The Library of Spanking Fiction: Wellred Weekly


Wellred Weekly
Volume 1, Number 5 : February 7, 2012
 
Articles
Items of interest regarding all things spanking

The Spanking Art Wiki
by Spankart

I've had a strange fascination with spanking for as long as I can remember -- from early childhood on. Not so much in real life, because I grew up in a modern anti-spanking home, but from verbal references, pictures and books. It took me until I reached puberty to realize that my peculiar interest in the subject was erotic, in fact very deeply so.

My teenage years were in the days when computers entered people's homes, but before the Internet. In the libraries I only learned of "classic" sadomasochism, which I felt surely had some overlap with my particular kink -- which otherwise seemed to be unheard of. Then, as a young adult, in 1994 it was, I "discovered" the World Wide Web and the Usenet. Bang! Fireworks! It came as an overwhelming, joyful surprise to see how many others out there share this interest in spanking, in all its sparkling facets. And it was amazing how the Internet could get like-minded people and their works together, spanning the globe.

But spanking was always more than just an erotic interest for me. I liked to study this historic pedagogic aspect of our culture as an art, and a science. Over the years I became a kind of Doctor of Spankology. Freud would have said I sublimized my paraphilia. Perhaps it is also in my genes: I come from a family of professors and teachers.

As my Internet identity -- this one of my Internet identities -- I adopted the name "Spankart" because of my creed that it is impossible to draw a line between sexual/erotic and mainstream/non-erotic spanking drawings. Hence you can't separate "porn" from "art". Any creative work is deserving of the term art. I felt the time had come to pull our genre into the daylight and get it the recognition it deserved as an art form. I think in those years I played a role in coining the term spanking art.

After some years spent in forums and groups, I started my first educational spanking website in 2002. It mostly focused on figure drawing, human proportions, and general drawing techniques. The Internet age was in full boom, a new generation of budding spanking artists was emerging, and I wanted to share a few tricks that had helped me greatly in improving my own drawing in what I had always found the most difficult of all: to draw people. Like most things in life, drawing is not magic, it is a learnable skill.

In 2004 I learned of (and joined) Wikipedia, and that was another turning point in my life. Creating a real encyclopedia online, collaboratively, using a new "anyone can edit every page" web technology called a "wiki", was an idea that tended to get one immediate response: "nice in theory, but it won't work in practice." The surprising thing was that it did work in practice. It worked well enough to yield amazing, useful results in a short time. The best thing about the wiki way was that whatever you write doesn't need to be perfect. You, or someone else, can always come back to it and make further changes. There is never a final version, the contents live and evolve.

From Wikipedia's encouraging example my idea was born to use the same technology for a spanking art encyclopedia. I envisioned a wiki that would cover any imaginable aspect of spanking: artists, story authors, websites, books, films, genres, actors, producers, but also spanking throughout the world and history, and all the basics such as spanking positions, spanking techniques and implements. The Spanking Art Wiki should become the one place for any knowledge items that might interest people like myself.

I put this in the words: "Our mission is to create the world's most comprehensive and detailed database on spanking art. The vision is a wiki that features an article on practically every spanking artist, comic, author, video producer, actor, movie and website. We will also work as taxonomists, defining and explaining spanking and art related terms. So this wiki will not only be a knowledge database but also an encyclopedia on spanking art that helps artists and fans to use a common language." -- from the Spanking Art Wiki's Mission statement.

I launched this project on 8 May 2005 at the wiki farm Wikicities, which was soon renamed to Wikia. Our site developed into one of their most-visited wikis. Fortunately we were hardly bothered by vandalism or spam for years, and with more and more (hundreds of) hours invested, our wiki grew and grew. From the beginning we made sure the wiki was 100% legal contents: no copyright infringement permitted and no illegal images by any reasonable standards. The neutral point of view (NPOV) principle that's fundamental for Wikipedia also became our basic rule. And we put efforts into making it a friendly, well-structured, easy-to-use site with a consistent look and feel.

2008 began with a situation that was new to us: Our wiki was attacked, but not by vandals, by people who mainly wanted to target our host, Wikia. We called it the "boy scout controversy" because the ostensible initial issue was our use of a vintage black-and-white photo of a boy scout (from Wikipedia) in our article "Boy scout". The commotion (our wiki as a whole was suddenly called "offensive") resulted in quick action from Wikia: without warning or discussion, they closed down the Spanking Art Wiki. But one or two weeks later Wikia gave us technical help to relaunch it, with all 1,600 articles and 1,200 images saved, at a new host.

This new host was AnimeOTK, who kindly offered us space on their server. Our wiki has continued to grow and prosper there. Since 2008 we are advertisement-free. We only ask visitors to donate to our host to cover the hosting costs. We recently celebrated the milestones of 3,000 articles and 3,000 images. Our main page has passed 2.5 million hits, our ten most popular articles have over 100,000 views each, and the wiki in total has over 60,000 page edits. Our currently most active users are Roguebfl (webmaster of Boyz Being Boyz), Jameslovebirch (expert in spanking videos), and myself.

We currently have to deal (or bear) with two mostly technical challenges: frequent outages due to bandwidth limitations, and spam from wiki-targeting bots. We hope both will become better after AnimeOTK's planned move to a new server in 2012.

My personal vision for the wiki's future is continued growth, a bigger community of regularly active editors, and better technical support. Perhaps one day we might also add further languages besides English, or publish selected articles from the wiki in book form.

I am proud of the Spanking Art Wiki. It is one of the biggest and best things I have done in my life. It fills me with joy to see how well it has developed. I wish the fruit of this work, this collaborative project, will outlive me. Please make this site yours. It's open and free. Come in, look around -- and contribute. New authors are always welcome.

And for those of you who are regulars at the Library of Spanking Fiction: we have particular expansion potential in the "Authors" section.


The Spanking Art Wiki can be found at: http://www.spankingart.org/


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