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Content guidelines

Page history last edited by Yvonne 15 years, 2 months ago

Content

 

By insisting on scholarly articles, I certainly don't want to exclude poetic and artistic approaches - what I am trying to avoid is the usual tat found in Wicca 101 books, like how to cast a circle, do spells, etc, with no reflection on the philosophical and spiritual implications of those. Articles should include some references where relevant or possible.

 

Obviously other sites have already covered a lot of the topics here in depth. So, on the Pagan theologies wiki, what I think we need is a description of how the topic is addressed or is important within Pagan traditions, and how different Pagan traditions respond to it differently.

 

What kind of information to include

 

The information should be relevant to Pagan theologies.

 

  • People: only include biographies of people if they made a significant contribution to Pagan theology or philosophy.
  • Academic perspectives: only include academic perspectives relevant to increasing an understanding of Pagan theologies
  • Mythology: It is fine for the theology to reference mythology, but it should also include an exploration of the issues brought up by the mythological material, rather than a simple restatement of the myth.
  • Personal opinion is fine, as long as it's not a rant.
  • Humour is fine as long as it is pertinent to the subject being discussed.
  • Ritual information is okay as long as it includes reflection on its philosophical and spiritual implications.

 

Multiple perspectives

 

Obviously views of various issues will vary from one tradition to another, and from one person to another (even within a tradition). If you find that a page is getting over-long, by all means add links to create new pages for specific traditions' approaches to the issue (you will see that I have already done this for some sections, e.g. Core myths).

 

Sometimes there are two answers to a single question that are both true, yet mutually exclusive - hence the multiple-perspectives approach. The site is about creating a palimpsest of views, a sharing circle, not "refining" things down to a single viewpoint.

 

Please don't edit featured articles, which are all attributed to specific authors (though comments on them are welcome) but you can edit any article that is not signed by a specific author.  However, we are trying to get to truth by adding more perspectives, not eliminating someone else's point of view; so please try to add more insight rather than merely deleting someone else's words because you disagree with their perspective.  One way to do this is to create a new section or page and perhaps entitle it 'another perspective on ..... from the ..... tradition'.  Obviously if something is simply factually incorrect, please do delete it - but for the most part we are dealing with perspectives on the ineffable, not historically verifiable facts.

 

See also Etiquette, Contents, Pagan theology, Content warnings

 

The relationship of this site to Wikipedia

 

This site is intended to supplement Wikipedia, which understandably wants to retain a neutral point of view and only include content of interest to everyone.  For instance, I once added some stuff about the Eight Wiccan Virtues to the Virtue Ethics page on Wikipedia, and it got removed.  The aim of the Pagan theologies wiki is to present the multiplicity of different views that can be found among the Pagan community (we're postmodern here and don't believe that objectivity or neutrality are possible), so the kind of content we are aiming to produce wouldn't fit on Wikipedia.  Theology is necessarily about people's opinions and not generally about empirically provable facts - unless one is examining the history of something.

 

By all means link to Wikipedia articles to provide another perspective on the issue under discussion, but do not copy and paste whole articles from Wikipedia or any other website, and only quote 10% of any article if you do include a quote.

 

If you're writing an academic essay, don't use Wikipedia as a source, because most academics hate it.  I personally think it's useful for providing an introduction to a topic, rather like the "Introduction to..." series of books (which you also wouldn't quote in an essay, probably).

 

A note for academics:  Wiki is simply Hawaiian for "faster" and is used to describe all such collaborative software. It's the software, not the content, that is called a wiki.  The wiki format is perfect for collaborative working, and the development of theology shoudl be collaborative and multi-perspective, which is what wiki software was designed to facilitate.

 

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