www.PaganDash.com – UK Census

Archive for March, 2011

Pagan Dash - Lets Make This Census Count

Many people have criticised this site and questioned our motives. There is a simple explanation, according to information sent to us from the Census Office the “pagan-” prefix would have resulted in everyone being classified as purely Pagan. This could have led to smaller belief systems disappearing from the statistics, altogether and larger ones being greatly diminished. Until CoA provided a previously unreleased document, it appeared that the PaganDash was not what it claimed to be. As it is unlikely many of you will believe this I will include a section of an email from the Census Office

You are correct in saying that somebody who writes “Pagan Wicca” would be
coded to Pagan,

In that light of that statement, you should see the implications for PaganDash, remember that any punctuation is removed so a dash is effectively the same as a space.

We have now confirmed that the above email was correct, and there was a flaw in the way “pagan-” would have been translated by the data capture department. We have been assured that as a result of our warning this coding has now been corrected.

We do wish to publically state that we support the PaganDash initiative and will help spread the word. It seems all the arguments from recent weeks are no longer relevant, as PaganDash.org have been able to create a new subcategory “Other-pagan”, this means that whether you use pagan- or not you will still be counted as your true path, and then grouped in the Other-pagan category.

While we apologise to PaganDash.org for doubting their initiative, if we had not warned that a problem existed it may have only been discovered too late after everything had been misclassified. The original information would not have been destroyed, but the initial counts could potentially have had been very misleading. In fact exactly the effect we originally predicted, with purely “Pagan” artificially boosted and individual paths showing false big declines.

We are glad that PaganDash worked with CoA to coordintate with the ONS to correct the coding, so the PaganDash campaign can now go ahead with no doubts about how we will all be counted.

We have been sent an email from Children of Artemis containing a previously unreleased document from the Census Office that changes everything.

It appears that the PaganDash campaign has managed to get all of us a sub category under Other for pagan belief systems. Previous information had totally refuted this claim, so we apologise to CoA for all the problems we have inadvertently caused you. The information on this site is as accurate as we have been able to obtain from the Census Office, expect a major update soon.

From the information we have received so far, even if you are not confident the PaganDash notation will be honoured, you can be included by just writing in your actual path. All Pagan paths will apparently be grouped in the new Other-pagan subcategory. We wish to thank www.pagandash.org for making that possible and hope to work together to make all of you confident you know what will happen to your religious entry on your census form.