Talk:Acorn Community Farm

VFD Result

The result of the VFD can be found here: Wikipedia:Votes for deletion/Acorn Community -- AllyUnion (talk) 10:07, 10 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Verifiability/POV of information

The following is why I have added a "disputed" warning to this article.

User:209.145.86.126 and User:209.145.86.69 are the only one(s) to have added any content to this thus far; all contributions by other users have been minor style edits.

Copied from User talk:209.145.86.69:

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Hi there. I noticed you had made some pretty substantial contributions to Acorn Community. I was wondering what your sources were for this information, as there seemed to be a significant dearth of reporting about it on the internet, at least. Thanks! Postdlf 03:29, 24 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Hello,

I see from the entries you made in the discussion regarding the VFD for Acorn Community that you are not in agreement with the result of the vote. Rather than what appears to be a polite request for information it seems to me that you suspect that I am a member of Acorn and are hoping to use this to bolster your argument. Who better to provide information on a cultural experiment than somebody who is experiencing and contributing to that culture? I really do not feel like entering into a debate over the validity of Acorn Community as encyclopedic. However if you press me I shall give my argument. [posted by User:Acorner; user's first and only edit]

So are you saying you were writing from personal experience? Postdlf 15:53, 24 Feb 2005 (UTC)

What of it? [posted by User:209.145.86.69]

See Wikipedia:Original research, Wikipedia:Autobiography, and Wikipedia:NPOV. All articles must be based on objective, verifiable information. This is difficult, if not impossible to do if the information comes from a first-person source that has not been otherwise reported. An encyclopedia in itself is a secondary (if not a tertiary) source. Furthermore, writing about one's own self or accomplishments is heavily discouraged because it's likely to be original research, and it's likely to come from a self-aggrandizing point of view. How are non-Community members to verify that what you have written is accurate? If you can't give a print source for the information you have contributed, if it is in fact original research, it should be removed. Postdlf 20:55, 24 Feb 2005 (UTC)

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I believe that reverting the User:209.145.86.69's edits would be a drastic step at this point, though perhaps justified in the future if the additions cannot be shown to reflect any verifiable, outside source. Postdlf 00:36, 26 Feb 2005 (UTC)

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Information regarding the Acorn Community entry may be verified in a number of ways.

You might like to contact TwinOaks community and ask to talk to any one of the 30+ members who have been living at TwinOaks longer than Acorn has been in existence.

You could contact the FEC (Federation of Egalitarian Communities) of which Acorn is a full member.

You could find yourself a copy of the Communities directory, of which there are thousands of copies in the libraries of the U.S.A. This is a comprehensive listing of the intentional communities in the U.S. this is also available online http://directory.ic.org/

You could contact Acorn Community where you could talk with people who have been here since the beginning. If you are particularly keen you could even take a trip to Virginia and peruse the archives of meeting and decisions reached over the communities lifetime.

Or you could have a quick search on the internet. I did just that and turned up these on the first google page www.ic.org/acorn/ www.communitymade.com/community-list.html www.localharvest.org/farms/M10043 www.communitymade.com/community-list.html whispy.com/intentional-communities.html www.neravt.com/left/directory/subjects/commun.htm

• www.ic.org/acorn/, www.communitymade.com/community-list.html, www.localharvest.org/farms/M10043, and www.neravt.com/left/directory/subjects/commun.htm are obviously self-promotional, as they are written in the first person. They can't be considered outside objective sources.
• http://whispy.com/intentional-communities.html refers to Acorn only in name, in the caption to a link to www.communitymade.com.

This is NOT verification. This is nothing but advertisement. Is that the best you have? Postdlf 00:27, 24 Mar 2005 (UTC)

It's true that "you could contact Acorn community and verify.." and similar points do not correspond to how Wikipedia was set up to not be a place for original research but to describe what's been published by (respectable) other courses. However, as the other user stated, you can use google to find lots of articles about Acorn online. For example, http://www.life.ca/nl/43/commun.html Similarly there's Kat Kinkade's book.

I missed the vote, and I'm glad the vote was to keep it (can one request to be notified by email when there's a vote? Does "Watch this page' do it? I thought I checked that but perhaps not) I would have voted for keeping this article. This is much more notable than a municipality, not the other way around. Places like this affect the culture. Not just for people like me who don't live there but have visited, but, from online discussion boards, I can tell you that probably hundreds of thousands if not millions have been influenced by the existence of not only ICs but of ICs in their state (in this case, in VA), in terms of their own life-goals and thinking about their own life. You don't have to be part of a blues or jazz music group to be influenced by blues or jazz..in this case the influence is substantial and has influenced not only individuals but other movements (e.g. the peak oil awareness movement, the permaculture movement, and more).

The above comments apply to any intentional community that has more than ~10 people and more than ~5 years old, but in the case of Acorn there is an additional second and very powerful reason why it is notable because of the combination of two facts: Twin Oaks is one of the most well known intentional communities in the U.S. if not world, and Acorn is a rare if not unique case of a split-off on this scale. The success AND any failures of the split-off into a second full community, Acorn, are of extremely high historical and contemporary value, therefore. --Harel 19:21, 26 December 2006 (UTC)

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I saved the best until last there is also a book published, "Is It Utopia Yet?" written by Kat Kinkade who was a founding member of TwinOaks. She dedicates an entire chapter ("Twin Oaks Plants an Acorn") to the planning and early years of Acorn Community. It makes an interesting read and can be found on Amazon http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0964044501/103-4371305-4903852?v=glance

Other vegetarian communities

I created a new category: Category:Vegetarian settlements and now it has only two articles ...

Does anyone know about other vegetarian communities over the world?

I am only familiar with Amirim. --Amir E. Aharoni 09:36, 7 August 2007 (UTC)

Moving Page to Acorn Community Farm

I am interning at Acorn currently and have been asked by the community to change the name from Acorn Community to Acorn Community Farm. Can anyone assist me on doing the properly? --Dhornbein (talk) 17:44, 12 June 2014 (UTC)

I handled it for you, but I want to warn you that if you'd like to help this page out, it's very important to get some proper source citations for this entire article. It may be considered wide in its scope and coverage, but it isn't sourced to anything. Wikipedia is not a place for original research, and doesn't exist to help promote this intentional community. It may have survived a previous deletion nomination, back when Wikipedia's editors had lax standards, but it's impossible for it to survive one today unless it gets verifiable, third party sources.--Cast (talk) 23:32, 12 June 2014 (UTC)

Thank you, I will work with the community to bring this page up to Wikipedia's standards. --Dhornbein (talk) 17:07, 5 July 2014 (UTC)