1

This article ( http://www.wikihow.com/Toilet-Paper-a-House ) was tagged for mean spirited activity (I didn’t tag it, someone else did), but it has been around for years and has a lot of information instructions. I don’t think this article should be tagged, but I wanted to hear any thoughts on this.

2

It is, inarguably, mean to tp someone’s house, but I think that it should stay. It is useful, and I wouldn’t want it to be deleted.

3

I tagged it as mean spirited because I thought it is. If it has been here for years, it should stay here.

4

I removed the nfd tag. It seems that the article has been NFDed for mea in the past and consensus was to keep. It pays to carefully review the discuss page before placing an NFD. (The wikiHow policy is that an article cannot undergo double jeopardy.—That is, articles cannot, typically, be NFDed for the same reason code more than once.)

5

As @Alabaster said, the policy is no double jeopardy, but this doesn’t apply if it was voted to be deleted and then rewritten. Unfortunately this happens frequently.

6

An activity is considered mean-spirited when it describes unreasonable violence or destruction. Things like punching an innocent kid or making a snuff film (the recording of a person’s actual murder) are mean-spirited; harmless pranks like TPing a house or initiating a college hazing ritual aren’t.

7

I’m not sure if I see TPing a house or college hazing rituals as “harmless” People get hurt during both. I, personally would have flagged it as mean spirited, but I seem to be in the minority here.

8

It’s just a little prank, it’s not like you are sacrificing your pet cat to Ronald McDonald. (That last part was needed.)

9

I am new here, but have been editing Wikipedia for about two years. I happened to think WP is a mess with regard to the arts and humanities, but take a pragmatic view with regard to topics that interest me. (Better to light a candle than curse the darkness?) Someone in a Native American group on Facebook posted the article on Acting like you are part Native American. After reading it I flagged it for deletion, since it is either sarcastic, racist, or both. All of the comments on the talk page agree that it is racist. Yet someone responded that I should read “Assuming Good Faith”? My deletion tag was made in good faith. What I do not understand is why the article was not deleted long ago. Regarding “double jeopardy” how is a new editor to know if an article had previously “survived” a deletion tag?

10

Well, welcome to wikiHow. So I hear that you’re editing Wikipedia? You might want to leave that site ASAP, because I read something that said that it is slowly losing active contributors, due to the fact that everyone is getting tired of all of the policies. The administrators over there are basically making it really hard for anyone to contribute. The person I read saying that in that comment I read said that the average contribution they’ve done is fixing the average spelling mistake.

11

@FriendlyFred - Click on the Discuss tab for the article of concern and scan the entries. There will be a bot-generated message if the article has gone through NFD Guardian and the consensus was to keep the article. It is also possible that an administrator or booster removed a tag and did not leave a message on the discuss page. That NFD and removal could be found by stepping through the article history, but that case may or may not constitute double jeopardy. If you found such an article, it might be best to bring the matter up in the forums. According to my understanding, the policy about double jeopardy only applies to articles for which the community has achieved consensus through the NFD Guardian or a discussion in the forums.

For the article in this thread, when I reviewed the history, I saw:    _Tom Viren said:    Little support for deletion, removing nfd_and:    _Chris Hadley said:    Removed NFD, no consensus for deletion, been through this before._These, together with the wikiHow founder’s discuss comment:     Jack H said:    Oppose deletion. This hardly meets the standard for mean spirited.
was enough for me to make the judgement call that the consensus had already been achieved. This is a bit of an unusual case. Most articles will show a straight-forward consensus to keep on the article discuss page and will cite the “for” and “against” votes made in the NFD Guardian. *edit for clarity

12

Now back from holiday vacation, I will pick up where I left off. “Mean spirited” I assume means overtly bigoted? My education is in the social sciences, so racism is a lot more complicated than that. I could cite from both newspapers and academic journals that describe how the practice of white people “playing Indian” is a form of institutional, or implicit racism. [ motherjones.com/environment/2014/05/inquiring-minds-david-amodio-your-brain-on-racism ] Examples: *Native Appropriations: This is the blog of a Native American woman who has a PhD in education. This link specifically addresses why non-Indians wearing headdresses is racist. - http://nativeappropriations.com/2010/04/but-why-cant-i-wear-a-hipster-headdress.html *A pop culture example is “Pharrell apologises for wearing Native American war bonnet” - http://www.theguardian.com/music/2014/jun/05/pharrell-apologises-wearing-native-american-war-bonnet-elle *An Open Letter to Non-Natives in Headdresses - http://apihtawikosisan.com/hall-of-shame/an-open-letter-to-non-natives-in-headdresses/ Cultural appropriation is using something that has deep meaning to Native Americans as a mere costume to be worn for fun. Being “made fun of” is one form of bullying, for example; psychological research demonstrates that Native American children exposed to incidents where non-Indians dress in feathers and warpaint experience a lowering of their self-esteem. At the same time, non-Indians who participate or view this activity are more likely not only to hold stereotypical beliefs about Native Americans, but are more likely to hold stereotypical beliefs regarding other ethnic groups. It does not matter if the beliefs are superficially “positive”, such as Native Americans being strong and spiritual, negative stereotypes of Native Americans being savage, primitive, or only living in the past are all part of the same unconscious misconceptions, learned from countless movies and TV shows from Pocahontas to the Lone Ranger. I saw another article on “How to Perform a Minstrel Show” with the amazing “Warning” that wearing blackface might get you killed, yet the NFD was also dismissed. How can this be? (ps. My experience with Wikipedia is the opposite of the above. Or perhaps I am one of the remaining active editors that have no problems. Once I start contributing to an article citing very good sources, the other editors disappear, all except the spelling and grammar checkers.)

13

I’ve reopened this thread, confused as to why it was closed. The above is simply a harmless reply, nothing more.

14

Honestly have 0 experience with Wikipedia and personally am not interested in it. Ill keep this brief, but @FriendlyFred , I totally agree with you. Why don’t you link some of the articles so we can decide how to treat them as a community? Blackface should not be tolerated nor cultural appropriation, quite obviously.

15

I agree with Confusionist as well. Both articles (the blackface one and the cultural appropriation one) seem as if they should not be allowed.

16

It is difficult to list the academic books and journal articles, since they are not web-accessible. For example, there is a book entitled Playing Indian http://books.google.com/books/about/Playing_Indian.html?id=wfSyQgAACAAJ . I listed three news/blog items above. (The first item, Native Appropriations, has a list of links to other sites at the bottom.) What more can I do?

17

I think we meant link the wikiHow articles you found issues with.:wink:

18

Articles that teach racial stereotypes: *Act Like You Are Part Native American *Make an Indian Headdress *Make a Roach Headdress for Kids *Make a Warbonnet *Perform a Minstrel Show