ambiguous* Contents [hide] 1 Claims 2 The Way of the Odin Brotherhood by Jack Wolf 3 Beliefs and Practices 4 Further reading 5 See also 6 References 7 External links Claims[edit]

The Odin Brotherhood was first described in print in a 1992 (Redundancy: alludes to a book but not cited) by Mark Mirabello, who claims he encountered it while conducting earning a PhD in History from Glasgow University[7] Mirabello is now a professor of History at Shawnee State University.[8] and the author of several books.[9] He has appeared in on the History Channel (Delete, History channel being on TV is common knowledge) and in documentary film.[10][11] The Odin Brotherhood by Mirabello was first published in 1992[12] and republished in 1994, 1995, 2002 and 2003.[13] and it has never gone out of print.[14] (Convoluted)Narrative is told in third person hybrid, a teacher instructs students. Mirabello says that members of the group chose him as "a recruiting tool".[1] Researcher Graham Harvey expressed doubts about the group: "A book called The Odin Brotherhood has been circulating which claims to be a record of contacts (in Britain and elsewhere) between Dr. Mark Mirabello and a secret society called the Odin Brotherhood. While(we are not in the dark ages so whilst is inappropriate) I have received enigmatic letters claiming to be from members of the group I have been unable to check the veracity of Mirabello's claims. No other group that I have talked to (including one that was named in a "Brotherhood" letter as a contact) has any more knowledge of the group beyond reading the book. Most doubt its existence."[15] And Thomas Coghlan, a forensic psychologist of the New York Police, writing in Cultic Studies Review, said from Mirabello's account that "at first read it appears specious." [16] In contrast, researcher Stephen E. Adkins writes that "British Odinists claim that there has been a secret Odinist movement, the Odin Brotherhood, since 1421....Membership of the Odin Brotherhood has always remained small, but undoubtedly, some adherents made it to the American colonies and the United States."[17] The rites of the group are also described in a short book called Teachings of the Odin Brotherhood of unknown author, the information was allegedly given by a Highland member of the group.[18] The Way of the Odin Brotherhood by Jack Wolf[edit]

In 2013 The Way of the Odin Brotherhood by Jack Wolf[19] was published. The book details Mr. Wolf's own contact with the Brotherhood and provides additional details on the group's beliefs, legends, and practices.[20] The book is published by Mandrake of Oxford.[21] Beliefs and Practices[edit]

Unlike most (SP)Odinist/Asatru groups, who claim to be reconstructionist, the Odin Brotherhood claims that it preserves genuine traditions of pre-Christian paganism.[1][17][22] The group claims that it was founded in 1421:[23] a widow was accused of practicing Odinism and burned, and a Catholic priest forced her two sons and daughter to witness the burning, those children were Christians in public, but secretly formed the group to preserve Odinism.[17] Deleted(Personal Opinion)

The Odin Brotherhood embraces Odinism, which is defined as ancient religion that "acknowledges the gods by fostering thought, courage, honor, light, and beauty."[13] The initiation rite of the Odin Brotherhood involves solitude, a diet of bread and ice, a white shroud, a dagger, and a fire.[24] According to Mirabello, the ritual is based on the "marking with the spear" ceremony described in the Ynglinga Saga by Snorri Sturluson.[25] The marking involves making three small cuts in the flesh, in the name of "holy, necessary violence." [1] The Odin Brotherhood embraces polytheism. "Hard Polytheists," members believe that the gods are distinct, separate real divine beings not psychological archetypes or personifications of natural forces. Hard polytheists reject the idea that "all gods are one God" The Odin Brotherhood believes that monotheism, "the belief in one totalitarian God(References to monotheistic God is capitalized; the polytheist gods is never capitalized), is preposterous and absurd." The Brotherhood insists that "no single, extraordinary(superordinary is not a word), ineffable entity controls all realities.".[13] According to Jack Wolf's new book, the Brotherhood believe that the gods, who visit here often, are actually living in the past. According to the Brotherhood, the entire time line of past, present, and future is accessible to the gods. [26] The Brotherhood(Capitalized: Proper Noun) has no buildings (temples or churches) but attempts to honor the gods everywhere, as long as outsiders are excluded; all words are "whispered," and all "abominations" are avoided. The central rite of the brotherhood is called the "Glimpse-Of-Extraordinary-Beauty," during which the celebrants believe they are "enveloped and penetrated by the thoughts of a god." [3] The brotherhood believes in life after death and that there are three "Other-Worlds," one of which is called Valhalla or the White-Kingdom. Not a paradise, Valhalla is a place of honor for heroes.[13] The existence of the Christian hell is denied.[3] Further reading[edit] 204.210.184.162 (talk) 17:36, 28 February 2014 (UTC)