Wikipedia:WikiProject Secret Societies

WikiProject Secret Societies
	Members of the Skull and Bones fraternity
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Welcome to the WikiProject Secret Societies! Some Wikipedians have formed a project to better organize information in articles related to secret societies. This page and its subpages contain their suggestions; it is hoped that this project will help to focus the efforts of other Wikipedians. If you would like to help, please inquire on the talk page and see the to-do list there.

For more information on WikiProjects, please see Wikipedia:WikiProject and Wikipedia:WikiProject/Best practices.

Scope

The scope of this project is all articles related to secret societies. For the purposes of this project, the following definition is proposed of that term.
A secret society must first be a society, which is to say an organization of a primarily societal nature. It must also be a private, non-governmental, organization which does not clearly and explicitly profess a group of religious beliefs as a primary identifier. In effect, religious movements per se, cults, etc., are not within the scope of this group. Even after this, however, there is still a remarkable degree of ambiguity regarding the term. On that basis, regrettable as it may be, it may perhaps be that the only way to define what is and is not a secret society is by the existing definitions used elsewhere. This project currently considers the following definitions to be those which the project uses.
- One of these definitions, Alan Axelrod's definition from International Encyclopedia of Secret Societies and Fraternal Orders, includes the following factors:
  - (1) it must one in which a prospective member has to make a conscious effort to join,
  - (2) it must have or have had a rite or oath of initiation,
  - (3) it must have or have had at least one of the following three items as a declared intention:
    - (a) to transfer a secret or teaching
    - (b) to behave in a fraternal or beneficial way as a group
    - (c) to work for the mutual support of members of the group against others.
- There is a tendency in such works to use indefinable phrasing, such as adjectives like "strong", and vague phrases like "favor its own". For the purposes of clarity, such terms are not included here.
- Another definition, from David V. Barrett's Secret Societies:From the Ancient and Arcane to the Modern and Clandestine, is that it is a group that has "carefully graded and progressed teachings" "available only to selected individuals" that include "hidden (and "unique) truths" that bring "personal benefits beyond the reach and even the understanding of the uniniated." This definition includes several hyperbolic elements as well. Removing the indefinable adjectives, we have "graded and progressed teachings" "available only to selected individuals" that contain statements of belief or practices that are less than immediately obvious and not generally explicitly stated in those specific terms by others, that benefit the member in some way.
- A third definition comes from the online Encyclopedia Britannica, to the effect that a secret society is "any of various oath-bound societies devoted to brotherhood (or sisterhood), moral discipline, and mutual assistance. Such societies usually conduct rituals of initiation to instruct new members in the rules of the group (see rite of passage). Greek and Roman mystery religions had their secular counterparts in clandestine social clubs, some of which served as platforms for political dissent. In West Africa secret societies such as Poro (for men) and Sande (for women) serve to translate slight advantages of wealth and prestige into political authority. In parts of New Guinea secret men's societies serve as repositories of tribal knowledge. Fraternal orders such as the Freemasons (see Freemasonry) may be considered secret societies, as may criminal groups such as the Mafia and the Chinese Triads and hate groups such as the Ku Klux Klan." This definition contains as its primary objective identifiers "oath-bound societies devoted to moral brotherhood (or sisterhood), moral discipline and mutual assistance", and specifically identifies several such societies.
For the purposes of this project, a secret society that would fall within the scope of this project must be actively described within one or more reliable sources as a secret society and meet (based on the available evidence from reliable sources) over half of the more objective, less hyperbolic qualifiers in any single definition above.
These articles should all be included in the Category:Secret societies or one of its subcategories.
We also acknowledge the existence of other WikiProjects, currrent or prospective, which may have a more focused scope than ours. As is standard with all such broader/smaller scope WikiProject arrangements, this project will itself only deal with the centralmost articles of those smaller scope projects, for so long as those smaller scope projects remain active.

Parentage

WikiProject Organizations

Related WikiProjects

Related pages in Sister projects

Wikisource:Portal:Secret societies

Sister Project Searches

Participants

Dagomar 03:27, 1 August 2007 (UTC)[reply]
John Carter 18:30, 4 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
JASpencer (talk) 18:43, 5 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Blueboar (talk) 00:38, 7 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Cornell1890 (talk) 00:12, 10 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Royalhistorian (talk · contribs) I am interested in the history of the Rose Cross, Freemasonry, Rosicrucians, Golden Dawn, SRIA, the The Fraternitas Rosæ Crucis and AEth Priesthood.
--The Theosophist (talk) 09:30, 8 October 2011 (UTC) Anything about Occultism, Hermetism, Esotericism, Theosophy, Freemasonry or Rosicrusianism 20:49, 2 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Bellerophon5685 (talk) 19:08, 11 April 2016 (UTC) - Fraternal orders, ethnic and religious orders, political secret societies, as well as what J.M Roberts called "the mythology of secret societies" ie, conspiracy theories.[reply]

Goals

Assess all articles within the scope of this project as per Wikipedia:WikiProject Secret Societies/Assessment.
Bring as many of the central articles about secret societies up to GA or FA level.
Work on issues relating to categorization within the Category:Secret societies and its various subcategories.
Work to create content, if not separate articles, for each entry on the still-developing Wikipedia:WikiProject Secret Societies/Missing articles.

Sources

At least three reference sources directly relating to this topic exist. They should prove useful to anyone seeking to create and/or develop content related to these subjects.

Axelrod, Alan. The International Encyclopedia of Secret Societies & Fraternal Orders. Facts on File, 1997.
Preuss, Arthur. A dictionary of secret and other societies. St. Louis, Herder, 1924.
Stevens, Albert Clark, 1854-1919 The Cyclopaedia of Fraternities: A Compilation of Existing Authentic Information and the Results of Original Investigation as to the Origin, Development, Aims, Emblems, Character, and Personnel of More Than Six Hundred Secret Societies in the United States New York and Paterson, NJ: Hamilton Printing and Pub. Co., 1899
- Second edition, 1907 - the two editions are identical, except for the material on Freemasonry.
Whalen, William Joseph. Handbook of Secret Organizations. Milwaukee: Bruce, 1966.

Projects

Add all relevant articles to the Wikipedia:WikiProject Secret Societies/Articles page by category.
Monitor these articles for vandalism, improvement, and other changes with the recent changes function.

Adopt an article

Similar to the Collaboration of the week, but on a smaller scale, you might want to "adopt" an article. This would involve doing the research, writing, and picture-taking (if possible) for either a non-existent article or a stub. Of course, everyone else can still edit an adopted article, and you can work on other things too, but the idea is to find a focus for a while, to try and build up the number of quality articles the Project has produced.

Example article: User:Example

Templates

{{WikiProject Secret Societies}} - to be placed on the talk page of all associated articles.
{{User WikiProject Secret Societies}} - userbox.

Stub templates

NOTE: Stubs are managed by the Stub-sorting WikiProject. Before creating a new stub, you should propose it at Wikipedia:WikiProject Stub sorting/Proposals. See Wikipedia:Stub for general guidelines on proposing stub templates and categories. DO NOT simply create new stub templates, as these will be deleted.

Articles

Wikipedia namespace and Meta-Wiki articles on Secret Societies

meta:Secret Societies

New Wikipedia articles related to Secret Societies

Please feel free to list your new Secret Societies-related articles here (newer articles at the top, please). Any new articles that have an interesting or unusual fact in them should be suggested for the Did you know? box on the Main Wikipedia page. DYN has a 72 hr. time limit from the creation of the article.

Daughters of America - created 22 Mar 2012 after finding the D of A symbol on my great-grandmother's headstone (rather embarrassed to admit that) --Spacini (talk) 16:46, 22 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]