Daggering Wikipedia: How to increase the chance of having your Wikipedia article published?

On: October 3, 2010
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About Emina Sendijarevic
Some find a great usefulness and comfort in new media, while others complain about the loss of privacy, intimacy and sociability. Technology in my opinion challenges people to rethink their position towards old standards, it challenges them to deconstruct the concepts they thought were embedded in old values and traditions. Instead of blaming or praising new media, we should see new media as an introspective tool for managing our world. New media (qualitative) research and social media analytics are a way to explore and understand every-day-real-life human interaction.

   

When thinking of a subject to write about on Wikipedia, a couple of considerations crossed my mind. It’s easy to write about a scientific subject that isin line with Wikipedia’s core principles (NPOV, no original content and verifiability), but what about highly controversial and disputed subjects or the ones about sex and violence? Can Wikipedians reach consensus over those kind of subjects?

From the policies and guidelines section of Wikipedia, it is ‘clear’ that content created on Wikipedia is always in a process of editing (wars). The guidelines are there to help the users create content as objective as possible:

“[Wikipedia] does not employ hard-and-fast rules, its policy and guideline pages describe its principles and best-known practices. Policies describe standards that (within the limits of common sense) all users should normally follow, and guidelines are meant to contain best practices for doing so.”

What does that ‘common sense’ imply? Entries like “List of sex positions” or “Lynching” that are accompanied with explicit visual material and words, give me the impression that there is no ethical boundary which is established through consensus, nor common sense. However, I’m aware that it is quite difficult to create a new entry in Wikipedia, as it is critically received by the Wikipedians and tested on the ground of the three Wikipedia principles. What kind of strategies can be deployed in Wikipedia to increase the chance of having your controversial/ dodgy article published?

Daggering
I wrote an article about ‘daggering’: A Jamaican dance that has recently gained popularity due to highly controversial Youtube videos in which can be observed how this provocative (some might say violent) dance is perfomed. The Jamaican Broadcast Commitee has set a ban on ‘daggering’ and everything that is related to it. In my article I use sexually explicit terms, while still trying to maintain a neutral point of view in my style of writing. I also used different accounts, added a great number of sources, headers (including history and politics, to make it look as if it has relevance). Let’s see how that will turn out.

Keeping you posted.

P.S. Including the tag {{new page}} will attend spectators of your article to “not rush and mark it for deletion, but check back in a while and/or contact the creator to ascertain his/her plans”. Morover it will also make your page less visible on google search untill you decide that the article is worth it.

P.P.S. I removed the new page-tag. The article has been included as part of WikiProject Dance, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of Dance and Dance-related topics on Wikipedia as well as WikiProject Caribbean, an attempt to build a comprehensive guide to the countries of the Caribbean on Wikipedia. However it has received ‘stub-class’ for its quality and a ‘low’ in relevance. The provocative image that I’ve included has been removed as well. While other Wikipedians are highly critical of the article’s relevance, the ‘base’ of the article is left untouched and remains on Wikipedia.

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