Talk:Otherkin

90% of this article is absolutely wrong and describes those who abuse this term. Why is that?

Why does this entre article describe the definition of the ones who stole the term "Otherkin"? Why does it describe these people why say it means they are something completely else with their entire being and use it to justify their weird social behaviour etc? It's embarrassing and ruins the reputition of the ones who use this term the correct way.

Being an Otherkin means the same as being a Therian, just it's the umbrella term for those who feel a spiritual connection to a mythical non-existing creature. It's nothing else but that. StarSuicune (talk) 12:17, 12 January 2022 (UTC)

Are there particular sources in the article that are invalid, or other sources that argue differently? The current sources seem to clearly define "otherkin" as a person identifying as non-human, similarly to this article; source #14, Otherkin Timeline: The Recent History of Elfin, Fae, and Animal People, Abridged Edition, even traces usage of the term through the 1990s.

Avoyt (talk) 18:32, 30 May 2022 (UTC)

Abridged Edition... Everyone on the internet should know that this is the polar opposite of a valid serious source. Abridged describes nothing but a parody. StarSuicune (talk) 09:04, 21 February 2024 (UTC)

According to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, "abridged" means "shortened and condensed." Some examples that Merriam-Webster gives of abridgements are abridged dictionaries and abridged editions of classic novels. Those are not parodies. Abridged does not mean a parody, it means a shortened edition of the standard length book by the same title. An abridged edition of a book keeps only a selection of the most important parts of that book. The source that Avoyt mentioned, the Otherkin Timeline, was available in both an abridged edition and a standard length edition. Whether an abridged edition is a reliable source depends only on whether the standard length edition was a reliable source too, unless if a particular abridged edition happens to have cut out something important, in which case the standard length edition is relatively more reliable. DruryBaker (talk) 03:15, 7 September 2024 (UTC)

I agree with Avoyt that we need more specific information on what you're asking for. Tathar (talk) 11:41, 4 September 2022 (UTC)

I agree. I'm otherkin and this article is completely wrong. My identity as otherkin purely stems from not being comfortable looking like a human and wishing i could look like a different species. I find the appearance of the human body boring and uninteresting, and wish i could look more unique in a way clothing cannot fix. None of this has anything to do with religion or belief that I am literally part animal. It's all to do with the appearance I am comfortable with. Otherkin are one of the most discriminated groups in modern times because of articles like this. TidalTempestBM (talk) 08:58, 6 June 2023 (UTC)

@TidalTempestBM Your personal experiences with the term "Otherkin" are not relevant to the contents of an encyclopedic article about the subject.

If there is to be an encyclopedia entry for "Otherkin" it should adhere to the most commonly recognized definition of the term as described in scholarly sources, as is the case for all of Wikipedia.

If this definition shifts, the article should reflect that. However, this article is not "completely wrong" simply because it doesn't reflect your personal relationship to the term. Agentdoge (talk) 05:24, 8 June 2023 (UTC)

Yes. This is strongly reminding me of a debate I ran into between some tarot card users, with one approaching them from a [pseudo-scientific] viewpoint of the cards representing psychological archetypes along Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell lines and useful as a form of cold-reading psychoanalysis, with the other insisting they were a form of powerful occult magic and deeply religio-spiritual, with each claiming the other was a "false practitioner", in an argument that to anyone not involved in the topic seemed somewhere between pointless and absurd, especially to people who use them simply as a form of entertainment. The vast majority of source material on tarot cards says they are a) playing cards used in a variety of mostly European games, and b) a form of divination called cartomancy (i.e., a belief in them having magical/occult/spiritual power); our own article on the topic reflects this sourcing, and does not address archetypal psychology interpretations because there is virtually no reliable sourcing for this, no matter the fact that there are people who approach them this way.

If there is or becomes sourcing on otherkin/therianthropism as simply a form of body dysphoria with no spiritual or other subcultural aspects, then we can cover that. Maybe such sourcing already exists, but until editors have reliable sources on this in-hand, we can't do anything with the article content in such a direction, certainly not based on personal-experience/viewpoint anecdote. It is natural that various approaches to such things will exist among individuals, but we can't write based on their talk-page opinions. In short, if someone feels the article is "absolutely wrong", then they have to cough up reliable sources that their viewpoint actually deserves any due coverage, and even then it is certainly not going to prove that those with a different view of this are "abus[ing] this term" and not using it "the correct way", only that there are multiple noteworthy views/approaches. See also WP:NPOV: Wikipedia is not interested in any "righting great wrongs" fringe activism viewpoint-pushing. PS: This condemnatory urge seems very closely related to the censorious and pseudo-moralizing nature of kink-shaming; even though the otherkin thing is not centrally about sexuality, it certainly has that component to it, as does furry/plushy, the vampire scene, etc. Which is to say, the more judgemental someone gets about "the other side" on a matter like this, the faster and more firmly they should be ignored. PPS: There doesn't seem to be any reliable sourcing available anywhere to support the notion that "otherkin are one of the most discriminated groups in modern times", and crank, victim-posing claims like this tend to be rather offensive to people who are actually subjected to daily discrimination and worse because of their ethnicity, gender presentation, disability, etc. No one on the bus knows you feel like a wolf or elf.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  13:24, 3 February 2024 (UTC)

Not just non-physical ones, even. Your personal emotions about the topic don't dictate things such as this. If needed, I will try and scrounge around for the archived evidence. 98.188.246.215 (talk) 03:31, 29 May 2024 (UTC)

I feel that the beliefs section is the most wrong, but it could just stand out to me. I'm not sure though and I would like to learn some stuff so hit me with what you think i guess. TurtleDemon666 (talk) 00:37, 31 January 2024 (UTC)

ONLY a "spiritual connection?" Really, man? Have you seen the polls done on alt.horror.werewolves that have been archived? Absolutely ridiculous to claim such a thing. Spiritual AND psychological Otherkin have been around for years; it's disrespectful to narrow it down in such a way. 98.188.246.215 (talk) 03:25, 29 May 2024 (UTC)

Hi, @98.188.246.215 . I don't personally identify with this community, but I do try to keep a close watch on this article since it's very prone to vandalism. I can hopefully try to help you out with understanding some of the situation, especially since you're offering to find some sources for claims.

Have you seen the polls done on alt.horror.werewolves that have been archived?

Wikipedia's sourcing standards require verifiability and reliable sources. Usenet polls aren't going to work, nor frankly are a lot of the sources already in this article (why are we citing RPG rule books, for example). You can find more on how Wikipedia handles sourcing at WP:RS and information on usenet specifically here WP:PUS. This is why another user almost instantly reverted your otherkin wiki citaton; it fails our sourcing standards pretty badly and cannot be relied on.

Spiritual AND psychological Otherkin have been around for years; it's disrespectful to narrow it down in such a way.

My understanding from trying to keep vandals away from this page is that it's possible you may actually be able to cite this. There does seem to be some work discussing the religious and psychological elements of this group in peer-review, so it's entirely plausible the point you want to make has already been covered by sources Wikipedia accepts.

I'd caution you against thinking this article is going to end up going in a direction that everyone who identifies as Otherkin will accept, since a lot of it seems to be restricted to discussions on social media with only a tiny bit of bleed over into reliable sources. Warrenᚋᚐᚊᚔ 06:47, 29 May 2024 (UTC)

I've just gone through and tried to clean up this article to a degree. The sourcing in it is still quite bad, but there's an extent to which this is so far outside what I usually edit that I don't want to be too heavy handed. Warrenᚋᚐᚊᚔ 07:27, 29 May 2024 (UTC)

Maybe use term alterhuman instead?

I'm new to editing articles and commenting or anything that needs an account on Wikipedia, but maybe use the term alterhuman? It tends to be more inclusive to other part of the community such as plantkin, or conceptkin.

also yes, I know that I'm probably doing this wrong but like i said, I'm new so sorry for any mistakes 65.117.164.210 (talk) 21:56, 3 February 2024 (UTC)

How would alter- be "more inclusive" than other-? About the only sourcing available for those ideas other than random internet schmoes' forum posts is another wiki (unreliable source, as user-generated content), Otherkin.Fandom.com, which uses otherkin as a generic/encompassing term, and they also have an article on alterhuman used the same way (so, it's what WP would call a content fork at best or even an outright viewpoint fork, though the site's content leans heavily toward toward the former term). Anyway, not only is it not WP's role to try to duplicate the content and scope of such a site (the material in which seems to be mostly invented on whim by people as they go along, and when based on anything at all but the editor's personal notions, is drawing almost entirely on Internet-forum neologisms and manifestos, mostly dating from 2014 and later. I.e., almost all of it appears to be "stuff I made up one day" combined with "original research". So, we're not in a position per the "notability" policy and "WP is not an indiscriminate collection of information" policy to just willy-nilly add such novel self-identity claims to our encyclopedic material. Even as to the page name, we're constrained by article titles policy, which mostly resolves to using the most common name in independent sources. For this entire subject area, truly independent sources barely even exist, and source usage in general is entirely in favor of "otherkin", with "alterhuman" barely attested at all [1].  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  09:40, 4 February 2024 (UTC)

Alterhuman is not a synonym for otherkin and would have to be a separate article than this. Otherkin identify as nonhuman, particularly mythological nonhumans such as elves and dragons. In contrast, alterhumanity is an umbrella term for anyone who identify outside the usual scope of humans. Unlike otherkin, alterhumanity includes people who identify as human but do so in a different way than usual. For example, people with the spiritual belief that they are reincarnations of human fictional characters (fictives). Furry fans can also consider themselves alterhumans if they do not literally consider themselves nonhuman, but nonetheless find animality important to who they are in a social context. Some people consider themselves to be alterhumans because they are plural systems. The person who coined the word alterhuman explained that it was supposed to be a much wider umbrella than otherkin.

Unfortunately, it is not yet possible to build an acceptable Wikipedia article on the subject of alterhumans. This is because far fewer sources use the word "alterhuman" that are up to Wikipedia's standards for acceptable sources. It is difficult enough to find enough acceptable sources that use the word "otherkin." This is only because the word "otherkin" is much older (coined in 1990) than the word "alterhuman" (coined in 2014).

For these reasons, this article should continue to be called "otherkin." DruryBaker (talk) 04:46, 6 September 2024 (UTC)

Rewrite

I brought this to WP:FTN, but it's been sitting as-is for a long time so I figured it could use a bit of an overhaul. I don't know much about this community/scene/spiritual tradition and don't want to be too heavy handed. I spent some time going through the cited sources that were here before and removed lots of self published sources, and a few big citations weren't supported by the good sources they relied on. There's still a lot from publishing houses that specialize in fiction, but I don't want to step on toes considering the spiritual/religious elements involved here and I'm not particularly qualified to evaluate them (nor do I want to buy those books to read them). If anyone else is willing to take a look, this page seems to have pretty constant issues with IP drive-bys and WP:RS.

Any extra set of eyes would be greatly appreciated. Warrenᚋᚐᚊᚔ 11:59, 29 May 2024 (UTC)

Thank you for bringing your experience to this and working to make this a better article. I really appreciate it. I'm going to improve the page with only the best available quality sources to support each piece of information. I've been reading through the edit history and talk pages to see what previous editors have thought of the sources. Which of the remaining sources do you consider to be low quality and why? DruryBaker (talk) 14:21, 6 September 2024 (UTC)

That is to say, what are your own opinions on why those sources are low quality? I ask because as I'm continuing to read through this article's talk pages, I'm finding that editors have varying opinions about why they consider certain sources to be either low quality or acceptable. One problem is that this article's editors have tended to slant their assessment of the sources according to whether the editors approve or disapprove of the article's subject matter, rather than whether the sources themselves meet quality standards. I wish to assess the quality of the sources themselves, while keeping an informed but unbiased attitude toward the subject matter. Ideally, I want to eventually replace all low quality sources with high quality ones, to make this a better quality article. That's why I would appreciate your own insight into assessing those sources. DruryBaker (talk) 04:06, 7 September 2024 (UTC)

Basically a lot of the material being used to cite this article is from Otherkin-related publishing houses. There are a fair number of high-quality sources on this topic which filter down through academia and the popular press but what this article is defaulting to citing is basically the equivalent of a D&D Players Handbook someone published under nonfiction; an enormous number of personal, uncited, hot takes being presented as “this is what the Otherkin are” and those sources being overweighted next to the sources that’d meet WP:RS. Warrenᚋᚐᚊᚔ 08:40, 7 September 2024 (UTC)

Thanks for explaining. I can address the sourcing quality problem by citing academic sources for each of the ideas this article needs to cover, while phasing out the popular and informal sources in favor of them, until the article is nearly exclusively sourced from academic and other reliable sources. Since it's in the controversial category, it may need to be held up to stricter standards than most. I don't completely agree with your assessment of the sources, but a harsh assessment may be what's needed to improve this article to Wikipedia's standards. To make the article fit into those standards while covering its subject as adequately and neutrally as possible, I'm starting a new hobby of carefully reading through relevant Wikipedia essays and policies and 30+ academic sources on the article's subject. Thank you for how you have been watching over this article even though its subject is outside your area. Any controversial topic needs thoughtful referees. DruryBaker (talk) 06:11, 9 September 2024 (UTC)