"Mermaiding" wikipedia page

[Shourn]

Hey, I'm new to this whole thing. I'm fascinated by mermaids and all sorts of mythical creatures, and I stumbled upon your community. Gotta admit that you're tempting me to overcome my aquaphobia, since I do some costuming anyway and this would be a great way to force myself.

Anyway, I've spent the last few days cleaning up the Wikipedia page about what y'all do. It's under threat of deletion for lack of "notability"--that is, worthiness of being in Wikipedia. Since I just heard about mermaiding, I haven't been able to write much but have been able to clean up the page and dig up some more sources. If any of you writer/researcher-type folks could write in a better representation than I could come up with at this point... I don't know. I just think y'all are really creative and deserve to have a Wikipedia article about what you do.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mermaiding

[Echidna]

I've read that article before.
It's certainly nice that it exists, but what strikes me as wrong is the notion that mermaiding=water ballet.

It's not.
A mermaid might do water ballet, but mermaiding itself isn't dance in water, it's swimming in a tail.
Synchronized swimming is also labelled water ballet, but mermaiding is not the same as synchro swimming, is it.

I developed a certain kind of mermaid water dance, Nixentanz.
Back when I first found that article, I briefly considered explaining the differences between all those types of water sports, but as far as I know, I'm the only mer doing real synchro swimming adapted for tails, so having an article about it would probably be considered not worthwhile.

[AniaR]

Yes I've seen that before. I know Thom was tickled pink it had one of his photos. I thought the other photo though was one of Hannah used for a book cover.

Also, mermaid performing began long before Weeki, with Annette Kellerman she WAS in a mermaid tail, over 100 years ago. You can read all about her here: http://halifaxmermaids.weebly.com/bl...sional-mermaid it be great to have Annette in there earlier. Though you'd have to cite some historical website for it as opposed to my blog along with her biography. She was also the first mermaid movie. She did loads of mermaid stuff including swimming in tanks.

[Spindrift]

Nice to see that we are Wikipedia-official though, haha.

[deepblue]

lol @ that 'water ballerinas' comment.

I wonder if the person who wrote that has any experience in the mermaiding world, because that doesn't seem like it.

I can see a how a lot of improvement can be made on the wiki page... maybe someone here can take care of that. (Not me. I'm only on a sewing break atm.)

[AniaR]

Water ballet is what Annette Kellerman and Weeki mermaids have traditionally called it....it may not be what we call it but the point isn't wrong

[deepblue]

I'd like to see it put in context, not as if it's still a common term. But I was also disappointed in such a small mention of Annette Kellerman.

Then again, I was surprised to see there is a page on mermaiding at all. Thank you to the creator of it.

ETA- considering the growing popularity of mermaiding, I'm surprised to know it's threatened with deletion. What's there is a great start!

[AniaR]

lol it looks like Mermaid Melissa found this, it now has so much melissa content! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mermaiding

edit: someone removed it, but it was like 5 sentences about melissa, more than anything else mentioned in the article!

[AniaR]

I think I should submit a whole paragraph about my book! lol

7 of the 18 things cited are mermaid melissas website lol. Why doesnt she just make a mermaid melissa wikipedia page

[Ashe]

Memaid Melissa is legally named 'Mermaid'? Never heard of that one.

[Echidna]

...
External Links:
One press link, one Oprah Link, Mernetwork, aaaaaaannddd

BOOK HERE PRO MER M ONLY ONE IN THE LEGAL WORLD HOOO.

Seriously?
Lol.

[Princess Pearl]

I really doubt her claim of being the only person in the whole wide world who is legally named "Mermaid." People name their children very stupid things. If people can get away with calling their children things like "Number 16 Bus Shelter" and "Sex Fruit," I'm sure someone somewhere has named their baby "Mermaid."

And yes, those are real baby names.
http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/talula-...hange-1.745238


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[Mermaid Wesley]

She had it changed so that she can have mermaid Melissa as her fb name i think. Weird to me idk.


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[Mermaid Mystery]

what's funny to me is her page on Facebook has no pictures of her whatsoever. it's all animals and "cool Internet Pinterest pictures" from 2009. I tried to go through it to see pics of her tails and I couldn't find anything.


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[AniaR]

so yeah it was edited as soon as I posted it. I shoulda screen capped it so you could of seen it -_-

BUT we had a big ol discussion of it on my Raina Mer account and the nice thing is we all brainstormed more content and citations, and a brave mer had taken it on to update it and flesh it out more

[Elle]

I'm tempted to edit this wiki page

[Princess Pearl]

Nothing's gone forever on wikipedia- there's always change logs, and you can even select different versions and compare them.

And looking at said change logs, you can also see the back end of what's been done.

For example, you can see that on March 24 there 15 edits, all made from the same IP address. Comparing the last version before that (dated February 23) to the final MArch 24 edit there's some GLARING changes. This includes changing the link to the Wreck Bar to Mermaid Melissa's webpage, as well as just throwing in a link to her website after a section about Annette Kellerman.

Some links to articles about other mermaids or mermaid community events were simply deleted, but what's WORSE is that more than one URL is subtly changed, making the links not work at all. "Hannahfraser.com" is changed to "hannafraser.com" and "mernetwork.com" is changed to "mermaidnetwork.com." Some are even sneakier, they'll have a single character changed- an extended URL will have a period dropped out, or have "community" spelled with one M. You can't see that unless you actually go in and look at the code. That's not a simple editing error, you have to go through the URLs looking for something that people might miss.

You can see that all the edits were done from one IP address. Low. Just... low.

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?...ldid=648507113

PS, I've gone in and corrected these now. All the links should work.

[Mermaid Wesley]

oh shit really? O: whooooaaaaah.......... thats more than vanity... thats dreadful... i mean assuming it was her. It could have been anyone really, but.... i dont think its likely. how rude...

[Elle]

The Hannah Fraser link was still the wrong one so I corrected that

[Princess Pearl]

Oh, bother. I failed the captcha, that's why it didn't get fixed, Sorry, everyone, looks like I'm a robot! Beep boop.

I've resubmitted it and all the links should work now.