Talk:SantaCon

message: I found a copy of the text of this wikipedia page from 2008. This text (which I did not write) is much more reflective of the actual event. I would like to see it worked back into the entry. Source of this is from my site, which has documented and organized Santacon since 2008: http://www.heathervescent.com/santacon/2008/11/what-is-santacon.html
SantaCon, short for "Santa Convention," is a mass gathering of people dressed in their various interpretations of Santa Claus costumes (most, however, are traditional), and performing publicly on streets and in bars in cities around the world. The focus is on spontaneity, creativity, and the improvisational nature of human interaction while having a good time and spreading cheer and goodwill to all they come across. Sometimes known in the U.S. as Naughty Santas, Cheapsuit Santas, Santarchy, Santa Rampage, the Red Menace and Santapalooza, SantaCon events are noted for cheerfully bawdy and harmless behavior, including the singing of naughty Christmas carols, and the giving of small gifts and free hugs to random strangers. In Japan there is more of the "doing good" principle and they have contributed to the community through such activities as Santa litter-picking outings. Some participants see SantaCon as a postmodern revival of Saturnalia, while others see the event as a precursor of the flash mob. For others it is about spreading the real spirit of Christmas in the form of love, generosity, fun and celebration with ones fellows, as opposed to the stressful consumerist competition it has become.
In 1994, the Cacophony Society staged the first American SantaCon in San Francisco. Influenced by the surrealist movement, Discordianism, and other subversive art currents, the Cacophonists decided to celebrate the Yule season in a distinctly anti-commercial manner, by mixing guerrilla street theatre, pranksterism, and public intoxication. SantaCon has since evolved, spawning many different versions and interpretations of the event throughout the world.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by Vsnt777 (talk • contribs) 05:20, 18 October 2015 (UTC)
replies: text: Vsnt777, we need an independent source, not one written by you. --NeilN talk to me 05:42, 18 October 2015 (UTC)

text: This has no sources to back up the content you have above. --NeilN talk to me 06:18, 18 October 2015 (UTC)

text: The event, like it or not, has changed considerably since 2008. To quote the article lead:  Would you have the article omit the bad aspects because you don't like the current reputation of the event in New York? clpo13(talk) 06:20, 18 October 2015 (UTC)
replies: text: No, but that source is about a specific, individual event. This page is about the event in general. I have no issue with the negative coverage of the NY event. It has significantly change, however, this change, and the NY event experience DOES NOT reflect the event experience in other locations. The NY event needs to be in the context of the NY event, and not in the context of ALL santacon events. Vsnt777 (talk) 18:12, 18 October 2015 (UTC)

text: The New York sources, naturally, review this from a current-day New York cultural perspective, particularly because it is covered as a public event rather than a serious piece of news. So that means complaining, in a snarky and condescending tone, about the drunken revelry. To maintain an encyclopedic tone we have to take a longer approach, and not engage in recentivism or regionalism. If it was one thing in 2004 and another thing in 2015, we do not exclusively cover 2015. Moreover, a few recent sources calling a yearly celebration a "bar crawl" does not mean it is a bar crawl anymore than a few recent sources calling Christmas a "celebration of consumerist culture" (or whatever the snarky condescending cultural critics want to say). That may be a valid criticism, but it does not identify the subject. - Wikidemon (talk) 08:51, 18 October 2015 (UTC)
replies: text: Removing the reference to it as a pub crawl is not an "abuse" of the sources as you put it in an edit summary but a reflection of the sources from the headline down. For heaven's sake, look at pub crawl. Am reverting. If you insist upon removing, I guess we'll have to go to dispute resolution but it strikes me as a total waste of time. Coretheapple (talk) 12:45, 18 October 2015 (UTC)

text: The event is not a pub crawl. There is some confusion about this term and I'll explain why. 1) Some Santacon events (noteably one of three Portland Santacons, brand themselves a pub crawl. There are also two other Portland Santacon events that do not call themselves a pubcrawl and are not one. In Los Angeles, it is not a pub crawl. The event route is a combination of restaurants with food and drink, activities, interactions with the public, activities in public places and restaurants/bars that have additional activities, e.g. karaoke. Drinking is not required and many attend the event sober. 2) Media has a hard time understanding culture jamming and when writing a story, it's easy to glom onto aspects they understand. For example, if we stop in a bar, calling it a bar crawl. As I mentioned before, some of the events choose to make it a bar crawl, but not ALL. The way the article describes it, it's to be understood all events are a bar crawl and this is blatantly false. For 10+ years I have personally had to deal with people misunderstanding the nature of the event, no thanks to articles like this. Vsnt777 (talk) 18:12, 18 October 2015 (UTC)

text: There's a difference between stating how the event is generally viewed and reporting on two citations. For an analogy, see Compton, California#Crime. It contains broad views, not things like two assaults were committed in December 2012. --NeilN talk to me 20:30, 18 October 2015 (UTC)

text: Funny that this should be the page where you discover this. It's not Wikipedia specifically, it's the nature of news coverage and other sources in the world. That's all we have to go by, so when they're biased, inaccurate, unclear, incomplete, opinionated, written in a different tone than an encyclopedia's, etc., any article that simply repeats will also have that problem. Wikipedia is built on a thesis, that mostly bears out, that volunteer editors neutrally compiling sources is the best way to get a decent article out of imperfect sources. When you think about it, any other way like appointing subject matter experts or letting people write from (claimed) firsthand knowledge is going to have much worse bias problems, short of the old style encyclopedia way where an editorial board oversees panels of scholars and professional journalists to write, which brings its own risks of cultural bias and being co-opted and nobody can afford anyway. So in the case of a silly countercultural phenomenon like this that respectable journalists don't understand or take seriously, we're left with a bunch of low quality sources reporting in sensationalist or judgmental fashion. This in turn requires an extra degree of sophistication and judgment from editors, rather than blindly counting references or accepting news stories from publications however esteemed that are clearly not very helpful. For making articles, sometimes you can make lemonade out of a batch of lemons, but you can't make caviar out of lemons. - Wikidemon (talk) 18:51, 19 October 2015 (UTC)
thread_title: Description from Santacon wikipedia page in 2008

message: Hello fellow Wikipedians,
I have just modified 9 external links on SantaCon. Please take a moment to review my edit. If you have any questions, or need the bot to ignore the links, or the page altogether, please visit this simple FaQ for additional information. I made the following changes:
*Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20141219140105/http://www.dnainfo.com/new-york/20111220/downtown/drunken-santas-terrorized-lower-manhattan-during-santacon-locals-say to http://www.dnainfo.com/new-york/20111220/downtown/drunken-santas-terrorized-lower-manhattan-during-santacon-locals-say
*Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20140223005711/http://gothamist.com/2011/12/12/its_time_for_santacon_to_stop.php to http://gothamist.com/2011/12/12/its_time_for_santacon_to_stop.php
*Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20131216192835/http://www.dnainfo.com/new-york/20121218/hells-kitchen-clinton/drunk-santas-terrorized-city-during-seasonal-rampage-critics-say to http://www.dnainfo.com/new-york/20121218/hells-kitchen-clinton/drunk-santas-terrorized-city-during-seasonal-rampage-critics-say
*Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20131128094312/http://gothamist.com/2013/11/24/ray_kelly_says_nypd_supports_santac.php to http://gothamist.com/2013/11/24/ray_kelly_says_nypd_supports_santac.php
*Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20131215102631/http://www.dnainfo.com/new-york/20131214/east-village/santacon-sweeps-east-village-up-wake-of-crowded-bars-long-lines to http://www.dnainfo.com/new-york/20131214/east-village/santacon-sweeps-east-village-up-wake-of-crowded-bars-long-lines
*Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20141214093953/http://gothamist.com/2014/11/18/bk_council_member_slams_santificati.php to http://gothamist.com/2014/11/18/bk_council_member_slams_santificati.php
*Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20141208141323/http://www.dnainfo.com/new-york/20141119/bushwick/santacon-will-no-longer-take-place-bushwick-organizers-say to http://www.dnainfo.com/new-york/20141119/bushwick/santacon-will-no-longer-take-place-bushwick-organizers-say
*Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20150404145246/http://gothamist.com/2014/12/10/santacon_norman_siegel.php to http://gothamist.com/2014/12/10/santacon_norman_siegel.php
*Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20131218011846/http://gothamist.com/2013/12/15/watch_santacon_videos_to_remind_you.php to http://gothamist.com/2013/12/15/watch_santacon_videos_to_remind_you.php
When you have finished reviewing my changes, you may follow the instructions on the template below to fix any issues with the URLs.
Cheers.—InternetArchiveBot (Report bug) 04:08, 3 November 2017 (UTC)
thread_title:  External links modified