Why This Site Exists
March 12th, 2011 | 
Author: 
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.
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This is just my personal understanding. There will be as many sub categories as people create.
So if you put “Pagan-Wiccan” you will go in the larger pagan category; that community that we are all part of when we attend a camp or conference, private ritual or just a coffee morning. However the bit after the dash will put you in the category for what you specifically describe. So Pagan-Wiccan will count you in Wiccan. It’s not counting twice. (When they count Christians as Baptists and Methodists they don’t end up with twice as many Christians, they end up with sub categories, more refined data.)
My understanding, as an individual who has understood the logic of the campaign since the start in Australia over ten years ago, is that the bit after the dash is not about set categories. A computer can add an extra category for each unique entry that people create. So the category for Wiccans or Druids will have lots of people in them. However if I put Magician (for that is what I am) I will be counted as a magician, even if I am the only person to put that, which I’m sure I wont.
They may stop counting the very small sub categories and classify them as ‘other’ but you can be sure that the larger categories such as Wiccans or Druids will be counted. Because they are using character recognition (each letter in a little box) they have the option to reanalyse this to count the number of say, Zoroastrians, if they decide to at a later date. They just reanalyse the data.