Otherkin Wiki:About

Otherkin Wiki is dedicated to being a comprehensive, verifiable reference work on everything to do with otherkin. The history, communities and experiences of otherkin are rich and deep, and we care about making sure people can access information about those things. By design, this also includes information about other alterhuman communities, because they're often intertwined.

It's not perfect, but it's always improving, and you can help.

Who we are

We're just a bunch of people who are passionate about otherkinity. Some of us are old and have been around otherkin communities since before you were born. Some of us are kids who found out about it just yesterday. Some of us have produced academic-level content on otherkinity, and some of us are more interested in mood boards and pride edits. We're avid researchers, readers, writers, artists, and people who are just really pedantic about spelling and grammar. We're elves, dragons, werewolves, furries, plurals, witches, cyborgs, and any other kind of alterhuman you can think of. We're a community of people just like you.

In fact, you can be a part of 'we' too! As long as you make an account, you can edit this wiki. You don't need an special skills, or even to know a whole lot about otherkinity. If you're interested in helping out, you can learn how to get started here - or come and say hi on the community feed.

The current admins of this wiki are Petrichoran and Voxel, but we don't have many more special powers than you do, we promise.

What we aim to do

This wiki is set up the way it is because we have certain goals in mind. Every policy and procedure we have works towards the following goals:

• Providing information that helps as many people as possible - This wiki is very prominent in search results, and it's seen by a lot of different types of people. Not just otherkin, but other alterhumans, questioning people and orthohumans too. Not just laypeople, but also researchers and journalists! We want everyone to be able to get something out of this wiki, so we try to make articles which are easy to understand, but with a lot of depth. We don't presume familiarity with any of the concepts talked about here.
• Creating a diverse and egalitarian knowledge base - Otherkin are not a monolith. The community is old, and there are a lot of people in it, which means there are a lot of different viewpoints and experiences. We aim to include sources that showcase as many viewpoints as possible, as well as make it easy for all kinds of people to get involved with the wiki itself. This resource belongs to all of us!
• Preserving important info from the communities' history - The otherkin community has historically been pretty secretive. This, combined with the format of modern social media, has made it very difficult to hold onto a lot of resources. By collecting as many sources as we can in one place, we're also protecting the historical and cultural legacy of otherkin for younger people and other newcomers to the community.
• Teaching media hygiene, critical thinking and research skills - By giving editors the tools to identify good sources, and by modelling good sourcing habits to readers, we can help people start to think more critically about information they consume. In a community that has been plagued with misinformation from all directions, this is a really useful skill to have!

What we don't aim to do

People have come to use wikis for many purposes. We're trying to be a more traditional encyclopedic wiki, so we might not do things the same way you're used to. Here are some types of content that you won't find in our articles:

• Primary research - All of our information comes from sources which have already been published somewhere else. This way, we can prove that what we say is reflective of the whole community, and not just specific to one person or even pure conjecture. This wiki won't be used to coin words like some others are.
• Opinion pieces - We write articles which are impartial and represent all notable viewpoints on a subject. We don't tell people how they should feel about the things we talk about, and we don't omit things just because we don't like or agree with them. If something is objectively bad, the facts should speak for themselves.
• Tutorials or guides - Our job is to act as a compendium of other people's knowledge and experiences. We're merely custodians of that information, not teachers. There are plenty of guides which relate to subjects on this wiki - we might talk about them, but we can't tell you what to do ourselves!
• Indiscriminate lists of information - We're not interested in cataloguing every single word or group that exists. We prefer to choose subjects with significant coverage in order to write thorough articles about the things which are most important to the most people.

None of this is meant to disparage other wikis which have these things. We just have a specific focus here. In fact, it's good for a diversity of places to exist and deal with different types of information! There's room for us all to do our own things.