User talk:Kathryn NicDhàna/Archive 1

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Archive This is an archive of past discussions. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page.
Archive 1: July 2005 - July 2006

Contents

Opening comment and welcome

Bear with me. I'm new to this Wiki-thang. I'm figuring it out as I go along. -KPN

Welcome!

Hello, Kathryn NicDhàna/Archive 1, and welcome to Wikipedia! Thank you for your contributions. I hope you like the place and decide to stay. Here are a few good links for newcomers:

I hope you enjoy editing here and being a Wikipedian! Please sign your name on talk pages using four tildes (~~~~); this will automatically produce your name and the date. If you need help, check out Wikipedia:Where to ask a question, ask me on my talk page, or place {{helpme}} on your talk page and someone will show up shortly to answer your questions. Again, welcome!  --Nantonos 04:28, 11 September 2005 (UTC)

MA

Sorry about that. I saw Wisconsin and thought Minnesota.

Lapsed Pacifist 03:49, 13 August 2005 (UTC)

GT

You said: I'd say it's simply a case of HroptR accessing pages that haven't been rewritten recently. @ Talk: Poly Recon

Believe it or not, I'm more on top of the issue than you think. Someone informed me of your version of what is going on here which I think is extremely inaccurate to say the least. From the content of that thread and your actions at Talk: Celtic Recon Paganism and Talk: Poly Recon all I can assume is that you are trying to rally the troops to purge all reference to GT on wikipedia. So from the context of the discussion, you and other CR people obviously have some sour grapes with the GT people, and a total absolute lack of NPOV. How can we deal with this and be accurate? Believe it or not, I'm a lot more reasonable than you have demonized me to be here and on LJ. This is my E-Addy. If you want to deal with this and not just create drama, contact me and let me know what the deal is. We can reach some kind of compromise, but what you are doing here is against Wikipedia policy and is no better than what Son of Art was pulling, drumming up support at his Yahoo list. I'm not your enemy and, and I don't have a dog in this race. -HroptR 07:24, 23 January 2006 (UTC)

I have to wonder why you're seeking out members-only CR communities on LiveJournal and worrying about what we say there. BTW, I saw in your contributions: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/HroptR that you *did* go looking for people to come take your side on the Reconstructionists edit. I did not do that. So I'd say your "troops" comment is projection. Tonight a friend mentioned Wikipedia, and I commiserated by sharing my experience with this edit. I would say the edits I have done on the Reconstructionists piece recently were NPOV. Yours strike me as quite POV, and I'm not the first Wikipedian to point this out to you. Nothing I'm doing is against Wikipedia policy. I am not "rallying troops." No one here is a "meatpuppet" (or a sockpuppet, ahem. What is your real name and web identity, anyway?). Actually, it looks like only a small number of us have even noticed this entry. I've only stuck around because you seem intent on continuing to spread misinformation about CR. Who has the agenda? Kathryn NicDhàna 07:54, 23 January 2006 (UTC) [edit 5/10/06: I now see why you perceived me as trying to round up people to start an edit war. I saw myself as just venting in a community where I hang out with a lot of my friends. Because the community is members-only, I wasn't really thinking about the fact that those posts were publicly viewable. If I was encouraging anyone, in my mind it was only those who were long-term members of the community, and who were already editors on Wikipedia. But I can see how this was not at all clear in what I wrote, and I apologize for not seeing that at the time. -kpn]
PS - I'm not opposed to there being sane, honest GTs on Wikipedia. I'm opposed to there being lies and fantasy-POV on Wikipedia. But as you seem inclined to track me around the web, I think I can let my record stand for itself. Kathryn NicDhàna 08:00, 23 January 2006 (UTC)
    • I'm not opposed to there being sane, honest GTs on Wikipedia. I'm opposed to there being lies and fantasy-POV on Wikipedia. I agree. I was not aware the CR LJ community was members only - you may want to lock it down if you don't want outsiders reading. A friend IM'd me saying I should look at it because she knows I'm researching recon trads. CR LJ is on her friend's list. I do not know any GT people and the only CR people I know of are the people who post prolifically on LJ and formerly Sword & Shield. So if you would cogently and unemotionally explain what the dichotomy is about, rather than incessantly demonizing people, it would go a long way to getting what you want. If the issue is too vitriolic to do so, then we are right back where we were and can only wait for some GT person to come along and present their side of the matter, eh? I have no POV whatsoever in this matter, other than insuring one party is not misrepresented due to emotion or sour grapes. I would do the same for CR. -HroptR 08:29, 23 January 2006 (UTC)
No problem. GT, as a polytheistic movement, is a splinter group from CR. The groups and individuals who identify as Polytheistic GTs split off from the CR community between 2-10 years ago (depending on the group or individual). Everything I've seen indicates they are all Americans (though some claim otherwise). One of the main reasons for the split was political - strongly differing opinions on the morality of the Iraq war, and on things like feminism and racism. In many ways it was a Red State, Blue State thing. But there were also conflicts over the lies spread, mostly by one guy (Brandon), that he had inherited the tradition in his family and was the "righ" ("King" or "Gang Lord" depending on your preferred translation ;-)) of large groups of armed, separatist Gaels. Sadly for him, a simple background check revealed that his claims (the ones relevant to his leadership in GT) were lies. Or, to be kinder, and in his mother's words: fantasies. That's his personal business, except where it creates a mistaken impression of the CR and GT communities. It was especially of concern to me because, at the time he was making many of these ridiculous claims, he was still identifying as CR. As he has become prominent in the online representation of those communities, this became problematic for us all. Kathryn NicDhàna 23:53, 23 January 2006 (UTC)
There are personal "sour grapes" because the original author of the GT Wiki entry (Brandon again) has made violent threats towards some prominent CRs (myself included). Most of these came after he was confronted on his lies and changed his backstory. The police were contacted; the threats mostly stopped (though other GTs continued some of them). Another "sour grape" is that in 2002 he plagiarized my website, and plagiarized the writings of another CR and misrepresented them as his own. Despite this, I have done my best to have NPOV in the entry. I have not submitted a deletion request for the GT Wiki article (though, to meet Wiki standards, it needs to be severely edited and restarted from the ground up). And truly, my suggestion that the GTs may not belong in the "Reconstructionists" entry is that a number of the loudest GTs spend so much time putting down Reconstructionists, and saying they are not Reconstructionists. For a while they claimed they didn't need to reconstruct anything because Brandon had inherited the tradition from his Grand Da'. Which, of course, does not work as a reason now that Brandon has sort of admitted he lied about all that. They do use reconstructionist methods. It's just a question of how honest they have or have not been about that, and how their values tend to clash with those of CR. Since truthfulness and honor are so deeply important to CRs, and to the better GTs, I think you can see how this has been problematic for the leadership and membership of both movements.Kathryn NicDhàna 23:53, 23 January 2006 (UTC)

Thank you for the honest explanation. Similar things have happened within other traditions, and the psychological need for a "lineage" is present in some subsets of heathenry and hellenism as well. There are groups probably of all trads claiming to have an unbroken lineage, and much of it comes down to semantics on exactly what constitutes an unbroken connection to pre-Christian belief systems. I appreciate you being forthcoming about this, and will keep this dynamic in mind. I still feel that GT should be present in the poly recon entry, only because other groups from other traditions making very similar claims are also still included. It is not wikipedia's place to cast judgement on the validity of their practice or claims, only to document them. Mutual antagonism is better avoided I think, and I now understand your insistence on making a distinction from GT and CR. As you probably know, not all people who are GT buy into the unbroken lineage bit or even agree with the larger GT groups - but like it or not, their methodology is reconstructionist. Again, thank you for taking the time to school me.-HroptR 03:12, 24 January 2006 (UTC)

Thank you for taking the time to discuss it. My request for the future, for all of us, is that no one individual be taken as the final word on either tradition. That's why I was so adamant about including the CR Essay, as it was written by consensus. And why I came down so hard on the GT Article - because right now it's just one person's soapbox and not NPOV. And when I saw you repeating misconceptions about CR (that it's eclectic, which it's not), specifically misconceptions that have been spread by someone with an agenda, I did get rather annoyed. Again, thank you for this sane discourse. Kathryn NicDhàna 08:43, 24 January 2006 (UTC)
PS - "As you probably know, not all people who are GT buy into the unbroken lineage bit or even agree with the larger GT groups - but like it or not, their methodology is reconstructionist." Agreed. I know a number of people who call themselves, and their practice, CR/GT, and who participate in both communities. In terms of what we're doing, there's so much overlap that to many people the traditions seem the same. Were it not for the political differences of some of the more visible members, there wouldn't be the divide that currently exists. There was a time when there wasn't a divide. Kathryn NicDhàna 22:12, 24 January 2006 (UTC)
And updating a bit: Now there is even less of a divide between the CR and GT/DGT communities, and even more overlap and productive dialogue between us. Thankfully, some of the more problematic individuals are no longer calling themselves GT or CR, so the whole scope of the debate has changed. And if you look at the CR article talk page, you'll also see that there have been some clarifications on the early crossover between CR and Disaporic GT. --Kathryn NicDhàna 03:37, 11 May 2006 (UTC)
        • I am very glad that I apparently live in America now. Never been there. Spent the last 18 years in Western Australia. Infact its about 35oC outside right now, middle of summer. Infact with a little careful google work and bit of knowledge about networking you could probably work out my home address. Then again, so far I haven't managed to irk the grumpies in the CR 'movement' enough to become a target. I best try harder :) edited cause I forgot to log in first.. Padraig MacIain 08:45, 3 March 2006 (UTC)


20/18 hindsight - Nov. '06

I think one of the main reasons things got so contentious with the Gaelic Traditionalism article is the name just wasn't appropriate - for either the modern, polytheistic movement or the article. Though I know Iain had all good intentions in choosing the name GT when he did, to most people, especially language activists in the Celtic Nations and the diaspora, "Gaelic Traditionalism" already had (and still has) a definition -- maintaining the living cultures as they exist in the historically Gaelic-speaking areas of the six Celtic Nations. This is simply different from a polytheistic revival, no matter how well-intentioned. For learners of Gaelic, no matter how well-meaning, to try to define "Gaelic Tradition" or "Gaelic Traditionalist" in a different way just didn't work, nor should it. Add that to the intitial POV propaganda in the initial version (not written by Iain), and it's not surprising things went the way they did.

DGT - "Diasporic Gaelic Traditionalism" is still problematic as a tradition name, as I think most of us, on hearing it, assume it means the living cultures as they currently exist in areas like the Gaelic-speaking communities in Nova Scotia.

I see on the talk page that Iain has objections to the, now renamed, Clannada na Gadelica article. I'd propose a rewrite with expert input (Iain or one of the other officers of CnG) or AfD, but due to the contentious history of the article, and specific bizarre slurs that were directed at CRs during the process, I don't feel it is my place to participate in either of those actions. --Kathryn NicDhàna ♫♦♫ 23:00, 22 November 2006 (UTC)