Wikipedia and the History of Gaming

Wired is running a story about Wikipedia's tremendous contribution to documenting the history of video games, and why it shouldn't necessarily be relied upon. Quoting: "Wikipedia requires reliable, third-party sources for content to stick, and most of the sites that covered MUDs throughout the ’80s were user-generated, heavily specialized or buried deep within forums, user groups and newsletters. Despite their mammoth influence on the current gaming landscape, their insular communities were rarely explored by a nascent games journalist crowd. ... while cataloging gaming history is a vitally important move for this culture or art form, and Wikipedia makes a very valiant contribution, the site can’t be held accountable as the singular destination for gaming archeology. But as it’s often treated as one, due care must be paid to the site to ensure that its recollection doesn’t become clouded or irresponsible, and to ensure its coalition of editors and administrators are not using its stringent rule set to sweep anything as vitally relevant as MUDS under the rug of history."

Comments

then?

[papabob]

Supose I create a wiki entry with info about an old and obscure game from the 80s. As Wikipedia is not primary source I add references from an obscure forum. Let say 5 years from now the forum is dead and no other info can be found. What you would do with my entry? would you preserve it because is actual info (althought unconfirmable)? would you delete it?

Re:then?

[Improv]

I would hope it would be deleted immediately. Forums are not reputable sources, and old/obscure games are not notable.

Re:then?

[Chrisq]

There are some references on Wikipedia into the internet archive, also known as the "way back machine". If your site was archived there I think editors would attempt to change references to this record. If it was completely gone I think it would probably be preserved with a "citation needed" tag.

Re:then?

[6031769]

If it is of importance to you, why not create a page on your own site which is entirely under your own control and there you can state all your opinions as well as facts with or without citations. If you like you could then create a wikipedia stub which could reference your own page. It's then up to the wikiguardians to decide if the wiki page is appropriate, etc.

Wikipedia is useful, but it's not the be all and end all of information resources on the web.

Re:then?

[mvar]

and old/obscure games are not notable.

a pottery bowl wasn't notable 2000 years ago but now we show them off in museums

Re:then?

[somersault]

old/obscure games are not notable

Why not? Do they have to be both old and obscure to not be notable, or simply one or the other? There are many obscure games that have notable qualities for things like being the first in some genre, or first to implement some now well known concept.

What about this article on "Computer Space". I'd never even heard of this game until right now, but it was the world's first coin operated video game. I think that's pretty notable. What about Karate Champ? I found it on Wikipedia last week after someone mentioned the developer here on Slashdot. I'd never heard of this game, but it was the first ever side view beat'em up. Again, I think that's pretty notable.

You might not be interested in gaming history, but a lot of people are, and will be.

Re:then?

[Andy Smith]

"it was the first ever side view beat'em up"

That's according to Wikipedia. Also according to Wikipedia, another side-view beat-em-up preceeded it by eight years:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heavyweight_Champ

Re:then?

[j0nb0y]

Many obscure games have been highly influential. The entire rogue-like genre is obscure, but has been extremely influential in games like Diablo.

Re:then?

[AmiMoJo]

The "not notable" argument is bullshit anyway. When Wikipedia started one of the main principals was that "Wikipedia is not paper", i.e. there is no limit to the amount of information and relevant material should never be removed on the grounds of brevity or it not being notable enough. Somewhere along the lone the deletionists got that changed and started burning articles as fast as they could.

I can see no reason why Wikipedia should not have an article on almost any subject, no matter how obscure, so long as there is reasonable reference material to base it on. First hand accounts by those involved who went on to write web sites should be permissible when they do not appear biased. Editors have to decide on that, not just make up absolute rules and use them to diminish Wikipedia.

Re:then?

[DarkIye]

This is an interesting variant of 'if you think his music is so bad, why don't you make your own?'.

The reason he can't is because that would make him a nutty man. The point of Wikipedia is that it combines the efforts of hundreds of nutty men to generate credibility.

Re:then?

[Moryath]

Here we go again.

Wikipedia is problematic beyond problematic. Want to know why? Here's a transcript of a Jason Scott presentation that goes over a lot of it.

The short version is: Wikipedia as it exists today is an insular, closed circle-jerk operation. Even good contributions and spelling corrections are apt to be "reverted" by a legion of people who are using semi-automated tools to up their "edit count", because the prime metric for becoming an "admin" is a stupid-high edit count that an actual writer could never reach in 10 years, and they don't give a crap how you got there.

Once you get to be an "admin", basically anything goes. That's when you start entertaining offers to be the protecting force for groups of people who create politics, that's when you start being verbally obtuse if not outright abusive towards any new editors, and that's where the whole system falls apart. Want to try to repair an article, add links? Ok, but now you have to speak 18 categories of acronyms, you have to be online 24/7 to instantly respond to "questions" that can be posed in a dozen or more possible places ranging from your talk page, other editors talk pages, article talkpage, "related" article talkpages, various "admin" forums, two or three email forums, and on and on. You have to master an entire subset of "how to write a citation" code rather than sticking a link at the end of the line, because otherwise some ass-hat will revert you and claim you're spamming.

It's a mess. It's a mess because Wikipedia is not, and never will be, an accurate encyclopedia. Wikipedia is just the latest in the MUD/MMORPG line of games where a bunch of assholes grind time, gain "XP" (aka "edit count"), and once they get powerful enough and get the "admin" hat, spend most of their day griefing incoming players and claiming it's "thinning the herd", "fun", or "protecting the encyclopedia."

Re:then?

[Shivetya]

and don't even get started on what get its own page in Wikipedia. Their editors are more than a bit fickle. One growing issue is the apparent changing of how they handle hybrid cars. Apparently someone got their panties into a bunch and has declared what hybrid/alternative fuel vehicles deserve their own page and which ones do not, see the related article at http://green.autoblog.com/2011/01/19/electric-car-pages-on-wikipedia-in-danger-of-disappearing/

Anime characters, episodes of such series, music artists, individual songs, all those things have warranted their own pages. It all comes down to, which editor did you run afoul of and how good of week did they have.

Re:then?

[somersault]

Oops, that's what I get for going by memory. The Karate Champ article does say it's only "has been believed to be" the first side view beat'em up, but somehow it still stuck in my head as that.

I even read the HeavyWeight champ stub last week too, but I guess this part caused me to kind of mentally discard it, especially since it was controlled by boxing gloves rather than a controller, so the characters probably couldn't move and therefore it wasn't what we'd think of as a modern beat'em up, it it sounds more akin to Wii Boxing than Streetfighter II Turbo Mega Star Wars Remix HD Edition Hyper Alpha Centauri.

Critics have since identified it as the first game to feature hand to hand fighting, although it had no real influence on subsequent fighting games.[1][2]

Re:then?

[Chris Pimlott]

Obscure to you, perhaps, but anyone who went to arcades in the 80s definitely saw Karate Champ.

Re:then?

[msauve]

"old/obscure games are not notable"

Think so? There's more. From the summary: "as vitally relevant as MUDS." If an old game is "vitally relevant," then those gamers really do need to get a life.

Re:then?

[mvar]

I can see no reason why Wikipedia should not have an article on almost any subject, no matter how obscure, so long as there is reasonable reference material to base it on.

Correct. Wikipedia is a great opportunity to gather all human knowledge in one, accessible from everyone, place. It sounds (and probably is) impossible, there are lots of flaws in the current system, but one can only hope (and try) for the better.

Re:then?

[1s44c]

Supose I create a wiki entry with info about an old and obscure game from the 80s. As Wikipedia is not primary source I add references from an obscure forum. Let say 5 years from now the forum is dead and no other info can be found. What you would do with my entry? would you preserve it because is actual info (althought unconfirmable)? would you delete it?

They would delete it right away as forums are not considered reliable due to lack of editorical oversight. Wikipedia gives really biased information for anything that isn't mainstream and well documented elsewhere.

Also their rules on what is and what is not notable are arbitary so you may well fall on the wrong side of that.

Re:then?

[1s44c]

Forums are not reputable sources

Yet Gartner is allowable to wikipedia or any uninformed computer magazine that slashdot would laugh at. Shows how great wikipedia is really, their rules are nonsense.

Re:then?

[somersault]

What does that have to do with anything? I was 1 year old when it was brought out, so it's both old and obscure to me, yet I still think it has value and a place in Wikipedia.

In 100 years, very few people will have ever seen an original Karate Champ arcade. Does that mean it should be deleted from Wikipedia or a similar resource? Or is it all the more reason to keep a record of it?

Re:then?

[Abstrackt]

I didn't. I was too busy playing Donkey Kong.

Re:then?

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't envy the job of the Wiki editors at all, though - the problem is they can't have a page for literally everything (or you'd end up with pages such as "My dream last night, it had lolcats"). The only easy way to determine if a subject should have a page is by number of interested parties. Seemingly pointless things like anime characters have lots of interested parties, so they get pages. Other things that might seem more notable prima facie, such as the first MUD to implement functionality X, but was only played by 50 people and only remembered by 5 of them might not get a page, not because it's of less import but because it's of less weight. It's not ideal, but Wikipedia's funding is not unlimited for all its grand "we are not a paper product, therefore we can hold all of man's knowledge" ideals - you have to have some practical cut off points both to make it financially viable but also to make the information useful (if nobody can find anything there's no point indexing it). If you feel strongly enough about a subject then there are forums on Wikipedia for the discussion of just this. If enough people feel the same way maybe a decision will be reversed, if you're a lone voice then maybe you should consider putting your money where your mouth is and setting up your own site to try and generate interest that way,

Re:then?

[wjousts]

Only because so few of them remain. If every bowl made in the last 2000 years still existed in tact, nobody would put them in museums. Similarly, preserving every game, regardless of merit or noteworthiness devalues all games.

Re:then?

[wjousts]

Not sure what point you are trying to make since the two games you mention both have Wikipedia articles (that you link to) because they are notable. Just because you, personally, hadn't heard of them before doesn't impact their notability.

So what's your point? Should every piece of Wii shovelware have an article?

Re:then?

[wjousts]

The reason for the notability requirement is because otherwise the good information gets lost in the chaff of articles for everybody's local chess club or WOW guild or band they formed with their high school friends that lasted for about a week before everybody lost interest after their dad said they couldn't practice in his garage anymore because he needs to put the car back in.

There's the rest of the internet for that crap.

Re:then?

[wjousts]

But it already in Wikipedia, so your argument makes no sense.

Re:then?

[grumbel]

Nobody is accessing Wikipedia by looking at an index of all the pages it contains, but by using search and search doesn't care if there are millions of other unrelated pages around.

And no, the "rest of the internet" is not the solution, people go to Wikipedia because they want a consistent interface, NPOV, references and all those other qualities that the rest of the internet does generally not provide.

Re:then?

[Anonymous Coward]

No need to be a douchebag about it.

Re:then?

[Lumpy]

So in order to increase the value of games we should destroy most of the game makers..

Can we start with EA?

Re:then?

[grumbel]

Thats something Wikipedia could easily solve, just backup all the webpages that get referenced.

Re:then?

[Lumpy]

Do you really think wikipedia will be around in 100 years?

I'm betting it fades into obscurity in 25 years.

Re:then?

[GreatBunzinni]

You clearly aren't involved with wikipedia. Anyone who is remotely involved in anti-vandalism and article clean-up knows how much crap people try to shovel into wikipedia on a daily basis. I mean, besides the obvious trolls and vandals who add all sorts of puerile comments to articles, there is a constant barrage of articles being created on all sorts of absurd subjects, such as spam articles on small irrelevant companies which have just been founded, local wannabe models who managed to pay a semi-professional photographer to take a couple of amateurish photos of them, garage bands which were created last week by a set of teens that don't even own any instruments, etc etc etc...

And these are only a few examples of the obvious, clear cut trash which popped into wikipedia in the couple of minutes it took me to write this post. Now, extrapolate that to any time frame you wish to imagine. Imagine how much crap that amounts.

Another thing that you fail to understand is that there isn't a horde of meanies who are single-handedly deleting articles off of wikipedia. Wikipedia established a long time ago a democratic process. A user cannot delete articles. The only thing a user can do is nominate an article for deletion. Then, the fate of that article is decided after a week-long discussion among users, who vote on what to do with the article. There is no "deletionist" policy, only discussion among peers to decide what to do with articles covering all sorts of questionable issues. Have any doubt? Then look for yourself and discover Wikipedia's process to delete articles. You only need a valid account to vote, so put your money where your mouth is.

On top of that, people like you must understand what would wikipedia's fate be if the community didn't imposed some sort of filter on the changes being committed to their articles. To put it quite bluntly, wikipedia would be the new geocities, where 95% of the pages were filled with complete crap. This sort of criticism targetted at how wikipedia's community manages wikipedia's articles boils down to the belief that no one should ever touch your pet article, no matter the intention and no matter how absurd it may be. And that is no way to manage a knowledge repository which some people try to make it to be useful enough as a reference.

Re:then?

[shentino]

conflict of interest

Re:then?

[Stooshie]

From the article on wikipedia:

" ... Critics have since identified it as the first game to feature hand to hand fighting ... "

It mentions nothing about side view.

Re:then?

[1u3hr]

Let say 5 years from now the forum is dead and no other info can be found.

No online reference can be considered permanent. But with luck the Wayback Machine will have archived it. If I find a dead link in Wikipedia I may look there and update it with the Wayback link.

Re:then?

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey Computer Space was cool game, as well as karate Champ. I lived the progression of coin-op video games and have seen my share of the good, the bad and the forgetable. Similarly home consoles, i.e. Atari 2600, Coleco, up through today. Same with PC games. Its good to have some historical information to how the video game has changed over the years.

Re:then?

[Desler]

The reason for the notability requirement is because otherwise the good information gets lost in the chaff of articles for everybody's local chess club or WOW guild or band they formed with their high school friends that lasted for about a week before everybody lost interest after their dad said they couldn't practice in his garage anymore because he needs to put the car back in.

And in what way would the supposed "good information" get lost? Is the wiki search going to stop returning results just because there are 10000 junk articles?

Re:then?

[TheDarkMaster]

So, so true... Why I never have modpoints when I actually find a good reason to use them ...

Re:then?

[1u3hr]

The reason for the notability requirement is because otherwise the good information gets lost in the chaff of articles

"Lost"? There are billions of webpages on the Internet, more every day, and yet none of the pages I want to access get "lost". You see only one page at a time. It doesn't get squashed if there are 10 million other articles on the same server.

Re:then?

[Veinor]

yeah, but nobody writes a wikipedia article about a specific pottery bowl. people write articles about ancient chinese pottery.

Re:then?

[Improv]

Wikipedia has flaws, but you're better off finding real, sane discussion of those flaws than listening to a rabid troll. Jason Scott makes stuff up. He did it with much of his BBS "history", and he's making it up here. He has a grudge against Wikipedia because he brought his pairing of grand ego and crazy to the project, and could not handle when people disagreed with him on topics he tried to own. He then left in a huff, and was angry when his attempts to remove the contributions he made (under the regular open license) failed.

His attacks are personal, and not much connected to reality. You should steer clear of him, both on Wikipedia and on any other topic he might decide he's an expert on tomorrow.

Re:then?

[jollyreaper]

[quote]It's a mess. It's a mess because Wikipedia is not, and never will be, an accurate encyclopedia. Wikipedia is just the latest in the MUD/MMORPG line of games where a bunch of assholes grind time, gain "XP" (aka "edit count"), and once they get powerful enough and get the "admin" hat, spend most of their day griefing [wired.com] incoming players and claiming it's "thinning the herd", "fun", or "protecting the encyclopedia."[/quote]

That's exactly what the deletionists strike me as, griefers. And they get to claim oh, it's about not being dicks themselves but are simply upholding the law. *smirk*

I think that there should be something like a karma system and positive contributions (adding content) should add to it and deletes should remove from it while reverts are completely neutral up to a certain point.

The problem with any sort of human system is where it becomes meta-gaming, no longer about the established purpose of whatever you're involved in but politicking and epeen stroking. You see this fucking everywhere from churches to non-profit volunteer projects to work etc etc etc. Nevermind what we're trying to accomplish here, I'm really about empire-building. What kind of fucking empire are you building in an animal rescue non-profit? My empire. *smirk*

Re:then?

[nem75]

The pottery bowl represents probably about 0.0001% of the items that were available during its given century of origin. Most of the other items from that specific time frame are not known to us anymore. As soon as the obscure game is the only game known from its time, it will be notable. Which probably needs some milleniae to pass and knowledge about our civilization to disappear almost completely, before the game is rediscovered. But not necessarily.

Its not primarily about age, its about how much is known about a decade/century/era in general. If 2000 years pass and about all computer games from the 80s are still known by then, the obscure game will still be ... well, obscure. And only marginally more notable than it is today.

Re:then?

[mcgrew]

That's hilarious! My old Quake site, the Springfield Fragfest, is in the wayback machine, and most of what I posted was parody and fiction about the various players and web sites in the community. And there were others that did the same thing. I remember one post I made that had one guy's shambler pissing on his couch. "Kneel" Harriot's site Yello There had my grandmother living under his porch.

I should dig some of those old posts out and rerun them as slashdot journals...

Re:then?

[Sigma 7]

Supose I create a wiki entry with info about an old and obscure game from the 80s. As Wikipedia is not primary source I add references from an obscure forum. Let say 5 years from now the forum is dead and no other info can be found.

Not a major issue:

* archive.org contains snapshots of the web from various points of time. If the forum was archived, then you can switch the link around.
* Specialized gaming wikis are more likely to still provide game content if the game becomes old or obscure. gaming.wikia.com is one of them.
* Even if it's deleted, you can still request the entire page history from an admin if you want to import it onto another wiki.

Re:then?

[thesandtiger]

Vitally relevant to that particular field, the study of game history and game development. I don't think anyone - except perhaps you - was under the impression that the author was actually suggesting MUDS are vitally relevant in a universal sense.

When it comes to current game design, actually, MUDS *are* quite relevant. There were a LOT of MUDS out there, and they were generally very easy to modify by anyone with a very slight amount of technical skill and interest in game design and development. As a result, you wound up with an amazing amount of variety in game mechanics and attempts at implementing some ideas that were way way way ahead of their time. Of course there was a lot of crap, too, but that's no different than any other field.

Even better, MUDS were *cheap* to make and modify - so you had people who might have the interest and ability working on them but didn't need a ton of funding, so you had lots of creative and interesting ideas. Unfortunately, the recent shift to emphasizing production values over gameplay has really made it difficult for people to both create new and interesting ideas using the (relatively decent) open source MMO project software out there and to attract fans.

I dare say that of any MMO out there now, or that will come out in the next 10 years, for any feature that they care to claim is new or groundbreaking, I could find a MUD that had something similar 10-20 years ago.

That kind of influence on an industry this size is pretty much the definition of "vitally relevant."

Re:then?

[wjousts]

people go to Wikipedia because they want a consistent interface, NPOV, references and all those other qualities that the rest of the internet does generally not provide.

And none of those features (except the interface, obviously) happen with non-notable topics.

Re:then?

[wjousts]

It gets lost because having an article on Wikipedia is no longer a sign that the topic is notable.

Re:then?

[Anonymous Coward]

The point of Wikipedia is that it combines the efforts of hundreds of nutty men to generate credibility.

Also known as peer review.

Re:then?

[AndrewGOO9]

old/obscure games are not notable.

Citation needed.

Re:then?

[somersault]

That's why I said "Wikipedia or a similar resource" ;)

Re:then?

[somersault]

My first post was in response to the point that "old/obscure games are not notable", which I think is a matter of opinion. If the majority of people decide in 200 years that old and obscure video games are notable, yet nobody has preserved information on them, then it would be a shame. Wikipedia's resources are finite of course, but just because something is old or obscure is not a reason to delete it. There has to be some more compelling reason IMO.

Re:then?

[grumbel]

And none of those features (except the interface, obviously) happen with non-notable topics.

Then stick one of those templates {{Refimprove}} or whatever templates at the top of the page. Deletions should be reserved for pages where there is indication that the given information is wrong, not for pages where everybody agrees that the information is correct and just missing a reference to something printed on dead trees.

Re:then?

[Andy Smith]

It's on the Karate Champ page.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karate_Champ

It is one of the first fighting games, and has been believed to be the first to use today's common side-perspective. However, Heavyweight Champ, released in Japan by Sega, used the same perspective and predates Karate Champ by eight years.

Re:then?

[Anonymous Coward]

... there is a constant barrage of articles being created on all sorts of absurd subjects, such as spam articles on small irrelevant companies which have just been founded, local wannabe models who managed to pay a semi-professional photographer to take a couple of amateurish photos of them, garage bands which were created last week by a set of teens that don't even own any instruments, etc etc etc...

What is insignificant to one person is interesting and important to another person. What is the harm in having a lot of irrelevant articles that only a few people ever look at? Maybe that small insignificant band one day becomes famous. It would be nice to have the full history of page modifications on Wikipedia. You seem to think that if there are too many insignificant articles, then we won't be able to find the important ones. Allowing these trivial contributions also encourages the submitter/editor to make other more valuable contributions. Compare this to deleting their article, however insignificant, which will likely make them never want to contribute again.

There is no "deletionist" policy

Yes, there is. The fact that an article can be deleted means there is a deletionist policy. Even spam articles IMO should only be hidden, and not deleted. The process for hiding them should be simple, which would make it easier than the current process you described for deleting an article. And the article should be relatively easy to recover.

Of course, all of this is my opinion. I believe Wikipedia would be better with a non-deletionist policy, and I'm sure you'll disagree. There isn't really a way to resolve the disagreement without actually trying out the policy changes. Creating another site similar to Wikipedia won't really work because Wikipedia has so much momentum, it's almost impossible for another site to catch up.

To give one final example to try to support my opinion, a couple of years ago I was interested in some Anime (I don't remember which), there was fairly extensive episode documentation. This was found to be insignificant by some user and was deleted. Fortunately, it seems the scope of what is significant to the Wikipeida is growing. And I find a lot of stuff now, that probably would have been deleted a few years ago. So I believe Wikipedia is gradually moving towards a non-deletionist policy.

Re:then?

[NJRoadfan]

I see Usenet cited a bit on Wikipedia. Heck, thats the only source for a lot of legitimate information on computing related topics. Look up the history of the 2IMG disk image format used by Apple II emulators. The details of the file format was hammered out between two emulator authors on Usenet.

Re:then?

[HarrySquatter]

It gets lost because having an article on Wikipedia is no longer a sign that the topic is notable.

So what? People who don't want to see the non-notable articles don't have to view them and the articles that they do deem "notable" are still there and are still just as accessible as they have always been. Nothing is "lost".

Re:then?

[Hatta]

Your time would be better spent spidering old game sites. We need to preserve these primary sources before they're gone.

Re:then?

[wjousts]

Deletions should be reserved for pages where there is indication that the given information is wrong

No, if information is wrong, it should be corrected, not deleted. If it's cruft it should be deleted. If it's notable but missing a few reference, then it should be improved.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not for a moment trying to argue that Wikipedia is perfect, it's far from it, but non-notable articles should be removed. The only problem is over-zealous editors who think that because they haven't heard of it, it must be non-notable. It's happen to me, and I was able to get my article back.

Re:then?

[Moryath]

I see a lot of ad hominem in your post and zero worthwhile discussion.

Here, I'll give you some more to think about in return:

Larry Sanger on Wikipedia's anti-expert bias and culture via Kuro5hin.

Confession of a former wikipedia gamer (via Archive.org because his website no longer exists).

Journal of a former wikipedia admin - great stuff here documenting how "gaming the system" by non-admins and admins alike works, including how organized groups work very hard to ensure that they pick off or drive off those of differing opinions "one by one" to ensure that "consensus" can never change (see the "Lie #2: Nobody new ever comes to Wikipedia" section).

Cites and Insights carries a long history of articles on the subject.

The underlying flaw with Wikipedia is exactly as Jason Scott posited, your ungrounded ad hominem attacks notwithstanding. It is comprised primarily of, and run by, people who have created an alternate language, an alternate political scheme, and an insular and closed circle into which "breaking in" is a matter of proving that you can waste hours upon hours upon hours of time chasing "edit count", learning to speak the acronym-code, sucking up to the most abusive of people when they do something that anyone else objects to and calling for the objectors to be banned.

Once upon a time, Wikipedia had a bunch of "guilds." Most of them have been cleansed, but ancillary "subpages" remain and are still indexed. Shi'a Guild, Sunni Guild, Israeli Guild, Muslim Guild, Deletionist Guild, Preservationist Guild, Guild of Copy Editors, and on and on. You'll notice most of them have vanished, along with membership pages.

Do you think they actually vanished? No. But as per "WP:CANVAS", which forbids "organized" editing, they vanished from Wikipedia. Which is to say, nothing changed except that they now organize in private e-mail lists and IRC channels rather than out in the open. You can still see the same behavior to this day; hit an article one of them is "protecting", and you'll have the rest of the "guild" swarming you in minutes.

The same's true for Wikipedia admins - the more corrupt, the worse. The old Durova hit list affair hasn't slowed them down, because there are at least a dozen (probably more than 25) email lists just like it where administrators "coordinate" their actions behind the scenes. Page 2 of the article does a great job analyzing the paranoid-delusional aspects of a "committed" wikipedia-admin's personality and actions.

Plenty of former wikipedia admins have seen the light.

Re:then?

[wjousts]

I think the point is that not all old/obscure games are notable. Neither are all old/obscure games notable. Being old and/or obscure has no bearing on whether or not something is notable or not.

Neither is Wikipedia responsible for being the sole depository of all knowledge of mankind (nor has it ever claimed to be). People are acting like if it's not in Wikipedia, it will disappear for ever. The whole point of TFA wasn't to claim that Wikipedia should preserve all gaming history, but that it can't be relied on to do that. It's not what Wikipedia is for. If you want to preserve gaming history then there needs to be places that do just that.

Re:then?

[Anonymous Coward]

So, circular logic, then?

Re:then?

[wjousts]

Yes it is, because being in Wikipedia is no longer an indication of noteworthiness. Please try reading my post before you reply so I don't have to repeat myself. The notable topics are still there, but being there no longer indicates that they are notable, so how do you tell the difference?

And why act like Wikipedia is the sole repository for all human knowledge? If your pet topic isn't included in Wikipedia, then go start your own Wiki for it (as lots of people already have for any number of specialized topics).

Re:then?

[wjousts]

Yes. Do you have a point? Or did you just learn a new term and thought it would make you look smart?

Re:then?

[somersault]

I think the point is [...] Being old and/or obscure has no bearing on whether or not something is notable or not.

Yes, that was in fact exactly my point.

Re:then?

[Anonymous Coward]

for now...

Re:then?

[AmiMoJo]

An example of a wrongly deleted article would be the Zenburn colour scheme for editors. It used to have a page once and the content was accurate, fairly complete, linked to other articles and cited. It was killed for not being notable enough, even though quite a few editors have it as a built-in colour scheme and there are quite a lot of web pages for it. I can't see any valid reason for it not to have a page. Its existence doesn't detract from WP in any way, the article itself was of reasonable quality (and why not improve it instead of just deleting it?).

I used to contribute quite a bit to WP. For an example of how it should be done I suggest comparing the Japanese and English articles on cats.

They both contain quite a bit of information, but the Japanese version goes further by including less well cited material that is generally accepted by most editors and which adds interesting points and trivia to the page. Even the language of the material is a bit softer - not less accurate, just more readable and not so much just the presentation of a series of cited facts like the English article is in places.

I suppose it depends what you think WP is for. I don't think it should be just a collection of citable facts. WP should be more than that though, it should both inform and be readable, even entertaining. As long as the article is well organised there is little lost by including detail, minor though it may be.

WP is not a democracy. The idea is to reach a consensus with a senior editor reviewing the arguments and making a decision. That unfortunately leads to bias. Deletionists also love trying to fast-track articles for deletion so that there can't be a proper debate. Minor articles are particularly vulnerable to that as often only a few editors have contributed and thus have it on their watch list, so they get fast-track deleted before there is a chance to react. Believe it or not most of us have other things to do than edit WP and try to keep a handle on article burning.

Re:then?

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

Forums are not reputable sources, and old/obscure games are not notable.

Somewhere, somewhen, Herodotus is weeping.

Re:then?

[AmiMoJo]

Those kinds of articles are rightly removed because they are impossible to cite or verify. I am not arguing otherwise.

Some idiots tried to remove the article on EnCase, one of the most popular digital forensics tools. It is widely used, there are training courses for it, papers dedicated to thwarting it. The argument was that there were no citations in mainstream media so instead of trying to find some they tried to delete it. I'm sure there are many articles about it in digital forensics magazines, and anyone interested in that field will know of it. Not that mainstream references should be the deciding criteria for notability - reasonable citations should be.

Re:then?

[Anonymous Coward]

Or deleted because it lacks notability.

Re:then?

[AmiMoJo]

The search engine used to be terrible but is much better now. If Google can pull all that information off random web pages it should not be too hard to do with nicely structured and marked up WP articles.

Re:then?

[Anonymous Coward]

Some of us who have been involved in removing vandalism from Wikipedia can differentiate between vandalism/crap and articles that are obscure but otherwise follow valid polices and citation. The amount of the former shouldn't preclude the latter, and they shouldn't be lumped together.

And Wikipedia is not a democracy.

I normally think a lot of complaints about Wikipedia are exaggerated and it is not as negative as some claim. But to deny that there are groups of users trying to enforce an effectively deletionist policy (regardless of lack of official policy) is not accurate. Although the effectiveness of such people varies wildly with topic, many cases their success can come from arguments of relative importance and not actual article quality.

Re:then?

[vux984]

Most of the other items from that specific time frame are not known to us anymore.

Sounds like a good reason to MAKE records.

Its not primarily about age, its about how much is known about a decade/century/era in general. If 2000 years pass and about all computer games from the 80s are still known by then, the obscure game will still be ... well, obscure. And only marginally more notable than it is today.

That sounds like an entirely reasonable GOAL. Lets ensure that all computer games from the 80s are still known... you know, by documenting them in some way.

The alternative appears to be: lets actively refuse to document stuff, wait 1000 years and then make a big deal out of a fragment of box art for some stinker because that's all we have left.

Re:then?

[GreatBunzinni]

What is insignificant to one person is interesting and important to another person. What is the harm in having a lot of irrelevant articles that only a few people ever look at? Maybe that small insignificant band one day becomes famous. It would be nice to have the full history of page modifications on Wikipedia.

That is true, what's insignificant to one person may be interesting or even important to another person. Yet, this fact isn't being questioned, nor is Wikipedia's article deletion process designed to target uninteresting subjects. It is not nor it ever was about meaning or interest: it's about filtering out the crap which has no business in an encyclopedia-like medium to begin with. And there is no clear line in the sand that defines which is meaningful and which isn't. This is why Wikipedia relies on a democratic process, one which depends on the involvement of the entire community, to decide what to do with a contested article.

Therefore, if an article which you believe is meaningful happened to be voted off wikipedia then either you failed to get involved in the decision process or, quite bluntly, the article was in fact cruft. Either way, the process relies on users, such as yourself, to get involved, as no one single handedly decides or has the power to simply delete articles at will.

You seem to think that if there are too many insignificant articles, then we won't be able to find the important ones.

Please don't try to put words in my mouth. I never even referred to any ability to search for articles, let alone any difficulty in doing so due to the number of "insignificant articles". It is a silly, baseless idea.

Allowing these trivial contributions also encourages the submitter/editor to make other more valuable contributions. Compare this to deleting their article, however insignificant, which will likely make them never want to contribute again.

One thing that those who complain about this sort of issue tend to forget is that Wikipedia is not a free hosting company. No one has the right to host their pet project on Wikipedia's servers. There are countless hosting companies out there which provide that type of service, such as free blogs and even free wikis.

If you truly want to contribute to a knowledge repository then you must respect the principles that were set to run them. The very nature of Wikipedia is that it's a public repository of encyclopedic information which is democratically run by the wikipedia community. It is not anyone's blog, nor it is your very own personal server. Therefore, if anyone wishes to contribute to wikipedia then they need to acknowledge that:

a) anyone can edit anything
b) everyone has the right to "be bold" about their edits
c) in cases where conflicts happen, the community as a whole is engaged in deciding what to do.

That means that no one has the right to unilaterally impose changes to articles. Even when articles are deleted, their deletion is triggered by any user's suspicion that the article is unworthy of being hosted by wikipedia. Yet, the only thing that that particular user can do is simply nominate the article for deletion, where he can only present the reasons why he believes the article should be deleted. His weight on the issue is the same as everyone else's: a single vote.

There is no "deletionist" policy

Yes, there is. The fact that an article can be deleted means there is a deletionist policy.

That's absurd and even you must be aware of how silly that statement is.

Even spam articles IMO should only be hidden, and not deleted.

That's stupid. Why would Wikipedia waste their scarce resources storing the countless floods of spam that plague wikipedia? Can you imagine the amount of storage you would need if you simply never deleted a single spam email that you managed to receive?

Re:then?

[HarrySquatter]

Yes it is, because being in Wikipedia is no longer an indication of noteworthiness.

So what? Other than to boost some elitist attitude I don't see why this even matters.

Please try reading my post before you reply so I don't have to repeat myself.

I have read your post. It's nonsensical and your logic is entirely circular.

The notable topics are still there, but being there no longer indicates that they are notable, so how do you tell the difference?

Through my own judgement? I don't need someone else to filter things for me, I have a functioning brain that can do that for me.

And why act like Wikipedia is the sole repository for all human knowledge?

Because that's what Jimmy Wales is trying to claim Wikipedia is supposed to be?

Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge. That's what we're doing. -- Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia and Chair of the Wikimedia Foundation

One can not be the "sum of all human knowledge" without including the "sum of all human knowledge". I hate to break it to you, but the sum of all human knowledge contains vast amounts of things that you would call "non notable".

If your pet topic isn't included in Wikipedia, then go start your own Wiki for it (as lots of people already have for any number of specialized topics).

Ah yes the tired argument that if you are against the deletionist horde it must be because you've had some personal article deleted. Sorry, bro, that's just not true.

Re:then?

[Anonymous Coward]

Smarter than the guy using it to defend the notability/wikipedia article conundrum, at least. Ooh hey, I said conundrum! Look how smarter I is!

Re:then?

[HarrySquatter]

Yes. Do you have a point?

Yes, his point is that your argument is fallacious.

Re:then?

[wjousts]

So you don't have a point. You think you can just shout "circular logic" and that automatically makes you smart?

Things in Wikipedia are notable because they are in Wikipedia. Because non-notable articles are deleted. It's circular logic, but, although this may blow you mind, circular logic isn't always a bad thing. That was the point.

Re:then?

[ShakaUVM]

The short version is: Wikipedia as it exists today is an insular, closed circle-jerk operation. Even good contributions and spelling corrections are apt to be "reverted" by a legion of people who are using semi-automated tools to up their "edit count", because the prime metric for becoming an "admin" is a stupid-high edit count that an actual writer could never reach in 10 years, and they don't give a crap how you got there.

Yep. "Cesspool" would be my one-word description of choice for Wikipedia, but insular circle-jerk has a nice ring to it, too.

I've added ISBN numbers to bibliographies (a minor, completely uncontroversial edit) and had a jackass admin (JayJG) autorevert the changes within 30 seconds. They own the page in question, against wikipedia policy. Putting a warning on their page that they're violating wikipedia policy results in one of their admin friends coming in, removing the warning, and then warning me to not fuck with them. This isn't an isolated incident either - I've basically given up on contributing to Wikipedia.

You want to know why I didn't click on your face to give you money, Jimmy Wales? That's why.

Re:then?

[wjousts]

I'm not for a minute trying to argue that Wikipedia (and especially it's moderators) is perfect. They are too quick to jump on the speedy delete if they happen to have not heard of something and that's wrong. Your particular example sounds like exactly the type of notable article that should be included and moderators should be patient enough to wait for experts to fill in some relevant citations. If in doubt, the response should be to wait, not speedy delete.

The argument I was responding to was the one claiming that there should be no notability requirements at all and any article, no matter how trivial and no matter how few people it might be of interest to, should be included anyway. I think that is wrong and will reduce Wikipedia's usefulness. No matter how good the search is, if Wikipedia is 99.9% personal vanity pages, it's not a tool people will use anymore.

Re:then?

[Anonymous Coward]

Obscurity, no. My guess is it collapses under the drama and infighting in its inner circle, and it all ends in lawsuits.

Seriously, ever read some of the correspondence of these people? They have their own dialect of jargon that makes Scientologists sound normal.

Re:then?

[HarrySquatter]

Things in Wikipedia are notable because they are in Wikipedia. Because non-notable articles are deleted.

And thus your definition is completely meaningless.

It's circular logic, but, although this may blow you mind, circular logic isn't always a bad thing. That was the point.

Actually circular reasoning is ALWAYS bad unless you think fallacious arguments are acceptable. You cannot use your own propositions to support your premise.

Re:then?

[wjousts]

So are you posting as Anonymous Coward or do you read minds also? Saying something doesn't make it so.

Re:then?

[Anonymous Coward]

...non-notable articles should be removed. The only problem is over-zealous editors who think that because they haven't heard of it, it must be non-notable. It's happen to me, and I was able to get my article back.

Ok, now you're just trolling. Thread over.

Re:then?

[Wannabe Code Monkey]

Even good contributions and spelling corrections are apt to be "reverted" by a legion of people who are using semi-automated tools to up their "edit count"

That sounds like bullshit to me. I have around 140 edits which are mostly spelling corrections, vandalism reverts, grammar corrections, wiki markup corrections, and some light restructuring. I have not once been reverted. I've found that the vast majority of wikipedia contributors are good people.

Re:then?

[wjousts]

No, my definition is not meaningless. If I'm looking for, let's say, image processing software, so I search Wikipedia and I find an article on Photoshop. The fact that it's notable enough to have an article on Wikipedia gives me some confidence that it's a legitimate, well-known, industry tool. If that's the only piece of information you use to make a decision, then you are obviously a fool, it's just one more input. If, on the other hand, there are also 1,000 articles on various image processing softwares that some guy developed as part of the undergraduate project and isn't even available anywhere, then Wikipedia is no longer a useful input. Especially if those vanity pages don't need any citations and can make any claim they want (so Bob's Image Shop proudly proclaims itself to be the worlds best image software with 1,000,000,000 users world-wide).

And it's not actually circular logic, because it's not a closed loop. The outside influence is the deletion on non-notable articles. The decision on what's non-notable isn't part of my loop.

Re:then?

[gknoy]

Why should "non-notable" articles be removed? What's wrong with being able to look up plot summary information for every movie ever made (even ones that got poor ratings or which sold poorly, such as The 13th Floor)? Is there a problem with extending that level of detail to episodes of Firefly, Sailor Moon, or an exhaustive description of historical steam trains?

As long as someone is willing to put the time into writing it (and referencing it, and formatting it well, etc), it seems like it only adds value to Wikipedia as an encyclopedia.

Re:then?

[HarrySquatter]

So are you posting as Anonymous Coward or do you read minds also?

Why would I need to read minds? He clearly says:

So, circular logic, then?

And if one look up "notable" article on circular logic on Wikipedia:

Circular reasoning is a formal logical fallacy in which the proposition to be proved is assumed implicitly or explicitly in one of the premises.

Thus, no need for any mind reading at all. It's simple deductive logic.

Saying something doesn't make it so.

My irony meter just blew up.

Re:then?

[AmiMoJo]

Well since I never made that argument I don't know why you replied to me.

Re:then?

[albyrne5]

Haha, I don't know why but this actually made me laugh.

Re:then?

[Stooshie]

I was talking about Heavyweight Champ.

Re:then?

[1u3hr]

I read your post. "It gets lost because having an article on Wikipedia is no longer a sign that the topic is notable." It's a non sequitur.

Re:then?

[Mongoose Disciple]

I dare say that of any MMO out there now, or that will come out in the next 10 years, for any feature that they care to claim is new or groundbreaking, I could find a MUD that had something similar 10-20 years ago.

That kind of influence on an industry this size is pretty much the definition of "vitally relevant."

This really nails the essence of why this topic is relevant, even if 90% of this article's thread so far is lost in the usual arguments around Wikipedia. I would mod you up if I had points.

Re:then?

[wjousts]

What's wrong with being able to look up plot summary information for every movie ever made (even ones that got poor ratings or which sold poorly, such as The 13th Floor)?

There's a place for that already. (one that is often used as a citation source in Wikipedia).

Re:then?

[wjousts]

Then why did you reply to me in the first place then?

Re:then?

[wjousts]

It only a non-sequitur if nobody ever removes the cruft.

Re:then?

[hairyfeet]

Are you running out of electrons? Is the Wiki short of electrons this month? It sure as hell better not be short of space after Wales spammed the site until he got his 15 million that's for sure! If Jimmy can't afford some HDDs after raising 15 MILLION dollars then somebody needs to be looking at the books.

And who gives a crap if it is obscure? You seem to act like search engines are from the 90s where you could type in "17th century lamp" and get bumpers for a 67 Dodge. The whole bloody point of having a search engine is it doesn't matter how big your site is I can STILL find what I'm looking for quickly and easily!

It seems like there ought to be a simple solution to this and I think there is: Old Jimmy likes to spam for money so this time he can spam for something that will end this problem once and for all. I propose Jimmy get on there and say "For 3 million dollars we will buy enough storage space to end any talk of deletionism forver." After all if Wikipedia is gonna be the "sum of human knowledge" as old Jimmy has said about a bazillion times then by its very definition its gonna have a ton of shit most are gonna consider "not notable". Otherwise all you have is "The sum of popular human knowledge" which certainly isn't what Jimmy has been pedaling when he is busking for $$$.

But ultimately everyone here knows the truth, even if most won't come out and say it: Deletionism isn't about "cleaning up the wiki" it is about power and is the exact same bullshit we have seen since the first website got the first BMFH. With Wikipedia you have cliques, you know this, I know this, it is common knowledge and the way humans have always been. A clique by its very nature is an exclusive bunch and without a way to exercise that exclusivity ceases being much of a clique. The way that exclusivity has manifested itself on wiki is by deletionism and "pet pages". Again I'm not revealing some big secret here, this is common knowledge. But if the goal is truly to have the sum of all knowledge then deletionism has to go, but that would take away power from the cliques. Which is why we are having this argument now.

Now me personally I don't give a shit, because I have seen enough hinky edits and pages on completely obscure characters in some show that are guarded like the shroud of Turin to know the policies are arbitrary and pretty much bullshit. But one thing I DO hate is hypocrisy so lets call a spade a spade, shall we? It isn't some "conspiracy" against the poor helpless mods that gave us the word deletionism, it is the very actions of those in charge. And since old Jimmy raised enough cash there had damned well better be plenty of HDD space that isn't an excuse either unless he is filling his pockets. So make up your collective minds: Is it gonna be Jimmy's "sum of human knowledge" or is it "the sum of what we the mods care about" because frankly you can't have both.

Re:then?

[Ihmhi]

It's people with your opinion of "delete immediately" that has ruined a lot of what made WIkipedia good IMO.

There's two camps, mainly; deletionists and inclusionists. Deletionists are for deleting unsourced, poorly cited, etc. articles. Inclusionists are more for just leaving anything there and having it improve over time.

I really, really can't fathom why articles are deleted from Wikipedia at all, ever (aside from malicious articles, such as "List of reasons why Rush Limbaugh is an asshole"). Disk storage and bandwidth are getting ever cheaper, and for the most part deleted articles are "stored" anyway - just the public at large can't view them.

Wikipedia was built on an inclusionist philosophy. Anyone wrote anything and it built up over time. I penned a few articles myself (not under my name, of course) and loved to watch them grow and expand, but that takes time. If the people in charge today were around when Wikipedia started, then it wouldn't be nearly as popular as it is today because the morons would have deleted anything that didn't get cited properly right away.

Frankly it raises the barrier to entry and repeat edits. Why bother making an article when you're just going to have 5 people cite reasons it should be deleted, have a quick vote of 4 or 5 guys, and the thing disappears? It's frustrating.

Re:then?

[BobMcD]

To be fair, there's a stanza being omitted from his phrase. You probably know full well that it is implied, but you're attacking him anyway. I suspect you're not being entirely honest in your own position.

Take, for example:

Because Wikipedia uses moderators to apply standards of notability, deleting that which does not qualify, anything remaining is assumed to have this merit. Assuming you agree on the definition of the word notable, then in effect the moderators are filtering topics towards 'notability'.

This says largely the same thing, and isn't necessarily circular. "If Wikipedia upholds their standards, therein will you find material of value" is arguable, but not at all fallacious.

Please step away from the blowtorch and let the flame war die out...

Re:then?

[BobMcD]

The argument I was responding to was the one claiming that there should be no notability requirements at all and any article, no matter how trivial and no matter how few people it might be of interest to, should be included anyway.

Considering how near-to-hand the actual argument you're responding to is, I doubt you're being honest. Here's the real deal, to save you all the painful scrolling:

I can see no reason why Wikipedia should not have an article on almost any subject, no matter how obscure, so long as there is reasonable reference material to base it on.

Observe how someone would need to have written that 'reasonable reference material' in order for this premise of notability to move forward. You've omitted this stanza in an effort to assert a straw-man on the other party. That's a technical foul, I believe...

I think that is wrong and will reduce Wikipedia's usefulness. No matter how good the search is, if Wikipedia is 99.9% personal vanity pages, it's not a tool people will use anymore.

Again, how would those millions of personal vanity pages meet the criteria for 'reasonable reference material'?

Re:then?

[BobMcD]

You're conflating your position to bolster your argument. Again I must call foul.

Observe how removing the 'notability' requirement would not necessarily remove the 'citations' requirement.

If you can cite it across whatever reasonable number of sources, then it is by definition notable. If that garage band makes the paper, or multiple papers, or what have you then their article should certainly stand. If they have no sources then they should not.

This is difficult to defend, I do understand, but comparing that to 'spam' isn't genuinely honest, is it?

Re:then?

[GreatBunzinni]

By definition, "conflating" means "merging together" stuff. You claim that I'm "conflating my position". I don't know what you mean by that, as it isn't possible to fuse a single thing with itself. As your accusation doesn't make sense and you failed to point out what exactly do you mean by that then I don't know how you can "call foul" on something which you fail to address.

Regarding your "garage band" example, please take a look at wikipedia's notability guidelines for music. According to this, a band is notable if, among other things, if it has received non-trivial coverage in a reference publication. Then, knowing this, the example you provided would satisfy the band notability criteria, unless the multiple papers were local town journals which covered mom&pop's family music ensemble performing in a cousin's birthday.

Articles on these mom&pop ensembles or some garage bands put together by teens who half the band members don't even own their instruments don't have a place in a blog, let alone a wikipedia article. They are irrelevant to everyone, maybe even to the band's members. Again, just because you can edit Wikipedia it doesn't mean that you can use Wikipedia as your personal blog or hosting company. And this is important to understand.

Re:then?

[GreatBunzinni]

And no, the "rest of the internet" is not the solution, people go to Wikipedia because they want a consistent interface, NPOV, references and all those other qualities that the rest of the internet does generally not provide.

Emphasis mine. If you demand that the content hosted and provided by a service is NPOV then you must accept the fact that other people must also have power over the content, which includes editing it to the extent they wish to edit. The NPOV aspect derives from the consensus reached by the community, whose edits you must accept if you are truly want content which isn't affected by a POV. Among those edits you also have content elimination, particularly references to absurd statements which lack any basis, let alone a reference, and also self-serving bits devoid of any relevancy.

Therefore, as it is easy to see, if an article consists of nothing more than absurd statements that lack any basis and/or are self-serving and devoid of any relevancy then, if you wish to have a repository of NPOV content then you must also accept the possibility that some content which fails to justify it's presence simply doesn't belong in a medium which aims to be an objective repository of NPOV content which can be used as a reference.

So, to put it short, if you wish to have a NPOV reference you must accept the fact that it's content must be edited, and the editing process includes, along addition of new content and tweaking of existing content, the elimination of content.

If you don't want that then you don't want a NPOV reference. If you want your own personal repository of information where you are able to exert complete editorial control over a subject then you do have other means, such as blogs and other forms of personal pages. However, if you want the benefit of having a community edit and maintain the content on a specific subject then you must accept the editing process that goes with it.

Re:then?

[BobMcD]

So, again, if the reference requirement is met, there is NO NEED for a notability requirement - is there?

Re:then?

[trollertron3000]

The only thing I really understand about Wikipedia is that it sucks the fun out of any topic. Factually accurate and cited materials hand combed over by a committee of assholes doesn't make for interesting reading.

Re:then?

[Xtifr]

Yeah, too bad they don't have an article like Rogue (computer game) or Roguelike. Those bastards! :)

Re:then?

[Improv]

My knowledge of Jason Scott is not ungrounded - if you go look at the history associated with his account, you'll find his actions to be exactly as I describe. He is not an expert on anything, he's just a troll with a big ego. Wikipedia, like Usenet, got a number of trolls, and dealing with them was often a challenge.

I'm a former wikipedia admin myself - I left the project some years ago. I know it's flawed, but not for the reasons you or JScott describe. I remember these position-organisations (generally they went by the name "Association"). They actually were problematic - removing them was helpful in bringing dialogue over policy a bit closer to the center.

Of course administrators will coordinate their actions. I did this myself - I was once fairly prominent. So what? This isn't a sign of corruption, it's simply necessary to keep a big project running well and true to its ideals. Any community that has philosophical stances will necessarily have divisions between those who have been part of it for a long time who really understand how things work and take responsibility for it, and people who are either very causal or new who might not understand or agree with the ideas around which the project was founded. Keeping things civil and on-task is not something that always happens entirely in public, especially when one has people who are either out to make trouble or have problems with not being fully vested in the community yet. That's not corruption (in the end, it's an encyclopedia project - nobody's getting paid anyhow - people stick with it for the project and the community).

(for what it's worth, I largely agree with Sanger's analysis - neither Sanger nor Wales represent great leadership, but I think the project would've been better off with a lot more Sanger in the mix than what happened - don't confuse the respectable opinions of Sanger from that of Scott)

Re:then?

[Xtifr]

When it comes to current game design, actually, MUDS *are* quite relevant.

Which may be why Wikipedia has an article on them: MUD.

Re:then?

[Anonymous Coward]

The pottery bowl represents probably about 0.0001% of the items that were available during its given century of origin.

[citation needed]

Re:then?

[UnknownSoldier]

> Similarly, preserving every game, regardless of merit or noteworthiness devalues all games.

WTF??

Noteworthiness & Value is _subjective_. I just payed a pretty penny to have the _original_ working Apple ][ versions of Kareteka, Lode Runner, Gumball, and Spare Change (yes, the classic Brøderbund games.) I'm _still_ trying to track down 2 of my favorite games in this trilogy: Empire II: Interstellar Sharks, and Empire III: Armageddon, but I can't because they are "obscure" games.

Just because they have _no_ value to the majority of the people, doesn't mean they don't have value. Their age, does in no way, "devalue" any other game. Sorry to be an ass, but here's a big F.U. to your "devalues all games" bullshit rhetoric.

Regards,
Someone who works on an Apple // emulator.

Re:then?

[kokojie]

I hate the deletionists, I had to fight them for almost every article I wanted to create. I don't know how they became dominant on almost all wikipedias

Re:then?

[Anonymous Coward]

No? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warrior_Vase

Re:then?

[Moryath]

Funny. Every time I compare Jason Scott's observations with former Wikipedia admins and other analyses, I find out that he's on the money, and your ad hominem attacks without basis.

I've done my own background looking, and found that Jason Scott's analysis is right on the money. Wikipedia admins throw "wikispeak" at new writers, troll them, and generally expect them to somehow pick up on random acronyms, and the few who do pick up quickly or go to writing well and quote back guidelines or policy pages are instantly labeled "trolls", "sockpuppets" and worse and actively hounded off the project.

Apparently the old IRC/Usenet advice of "lurk first, post sparingly" is unheard of within the halls of trollship that count for the admin clique today on Wikipedia.

There's nobody left on the project trying to help new people get better at writing and integrate to the project - hasn't been since 2005. Today there's just a bunch of entrenched ass-hats with admin powers actively working to keep people out, and a bunch of wannabe-admins tirelessly clicking "revert revert revert" on tools like "twinkle" to bump up their edit count.

Re:then?

[kokojie]

plus, wikipedia search can just adopt the google algorithm, good information usually get more traffic and sites/pages with good traffic level rank on top.

Re:then?

[GreatBunzinni]

You keep missing the point. One of the notability criteria is the existence of credible, relevant references. That is the notability criteria. If there are credible, relevant references regarding a band then the band is deemed notable. Why is that so hard to understand?

Besides that, wikipedia isn't myspace, where every band (and even non-band) is entitled to an article. It is not like that nor does anyone gain anything if it started to be like that. Therefore, the line must be drawn somewhere to check which band is worthy and which band isn't. If no such system is put in place then three teens who happen to spend an afternoon in a porch with a kazoo can call themselves a band and demand that they have a dedicate article on wikipedia. Why exactly should that be desirable?

Re:then?

[Improv]

I can't speak as to how things are today (I've been gone for awhile!), but when I was around there were outreach programs trying to get people up to speed. I don't remember twinkle - maybe it's new? It's important to remember that the project is about making an encyclopedia, not making people feel good. People who are outrageously/flamboyantly rude don't belong on the project (either as admins or regular users - one of the many problems JScott had was that he could not disagree in a civil way). Still, when people make an edit that's not up to snuff, it will likely be reverted. That sometimes upsets people because they want to contribute - understandable, but not the right way to think about it.

It was appropriate to shoo Scott from the project. It's a pity Erik Möller wasn't shooed from the project as well - he managed to irritate just about everyone he met with his inability to work well with others, but thanks to being backed by some major players in a political ploy, he ended up briefly taking center stage in project leadership. This was enormously damaging.

Read Jason Scott's actual interactions with others on the project. Look at his behaviour, and the behaviour of the most active people on Wikipedia Review. These are trolls trying to self-justify, nothing more. While he's not a historian, Jason Scott happens to be a decent writer - that's why his character isn't obvious unless you see him outside his self-narrative. Go look at the contribution history of User:Jscott. Look in other places on the internet where he's had to work with others. I believe you'll see him in a different light, and the context it'll put on his writings will change things.

Wikipedia is not perfect (and I left for what I believe are a set of good reasons), and there are some very good criticisms that can/should be made of it, but you have to learn to separate the opinions of bitter outcasts who were unable to abide by the rules lashing out because they got what they deserved from that of people who make reasoned points.

Re:then?

[BobMcD]

I'm not missing the point at all, but I do believe you are.

Besides that, wikipedia isn't myspace, where every band (and even non-band) is entitled to an article.

Wikipedia doesn't get to make that call, period. If the sources exist, then notability is determined outside of any other 'worth' as determined by the delete squad. Further, since Wikipedia has no control over whether these other media publish such things, they do not get a vote, and must therefore include it even when they believe it isn't 'cool enough' to be part of the internet chic. Otherwise Wikipedia is arbitrarily excluding data and isn't genuinely the 'sum of all human knowledge' any longer. They're simply the 'sum of stuff select geeks think is cool'...

In this way the 'garage band' angle is entirely, absolutely moot, and the fact that you're dwelling on it means you simply don't get it. Wikipedia doesn't 'decide' what notability means, the presence (or lack) of sources does that all by itself. No further criteria need exist.

Re:then?

[Moryath]

Sorry, but no.

I've been there, I've seen the way administrators treat people. "WP:BEAR" and "WP:BITE" are so frequently abused that it makes for a comedy routine.

Standard wikipedia experience for a new user:
1-user makes spelling fix or other minor edit to improve page.
1a- loser running "twinkle" or "huggle" or whatever the automated-semi-bot-tool-of-the-month is reverts just to up their edit count.

2-user undoes the change, because they're improving the encyclopedia
2a - loser running "twinkle" reverts and adds a nastygram on edit summary and talk page about "take it to talkpage if you want to make this change blah blah insult insult"

3-user ignores tinkle-loser and reverts again.
3a - twinkle-loser goes to his friend the admin crying "waaah WP:3RR he's being a meanie". Friend the admin issues day-long block to new user, ignoring asshatted behavior of twinkle-loser.

4-twinkle-loser or admin friend, or both, writes something gloating and insulting on new user's talk page.
4a-user either (a) gets PO'ed and leaves or (b) files an unblock request calling out twinkle-loser and friend-admin
4b- other "friend admins", assholes like "Beeblebrox" (the current abusive dickhole in the dickhole-of-the-month club last I checked) begin reverting new-user's talkpage, either claiming "request is not correctly formatted", "request isn't a proper request showing you learned the rules", blah blah... essentially, "kneel harder and open wide, bitch."

5 - new user, now justifiably outraged, writes something nasty back to asshat like Beeblebrox or other "patrol admin."
5a - abusive dickholes that constitute core of "unblock request patrol" ban user indef, lock talkpage, and go their merry way announcing "hey look we killed another troll", when they themselves are the ass-hat trolls du jour.

Re:then?

[Improv]

If that happens, it's a problem - any admin who supports that behaviour shouldn't be an admin (particularly 1a - edits should be judged mostly on their merits, but also 4 - it's possible/appropriate/necessary to simply explain that some behaviour is problematic without gloating).

There's a problem with #2 - what if people disagree over what constitutes improving the encyclopedia? People *have* to talk that over. You can't expect everyone to just have their way - there's a single text everyone shares.

When I was involved in the project, I believed in being polite but firm. People may not have agreed with my actions, but I never gloated, I never spat in anyone's face, and when there was a disagreement I explained my reasoning as best as I could, even if I had to block a user, lock a page, or do something else with my privileges alongside that. I was always willing to listen and talk, and in my work in mediation as well as on public and private forums on the project I strove for civility and tended the project as best I could.

In my later years of the project, many people were given administrative privileges who didn't merit it, either because they had a bad attitude or they didn't understand/accept policy. As a whole though, administrators were not as you describe.

Yes, we had private discussions. There were a lot. I don't think we ever pretended this was not the case. When I mediated disputes, most of this happened in private emails between me and the parties involved. When I helped with trouble ticket system, all of that was private. When I had private discussions at Wikimedia conferences with other prominent Wikipedians, nobody was taking public notes. So what?

People will disagree on big projects like this. Some people can't handle disagreement well, and sometimes things will reach an impasse. High-strung people and trolls typically don't last long, and if they're bitter enough they often lash out. The rest of us have to deal with the fact that we don't always get our way - I remember really disliking the use of the word "pluvious" in an article, trying to remove it, getting into a disagreement with the editor who put it in, having a long discussion, and eventually having a straw poll on the topic. I lost. I coped. It was irritating for me not to have gotten my way, but I accepted, despite being an admin, that I would not always be able to have my ideas about improving articles be realised. I was a prominent admin. The other editor was not. He or she still won the debate, nobody was banned, blocked, etc.

I hope the current administrators are no different from what I tried to be.

Re:then?

[Moryath]

If you can't get the hit - look at what goes on in Wikipedia these days.

This kind of crap was going on even back in 2005. Whether you participated or just turned a blind eye, you're as much to blame.

Re:then?

[Snodgrass]

I've never seen the 'Wikipedia is a MUD' comparison before, but it's completely awesome.

Re:then?

[Chris Pimlott]

The point is that the general test for obscurity isn't whether it's obscure to you personally. No one alive now fought in the War of 1812 but that doesn't make it obscure.

Re:then?

[Improv]

Do you have any idea how big Wikipedia is? Finding and fixing the whole project, or even noticing what I believe to have probably been rare abuses, is beyond the ability of any one person. I did my best for the project given how much time and attention I was willing to give to it.

Besides, I'm not convinced that we'd agree what counts as a problem. Let's consider your example above - let's imagine a variant:

A) Newbie finds an article they want to improve. They do an edit
B) More experienced editor thinks they made it worse, undoes.
C) Newbie returns, is unhappy to have their change undone. They redo the edit
D) Experienced editor undoes it again, asks user to take it to article's talk page, explains reasoning on newbie's talkpage
E) Newbie doesn't want to, undoes again
F) Experienced editor asks a friend for a second opinion, friend reverts, warns newbie not to redo lest they run afoul of 3RR, suggests use of talk page
G) Newbie, already angry, redoes it. Is blocked for a few hours, and is asked urged on their talkpage to discuss the edits, told about 3RR.

Is that abuse? How would you handle it? Would your solution scale?

Re:then?

[somersault]

What would be your criteria for that war being obscure then? I suspect a lot of Americans know what it is, and I guessed it would be an American war, but I also had to guess it was the Civil war rather than to do with your independence. To those outside of the US who have never studied any US history, it's still pretty obscure. A better example to use might have been WWI perhaps.

But anyway, even if something is truly obscure in that very few people in the world know about it, I think that's all the more reason to record it.

Re:then?

[Anonymous Coward]

We're whalers on the moon,
We carry a harpoon.
But there ain't no whales
So we tell tall tales
And sing our whaling tune.

Re:then?

[GreatBunzinni]

It is quite clear that you don't get it. You simply don't know what's the idea behind wikipedia and therefore you keep confusing that wikipedia is there to act as a new geocities, which should store every piece of crap that is thrown at it, no matter how mind-numbingly wrong and self-serving it may be, just because it is there and someone happened to spend a couple of minutes spewing that nonsense on a new article. That is patently absurd and it is obvious to anyone that this would be bad for everyone.

But just to put it in terms that you can understand, consider these founding principles of a wiki:

1. Any user may edit
2. In case of conflict, the community should reach a consensus

By now you should be well aware of these two aspects, and you should have absolutely no doubt regarding their validity.

From these basic principles you must be aware that:

• item 1) means that any user may add, alter and remove anything on wikipedia. This applies to simple typo corrections to deleting entire articles. No exception.
• item 2) means that if two users disagree that a specific edit should be kept then the community must agree on what to do with the edit

Editing also includes deleting any content of an article. As there are no limits applied to how much anyone can edit then, obviously, that means that editing also includes eliminating an article.

The need to reach a consensus means that no single user can unilaterally impose their will on any other user, let alone the entire community. Therefore, it is quite clear that no one has the right to force the creation or deletion of articles at will just because he feels like it and in spite of the community's views or consensual position.

These consequences are quite obvious. Once we acknowledge then, and picking the example of any random article covering any irrelevant garage band that fails at achieving anything, it is easy to understand that no one has the right to create an article on that irrelevant band and just expect that, no matter how irrelevant, meaningless and inconsequential that band is, no other user can edit it, no matter how many people acknowledge that such an article has absolutely no place in a quasi-encyclopedic medium which intends to be used as a respectable reference.

Re:then?

[GreatBunzinni]

An example of a wrongly deleted article would be the Zenburn colour scheme for editors. It used to have a page once and the content was accurate, fairly complete, linked to other articles and cited. It was killed for not being notable enough, even though quite a few editors have it as a built-in colour scheme and there are quite a lot of web pages for it. I can't see any valid reason for it not to have a page. Its existence doesn't detract from WP in any way, the article itself was of reasonable quality (and why not improve it instead of just deleting it?).

Boy, you sure picked an appallingly bad example to try to complain about articles being deleted. Care to know why?

Well, here is Wikipedia's debate on the deletion of the Zenburn article. Please do read it. I'll paste here a couple of quotes from that discussion:

• Hi, I'm the author of Zenburn. Yes, Zenburn is nothing special, it's definitely not a product, just a color scheme which many people use and have ported to different editing environments. My guess is that the page at Wikipedia seems to have originally been created by one of those users. I agree with the verdict to delete
• I am an avid user of Zenburn, and though I also agree that this article does not meet the important WP standards for inclusion (and should be removed)

If this is how ugly and contentious the deletion process is being run then those "deletionists", whatever that is and whoever they are, don't look so ugly all of a sudden.

I used to contribute quite a bit to WP. For an example of how it should be done I suggest comparing the Japanese and English articles on cats.

They both contain quite a bit of information, but the Japanese version goes further by including less well cited material that is generally accepted by most editors and which adds interesting points and trivia to the page. Even the language of the material is a bit softer - not less accurate, just more readable and not so much just the presentation of a series of cited facts like the English article is in places.

If you believe that the en.wikipedia article could be improved then, as this is a wiki, you only need to simply do it yourself. When I see any article which I believe I can improve, whether it's an english article or one in my native language, I simply invest some time into it. I've also translated a considerable number of articles, both to and from en.wikipedia. I've also started articles in multiple languages, just because I believed that the world would benefit from that knowledge. As a consequence, I've seen a considerable number of articles that I've created get nominated to be deleted, which I reacted by simply participating in the discussion. In short, if you want to get something done properly then you need to get on your feet and do it yourself. That's what everyone should do. If instead people just stand around idle while letting everyone do what they want with everything then you only get your way by accident.

WP is not a democracy. The idea is to reach a consensus with a senior editor reviewing the arguments and making a decision. That unfortunately leads to bias.

I didn't said that Wikipedia was a democracy. What I said was that the Wikipedia community has put in place a number of democratic processes which are designed to better reach a consensus. Nonetheless, I believe that the democratic degree of those processes vary between wikipedia communities. For example, in other wikipedia languages the deletion process is decided through the majority +1 rule. In other languages the 2/3+1 rule is used to decide if an article is deleted. Yet, no matter what wikipedia we are talking about, the process is always democratic in nature, and everyone is encourage to participate in the discussion. Just don't spend your time moping spewing absurd complains such as that some

Re:then?

[BobMcD]

It is quite clear that you don't get it. You simply don't know what's the idea behind wikipedia and therefore you keep confusing that wikipedia is there to act as a new geocities, which should store every piece of crap that is thrown at it, no matter how mind-numbingly wrong and self-serving it may be, just because it is there and someone happened to spend a couple of minutes spewing that nonsense on a new article. That is patently absurd and it is obvious to anyone that this would be bad for everyone.

It SHOULD be quite clear that I NEVER SAID THAT. Stop putting words in my mouth.

Observe:

1) If such a band were not noteworthy, there would be no external coverage of it, and therefore no sources to cite.

2) If such a band were noteworthy, someone somewhere would write something reputable about it.

This is immutable.

Once we acknowledge then, and picking the example of any random article covering any irrelevant garage band that fails at achieving anything, it is easy to understand that no one has the right to create an article on that irrelevant band and just expect that, no matter how irrelevant, meaningless and inconsequential that band is, no other user can edit it, no matter how many people acknowledge that such an article has absolutely no place in a quasi-encyclopedic medium which intends to be used as a respectable reference.

Again, because you NOT FUCKING LISTENING:

Such a band would not have any sources to cite.

Period, the end.

But if it did have sources, then your opinion that it wasn't as epic as Creed (or whatever your favorite band is) WOULDN'T FUCKING MATTER!

Do you read me now?

On second thought, I don't care. Do not bother to reply - I won't be reading it.

Re:then?

[julesh]

So, again, if the reference requirement is met, there is NO NEED for a notability requirement - is there?

The two are effectively the same thing - in WP jargon, notable is basically defined as having been written about by independent reliable sources. There are some shortcuts that effectively say "these are the kinds of things we expect such sources to exist about anyway, so no need to actually find them", but it all basically boils down to availability of sources.

Re:then?

[wjousts]

Sorry to be an ass

No you're not.

The point isn't anything to do with how much you personally value something. The analogue to 2000 year old bowls was made and I pointed out that if every bowl made in the last 2000 years still existed, they'd be (mostly) worthless. That doesn't change the fact that any specific bowl that was passed down through generations of your family might be absolutely priceless to you.

Watch any of the multitude of antique shows on TV, you see it all the time. "Yeah that's cool, but they made 100,000 of them so it's worth nothing."

Re:then?

[BobMcD]

I agree that it should boil that way, and would even stipulate that this is the design. It does not, however, appear to be the practice. There are at least a few examples of real things, well-published in the expected places, that were removed for not being worthy. They usually get restored, as far as I've heard, but it is still a problem and it hints at a greater issue.

Re:then?

[Andy Smith]

I know. Read the quote :-)

Re:then?

[julesh]

Do you really think wikipedia will be around in 100 years?

I'm betting it fades into obscurity in 25 years.

Seriously? No. Maybe it will no longer be used for its original purpose (although I would guess it will, perhaps not quite as much as today though) but in 100 years time it will start to have been of interest to historians. An immense documentary collection of how early Internet pioneers thought, starting from when the Internet was just becoming mainstream and progressing through to the era of ubiquity. It will be a goldmine.

Not Wikipedia's job to be a first publisher

[Improv]

Something must be notable *and* written about in a reputable academic source in order to be appropriate content for Wikipedia. Wikipedia is not a place for people who want to publish new material, no matter how important it is that there be such publication. It's good to see that there are specialised wikis for ad-hoc history projects of MUDs - that's appropriate, and it avoids all these issues of notability and original content.

Just because a task is worthwhile/important doesn't mean Wikipedia is the right place for it.

Re:Not Wikipedia's job to be a first publisher

[Grokmoo]

There is no requirement that something be written about in an academic source to be included in wikipedia. Any reputable source will generally do, including newspapers and magazines in most cases.

Any game that had a substantial influence shaping the development of gaming is worthy of inclusion. That doesn't mean that it won't be difficult to find good sources to back up the argument that it was in fact influential.

Re:Not Wikipedia's job to be a first publisher

[sourcerror]

What about Franko the crazy revenge? (NSFW) I would doubt gaming newspapers would be keen to write about it. It also doesn't help that it's in Polish.
I could argue that with its brutal realism/cynism it was a forerunner for GTA.

Re:Not Wikipedia's job to be a first publisher

[drinkypoo]

I've been seeing articles on Wikipedia which cite stuff I wrote on Everything2... in which I cite the selfsame Wikipedia article. Fail, fail.

Re:Not Wikipedia's job to be a first publisher

[Anonymous Coward]

Something must be notable *and* written about in a reputable academic source in order to be appropriate content for Wikipedia. Wikipedia is not a place for people who want to publish new material, no matter how important it is that there be such publication. It's good to see that there are specialised wikis for ad-hoc history projects of MUDs - that's appropriate, and it avoids all these issues of notability and original content.

Just because a task is worthwhile/important doesn't mean Wikipedia is the right place for it.

This, quite frankly, is sheer rubbish, and it's really sad that it got modded to +5 - and even sadder that a lot of Wikipedia editors and admins today share this view.

Remember the fuss about Mzoli's? If not, basically, this was an article that Jimbo Wales started; some admin speedy-deleted it pretty much right away for much the same reasons you cite, and the whole thing eventually ballooned into a big discussion of what Wikipedia is about, with various kinds of fallout.

I think the following reply to Jimbo from the admin who speedy-deleted the article is enlightening:

With all due respect, I was merely pointing out that some users seem to place a higher importance on your edits over any others. Had this article not been authored by you, my speedy deletion never would have been overturned.

Indeed, he's right: if it hadn't been Jimbo that had written the article, it would have been deleted without even so much as a discussion, and that would've been it. Bang, case closed. Where he errs is in the assumption that this would've been right: fact is, Jimbo's article was (rightly) kept in the end, but if anybody else writes a similar article, chances are it'll be deleted.

That's not what Wikipedia was about, and it's absolutely sad that people like this guy, people like YOU, have any power to say what is or isn't appropriate for inclusion in Wikipedia.

Re:Not Wikipedia's job to be a first publisher

[ph0rk]

As someone who generates academic material, I think this is a flawed position.

Academic publishing takes time, often a *lot* of time, depending on discipline. History journals and those in the social sciences are generally quite slow-moving. Wikipedia can be there to catalog things that would never see academic publication, and never will if they aren't cataloged *now*.

Wikipedia is for groundswell. Wikipedia should not let the perfect be the enemy of the good. No one in their right mind would cite wikipedia anyway. Well, no one but an undergrad.

Re:Not Wikipedia's job to be a first publisher

[El_Muerte_TDS]

Just because a task is worthwhile/important doesn't mean Wikipedia is the right place for it.

Why not?

Re:Not Wikipedia's job to be a first publisher

[tepples]

Wikipedia can be there to catalog things that would never see academic publication, and never will if they aren't cataloged *now*.

That would be a job for an outlet other than Wikipedia, such as E2, a Wikia site, or an independent MediaWiki site.

Re:Not Wikipedia's job to be a first publisher

[Anonymous Coward]

Did you correct them?

Re:Not Wikipedia's job to be a first publisher

[BoberFett]

Based on that video, you could claim it's a bad clone of Streets of Rage. They even swiped some of the sound effects.

Re:Not Wikipedia's job to be a first publisher

[sourcerror]

Look, there are thousands of games like Streets of rage. The above game however is more grittier. Actually maybe the GTA parallel isn't that good, it's more like Postal. But the point was the uncensored urban decadence, and a weird sense humour.

Re:Not Wikipedia's job to be a first publisher

[Anonymous Coward]

Bit of a stretch to claim that particular game is a forerunner for GTA. There are a hundred games exactly the same, ie Streets of Rage, Double Dragon, etc.
 

Re:Not Wikipedia's job to be a first publisher

[LordVader717]

Seconded. I often find myself browsing older versions to find some useful information. I always find useful links which were removed, as well as uncontrolled deletions of entire sections by someone who clearly has an agenda. It's quite sad really.

Re:Not Wikipedia's job to be a first publisher

[drinkypoo]

Shit no. That would be too much work. I'm not even going to bother making revisions to any article in which they are likely to be reverted. That's why I took up writing on Everything2 in the first place, nobody is going to edit my articles there without my permission.

Re:Not Wikipedia's job to be a first publisher

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

I could argue that with its brutal realism/cynism it was a forerunner for GTA.

Whether it was or not, I can just argue that it's "Not Notable" and that will be the end of its article.

Sources

[kellyb9]

If it were more culturally or socially relevant, there probably would have been more sources out there. Sounds like a small community of people are upset that nobody took the time to write about their favorite game.

Re:Sources

[alphatel]

Sounds like a small community of people are upset that nobody took the time to write about their favorite game.

I don't think any specific MUD is as important as the concept of having some idea of what it is. Without those 100,000 people who played text muds in the 90's as the only online role-playing outlet, there could never be a successful Warcraft, which is like a graphical mud with a giant exclamation mark.

Re:Sources

[Anonymous Coward]

Sometimes things are only recognised as important a long time after their time.

Re:Sources

[wjousts]

Exactly, people get upset when they have to face the reality that the things that are important to them aren't necessarily important to humanity as a whole.

Re:Sources

[wjousts]

Which is why there is an article on MUDs.

Re:Sources

[Todrael]

The MUD I still play was where Brad McQuaid played before he created EverQuest. He used a lot of content from it in EQ. Fortunately, the MUD was mentioned in at least two published books and a published interview with Brad, so it's got citations enough to stay alive. I'm just wondering what other MUDs out there don't have such citations, but still have the history. Where did the EQ devs play?

Re:Sources

[BoberFett]

If Wikipedia bases it's content on the importance of a particulr topic to humanity, then all of those articles that focus on individual Pokemon characters mean humanity is doomed.

Re:Sources

[wjousts]

A fair point. Bravo.

Re:Sources

[Anonymous Coward]

While MUDs may have been played by a small number of people, they laid the foundation for games such as WoW and EQ. The mechanical roots of all popular MMORPGs are essentially the same as what was developed by the MUDs. If games like WoW and EQ are culturally relevant then so is there genesis. A subject's importance is not always directly related to it's popularity.

Re:Sources

[afallowhorizon]

Post on Slashdot implying that MUDs were not socially or culturally relevant enough [on an article that explains why they're so relevant, at that] gets +5 insightful. Seriously?

Wikia

[oiron]

FTFA:

Eventually, the community decided to move on, and founded MUD Wiki, a Wikia dedicated to the genre.

Exactly! I'd expect to find specific information about obscure Star Trek characters (even those I consider important for some obscure reason) on Memory Alpha, and not in Wikipedia. A link from main Wikipedia to the MUD wiki, explaining that more information is available there seems appropriate. IIRC, such things have been done in other Wiki articles...

What's the fuss about?

Re:Wikia

[grumbel]

Lets look up Wikipedia on Wikipedia:

Wikipedia seeks to create a summary of all human knowledge in the form of an online encyclopedia. Since it has virtually unlimited disk space it can have far more topics than can be covered by any conventional print encyclopedias.

Ok, so how the fuck does the whole "randomly delete stuff that doesn't make it over an arbitrary notability hurdle" fit into that premise? How is deleting stuff from Wikipedia and moving it to a commercially hosted website outside of Wikipedia fixing the issue?

I am certainly not going to donate any more money when the stuff I am interesting in has to be found in a Wiki that isn't even part of Wikipedia.

Re:Wikia

[m50d]

It's a shame that wikipedia has ceased to be "somewhere you can find anything, no matter how obscure". Nowadays I tend to Tv Tropes instead, with its "no such thing as notability" policy - even for real-world things, you've more chance of getting a useful article.

Re:Wikia

[Anonymous Coward]

You're complaining about arbitrary and inconsistent guidelines on Wikipedia enforced by asshats with a hard-on for being dicks? Where have you *been* for the last decade?

Re:Wikia

[Anonymous Coward]

Hundreds of thousands of pages of fan cruft detract from the professional image that Wikipedia is fighting desperately to project.

I also think it's fairly easy to argue that who Spock slept with in xXxBabyDragonKnightxXx's fanfiction is not part of the category "human knowledge".

Re:Wikia

[Anonymous Coward]

Sulu, right?

Re:Wikia

[goose-incarnated]

You too? It's certainly something when I view an evening of reading tvtropes to be much more entertaining and informative than wikipedia.

Re:Wikia

[RealGrouchy]

Ok, so how the fuck does the whole "randomly delete stuff that doesn't make it over an arbitrary notability hurdle" fit into that premise?

Well it does say a "summary". Not "every detail".

- RG>

Re:Wikia

[HunterZ]

Sulu, right?

Not sure, let's check Wikipedia.

Oh, right.

Call it a good start

[SEWilco]

Keep writing, Wired, as you're publishing material which can be used as Wikipedia sources.

Wikipedia's validity as an information source...

[Anonymous Coward]

...is questionable. There had been a significant contributor to the indie player-run shard scene from the late 90's / early 2000's which was the community which showcased one of the most popular Ultima Online shards at the time. It had hundreds of contributors and players in its tenure over the span of 5-7 years, sported a custom scripting language enabling its developers to release features which (at the time) OSI was "thinking about" releasing on the paid-subscription UO servers.

When I happened upon its Wikipedia article a few years ago, it had been subject to deletionists, who challenged the authenticity of the information presented. Being one of the administrators on the server during the height of its popularity, I counter-challenged with some URLs of fan pages and other related articles, and undeleted a list of staff members who had contributed to the server's evolution over time. The deletionist backed off once another former player joined in the argument.

However, due to the diligence of the deletionists, the Wikipedia page is no more. Good to know that, while history can be remembered by those who experienced it while they yet live, those institutions that are in place to remember it for all time have selective memory.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mytharria
http://www.search.com/reference/Mytharria
http://www.worldlingo.com/ma/enwiki/en/Mytharria

I've Seen This Before, Easy Solution

[eldavojohn]

With the manga fanatics on Wikipedia. And the Star Wars nutjobs (myself included). And you know, I have to agree with Wikipedia on this one and I would suggest for gamers to go to Wikia and get a specific wiki on there going with the deleted pages from Wikipedia's history. There are already tons of game specific wikis on there and very successful ones like Wookiepedia and Mangawiki. I don't understand why people have a problem with this, Wikipedia is for the normal populace -- not the hardcore fans of specific interests. So either throw in your lot with MUD wiki or make a new MUDpedia or something and move on. You'll get a link in on the history of gaming page at the real wikipedia and you can go crazy nuts in your own little specific area.

Re:I've Seen This Before, Easy Solution

[Abstrackt]

I don't understand why people have a problem with this, Wikipedia is for the normal populace -- not the hardcore fans of specific interests.

Wikipedia used to be "the encyclopedia anyone can edit", normal populace and hardcore fans of specific interests alike. Coincidentally, the List of Catgirls article is doing quite well.

Re:I've Seen This Before, Easy Solution

[Anonymous Coward]

Wikipedia is for the normal populace

The problem is that the person who decides what is considered normal is a complete nutjob.

Re:I've Seen This Before, Easy Solution

[geekoid]

The problem with that is that are clouded with nutjob fans. So the information is bias towards their opinion and belief, not based on fact or reason.

I have an excellent argument that shows Jar-Jar isn't the idiot people think he is. It's a good one to; however no matter how good the argument is, wookiepedia would shoot it down. In there favor their arguments would be pretty solid. like 'Doodz, you're wrong' and 'it doesn't confirm my bias'.. and someone would also rebut me with a pithy saying, in klingon..cause there is always one.'

The problem with notability

[Anonymous Coward]

Mediocre RIAA and MPAA backed musicians and films are auto-notable due to the vast amount of payola they give to "reliable" sources to get spammed. Meanwhile decent indie films and bands get the {{CSD-A7}} treatment. If wikipedia cracked down on auto-notabillity articles for Justin Bieber, Willow Smith and Kim Kardashian would not exist because they are media creations and not actual m usic.

Jimbo Wales needs to stop his cult of personality as well, plus admins need term limits to stop abuse.

"vitally relevant"?

[fantomas]

Tough call that is to make, whether MUDS are "vitally relevant" (to whom, I wonder?).

But to be fair as a librarian I'd say it's not for us to judge. But there are plenty of peer-reviewed journals out there for those who believe they are vitally relevant to publish in, or indeed they could pay to self publish books on the subject. Wikipedia would then be happy to have these works referenced.

Re:"vitally relevant"?

[Anonymous Coward]

Tough call that is to make, whether MUDS are "vitally relevant" (to whom, I wonder?).

Were it not for MUDs, the MMO genre would not exist, and by now, PC gaming would be completely dead.

If the summary style

[dilvish_the_damned]

is any indication of the flowers we could find if in chance the poster or that persons brethren may be allowed to in fact modify said obscure game entries in the previously refered to Wikipedia it may become an eventuality that it would suck to read.

I am going to deem this a "tight loss". New term, but look it up shortly in wiki. I am pretty sure its going to mean what you think it means.

"Wired is running a story"

[a Flatbed Darkly]

Lost me there.

Wtf?

[Dunbal]

Hey well you know when you google something there are OTHER links besides wikipedia...

As far as I know I don't remember wikipedia fighting over the exclusive right to archive video game history.

Wrong reference

[DNS-and-BIND]

Wikipedia is not the right reference to use. *shock* *horror* *how dare someone insinuate that "the wikipedia" is not the fount of all human knowledge!* The best place for research is USENET (search for "Google Groups" instead these days) because that's the only central location where games discussions went on back then. Sure, there were BBS and such, but one-node communications platforms are very limited.

Re:Wrong reference

[Mashiki]

Except BBS's weren't really one-node communication platforms. Most if not all BBS's had fido:NET, or something similar on a small scale that was regional. Unless you count hundreds of thousands of BBS's worldwide as small, and popular before usenet as limited.

I'd say the best place to find information pre-1996 would be in old fidonet archives. Which predated usenet, especially if your hub didn't carry usenet at the time(mostly a money factor for long distance calls). And we got around that problem by using multi-node jumps. Usually 1-2 cities, and paying out of pocket for 2 telephone lines+running a mininode to forward calls was cheaper than paying long distance.

This has always been a problem with Wikipedia

[jimicus]

Wikipedia is lousy for a lot of recent history precisely because (as soon as you drift away from relatively mainstream stuff) so little of it has been documented elsewhere on the web - I've seen plenty of articles myself which I'm 100% certain are factually inaccurate, and I can name the inaccuracies - but I can't find an appropriate citation. So any correction I make is likely to have a very limited life expectancy.

Re:This has always been a problem with Wikipedia

[Lehk228]

just plaster it with [citation needed]

Re:This has always been a problem with Wikipedia

[Nick0000000]

Wikinewb here but, surely in that case just remove the inaccurate info...

Re:This has always been a problem with Wikipedia

[boristhespider]

I spent a while doing that on every article I could find. Almost every article on Wikipedia is grossly deficient in citations if you follow the regulations some nerd throws at you. So I got fed up and went to one of the more objectionable's favourite page and started adding [citation needed] after every factual statement that lacked verification. There's a shocking amount of things that are just accepted on pretty much any Wikipedia article.

I got banned for a few days for that.

I think I'm going to go back to it, actually, and see if I can get the whole IP range of my city knocked out.

Re:This has always been a problem with Wikipedia

[TuringTest]

I've seen plenty of articles myself which I'm 100% certain are factually inaccurate, and I can name the inaccuracies - but I can't find an appropriate citation. So any correction I make is likely to have a very limited life expectancy.

Even in that case where your edits would likely be reverted, you still must make it and/or discuss it in the talk page.

Wikipedia is designed for that eventuality; it exposes not only the article's contents but the process by which editors arrived to them. If you know for true a fact but can't provide references, explaining that in the talk page will expose the situation to future researchers.

Someone really interested will read through the talk archives or even the change logs to find what has been discussed for inclusion and what has been rejected. Scholars could read your comment in the future and be able to cross-reference with other sources, finally being able to assess its accuracy.

Re:This has always been a problem with Wikipedia

[boristhespider]

And then someone changes it back. Unless you're unemployed and have absolutely no life you can't win; people camp on their favourite page and revert a few times. Then it gets locked down through too many reversions and they go running and crying to some admin for "arbitration" which they win because they've got a longer history on Wikipedia. This happens regardless of whether you, as a genuine expert in the field with access to relevant, well-sourced citations, are right or wrong.

Wikipedia isn't knowledge by democracy, it's knowledge by whoever can spend the most time camping.

Re:This has always been a problem with Wikipedia

[drb226]

Wikipedia is lousy for a lot of recent history precicely because ... so little of it has been documented elsewhere on the web

Sources you cite on Wikipedia don't have to be on the web. That being said, "recent history" is usually first found in newspapers and magazines, which usually have a web version. And if the news didn't show up in significant newspapers or magazines, it's probably because the news was insigificant.

Re:This has always been a problem with Wikipedia

[geekoid]

But you could post examples here, and I would wager several more source will go out to find data to back you, or show you the fool. Either is fine.

Re:This has always been a problem with Wikipedia

[Anonymous Coward]

You can cite dead tree resources, too.

If you don't have a web site or book to reference, your correction isn't especially valuable- how do we know you're not mistaken?

Re:This has always been a problem with Wikipedia

[SheeEttin]

Question is--was it reverted?
(Also, you probably should've just used {{unreferenced}}.)

Re:This has always been a problem with Wikipedia

[boristhespider]

Actually I didn't check if it was reverted or if someone went through removing all the tags. Probably doesn't make any odds either way (I can't even remember what article it was now, either, so I can't spend a pathetic evening hunting through its change-log -- which I'm ashamed to say I'd probably do).

I didn't even know about the {{unreferenced}} tag, but I suspect those would've been removed as well since I did scatter [citation needed] absolutely everywhere.

Also, I'm amazed my post got modded up and not down. I don't really understand /. sometimes...

Re:This has always been a problem with Wikipedia

[LordVader717]

I think the problem is that many junior admins really lack knowledge about verifiability. Not every statement needs a traceable source. Some articles have ridiculously long lists of citations for the most trivial things. And many of them are of dubious quality to begin with. Sometimes it seems that admins are just too lazy to read into a subject itself before questioning the authenticity of every statement.

Given that Richard Bartle is still alive...

[EWAdams]

... and writing books, I don't think we really need to worry about what was said on Usenet. Why not go to the source?

Re:Given that Richard Bartle is still alive...

[geekoid]

Becasue source lie? because memory isn't has hard as people like to think?

There's already a site for this

[raphael75]

http://www.mobygames.com/ already lets users document every game ever made, and it was around before wikipedia.

No it's not

[Anonymous Coward]

Warcraft was a single-player game with network connectivity. So were Warcrafts II and III. You're meaning World of Warcraft, which is a totally different game.

If we're going to get anal over computer games then let's get a bit more accurately anal.

Re:lol

[nedlohs]

And 2000 years ago nobody thought anyone in a museum in 2000 years would give a fuck about their shitty beer mug.

Early internet history

[Anonymous Coward]

This problem affects a lot more than games. I know for a fact that as early as 1992, chat board and IRC users used "OMGWTFBBQ" to mean "Oh My God, What The Fuck, Be Back Quick".

Usage:

"OJ Simpson is in a car chase on TV!"
"OMGWTFBBQ!"

I can't prove it though, so it won't ever be in the historical record. I can tell people about it but I'll just sound like some sad old man bullshitting.

Jerks now are Insightful?

[Anonymous Coward]

Who moderated this jerk as Insightful? His friends? The great thing about Wikipedia is exactly they have content about varied things, no matter how "obscure" they are.

Re:lol

[Anonymous Coward]

seriously, that's your retort? ok, let's assume we're talking about a shitty pacman clone for the dragon 32. now let's assume we're a museum owner in the year 3000 and someone donates a copy of it.

"gee, thanks. what's this?"

"it's a shitty pacman clone for the dragon 32 that no-one's ever heard of!"

"oh. well, we've got copies of pacman coming out of our arse. we've got broken old dragon 32s coming out of our arse. we've even got copies of clones and pallatte swaps for every major gaming system of the 1980s. why would we want this?"

"because it's a shitty pacman clone for the dragon 32 that no-one had ever heard of!"

"we've already got a version of pacman for the dragon 32. no-one looks at it because no-one gives a fuck about shitty pacman clones when we've got non-shitty clones and the atari original. no-one even really gives a shit about the dragon 32."

"but it's a shitty pacman clone for the dragon 32 that no-one has ever heard of!"

"please leave or i'll summon security."

The current state of gaming

[Anonymous Coward]

http://libregamewiki.org/ A free as in freedom games wiki.

I, for one...

[yerpo]

... support the Wikipedia rules about notability. Some line has to be drawn, and without good sources, there's no way of telling that a user "Alex1648" (for example) is a genuine old gaming enthusiast as opposed to a 15-year old troll who made a story about it last Monday and set up a website. And if nobody but MUD players argues that this-or-this title was "massively influential", an uninvolved person would reasonably argue that maybe, just maybe, they're overstating its influence. Be it because of emotional attachment, or anything else, why would that be relevant? If we let MUDs slip through the guidelines, what's next? Cigarette lighters? Dish-washing brands nobody has heard of? Car salesmen? Why would they be deprivileged then? Surely they must've had massive influence, just look at how many people wash their dishes, light their cigarettes or buy cars (more than there are MMORPG players, surely).

Re:I, for one...

[Jiro]

Overstating the influence? The problem is that articles are created based on references, not "influence" and references as an indication of influence just doesn't make sense for MUDs or many other Internet-based phenomena. There are plenty of things which have about as much influence as MUDs but which get articles simply because they have more references.

Re:I, for one...

[yerpo]

That's exactly the kind of pointlessness I'm talking about. You said that they are influential and you have nothing to back this statement, except additional opinions. Why would your opinions be important?

Re:I, for one...

[Anonymous Coward]

Because he's a self-important jerk who has no dealings with humanity outside of his little circle of internet friends, who sit around stoking each other's egos that their miserable pastimes are relevant to humanity as a whole rather than a backwater highlighting how pointless they really are.

Re:I, for one...

[grumbel]

there's no way of telling that a user "Alex1648" (for example) is a genuine old gaming enthusiast as opposed to a 15-year old troll who made a story about it last Monday and set up a website.

Nonsense, just get a few gamers together and have them look over the article. If none of them has ever heard about it, then there is a reasonable chance that it is made up, on the other side if everybody agrees that its real thing, just a little obscure, no problem, just stick one of those banners over it that says that it could use more references.

Classic example of this is homebrew: You will have no shortage of people with experience with it, you won't have an issue finding numerous webpages, wikis and forums discussing it in detail, but you will have a very hard time finding a detailed source about the topic that Wikipedia considers reliable, as the mainstream gaming press prefers to ignore that topic as good as it can to not lose its good relationship with the game companies.

And if nobody but MUD players argues that this-or-this title was "massively influential", an uninvolved person would reasonably argue that maybe, just maybe, they're overstating its influence.

Simply move that section to the talk page and let it live there till somebody finds some evidence.

Re:I, for one...

[yerpo]

Nonsense, just get a few gamers together and have them look over the article. If none of them has ever heard about it, then there is a reasonable chance that it is made up, on the other side if everybody agrees that its real thing,

The existence is not in question here, relevance is. And by introducing more anonymous cowards, you haven't done anything to solve the problem of substantiating your opinion.

just a little obscure, no problem, just stick one of those banners over it that says that it could use more references.

But there aren't any to begin with. Why would a topic like that deserve metion in an encyclopedia?

the mainstream gaming press prefers to ignore that topic as good as it can to not lose its good relationship with the game companies.

Introducing conspiracy theories doesn't really improve your argument.

Re:I, for one...

[grumbel]

The existence is not in question here, relevance is.

Why does relevance matter when the facts are correct?

But there aren't any to begin with. Why would a topic like that deserve metion in an encyclopedia?

Because somebody made the effort to actually write an article about it. Why should anything else matter for Wikipedia?

Introducing conspiracy theories doesn't really improve your argument.

That's not a conspiracy theory, thats plain old fact.

Re:I, for one...

[yerpo]

Why does relevance matter when the facts are correct?

Because they are useless and because anonymous contributors cannot be trusted to supply correct facts.

Because somebody made the effort to actually write an article about it. Why should anything else matter for Wikipedia?

Because it's an encyclopedia, not an indiscriminate collection of random facts. Would you agree that if I made an effort to write an article about how I had my molars removed, this should be published in Wikipedia?

That's not a conspiracy theory, thats plain old fact.

Again, according to you, i.e. irrelevant.

Re:I, for one...

[grumbel]

Would you agree that if I made an effort to write an article about how I had my molars removed, this should be published in Wikipedia?

Classic straw man argument. No, an article about your molar removal should not be in Wikipedia, because it never ever was part of public knowledge.

A game released to a wide audience, to which you can find numerous references, which in turn make it part of public knowledge, is something completly different and thus should be part of Wikipedia. I am not so much bothered by Wikipedia requiring references, but by what they consider reliable references.

Re:I, for one...

[yerpo]

Classic straw man argument. No, an article about your molar removal should not be in Wikipedia, because it never ever was part of public knowledge.

It's you who put up effort as a measure. I merely continued with this logic, so no, it's not a straw man any more than you are.

But okay, then, if not my molar, a song by a garage band that got played once or twice on a local radio and performed at a village fair before the band broke up. How about that? Or a primary school rocket-modelling team? The internet is not the only repository of public knowledge.

The problem with the internet generation is that they are very good at collecting information, but completely incapable of assessment. I strongly believe that current rules about what constitutes a reliable reference provide the best (or as nearly to the best as humanely possible) filter that keeps the useless crap out, while simultaneously allowing useful content and ensuring its accuracy.

Re:I, for one...

[grumbel]

But okay, then, if not my molar, a song by a garage band that got played once or twice on a local radio and performed at a village fair before the band broke up. How about that?

Thats perfectly good for an article, because it is something where there is a reasonable expectation that somebody might actually look that up one day ("Hey, I always wondered what happened to that band") and there is a reasonable chance to find at least some info about it. Of course general Wikipedia rules should apply, i.e. not have the band members themselves write the article and be proper NPOV, not advertisment, etc.

If some third party comes along and writes a reasonable good article, there is no reason to destroy their work.

filter that keeps the useless crap out

Except that they don't filter crap out, but stuff that doesn't follow the arbitrary notability rules, even if its a decent article.

That said, in the English language Wikipedia the problem isn't quite that bad, you still can find a lot of niche knowledge, even so the notability rules can get sometimes in the way and leads to more destructive work, then constructive one.

In the German Wikipedia on the other side the problem is pretty much out of control, not only is it destroying good articles on a regular basis, but it also lead to absurdly written articles such as
Jean-Luc Picard, as fictional characters are considered non-notable for an own article, people had to collect all fictional characters to a single page.

Re:I, for one...

[yerpo]

Thats perfectly good for an article, because it is something where there is a reasonable expectation that somebody might actually look that up one day

Er... no, there isn't. And for every such article that might eventually, in a couple of years, be useful to a single person, there would be hundreds of articles with unverifiable false information (including that band's article). How do you write a NPOV article, if the only people who have correct information about a topic are those personally connected with the subject? Furthermore, I don't know what part of internet you use, but consider yourself extremely lucky if you didn't experience a resourceful troll yet. They would have a field day in a Wikipedia without notability rules (it's bad enough as it is). The effort to write that one useful article is nothing compared to effort that would be needed to sift through the crap.

Except that they don't filter crap out

Yes, they do. And it's completely reasonable to say, that if nobody bothered to get an article about something through the editorial process of a single media source that's more than locally important (given their sheer number), then this topic is useless for general public.

By the way, given the abovementioned number of sources that are considered reliable, it's completely ridiculous to claim that every single one of them is afraid of the gaming industry. I sincerely hope you were joking after all.

Re:I, for one...

[grumbel]

How do you write a NPOV article, if the only people who have correct information about a topic are those personally connected with the subject?

You don't. If you can't find enough info about something to write an article, you simply don't write one. If on the other side you do find enough info, then there is no reason to go around deleting it.

The effort to write that one useful article is nothing compared to effort that would be needed to sift through the crap.

You are again entering straw man territory. Of course you should not allow crap, but crap is something very different then just something you don't consider important.

They would have a field day in a Wikipedia without notability rules (it's bad enough as it is).

And yet in my use of Wikipedia I have tripped over far more articles I was interested in that got deleted or cut down back to uselessness then over plain old vandalism. If the cleanup is a bigger problem then the problem its trying to fix something is going wrong.

And it's completely reasonable to say, that if nobody bothered to get an article about something through the editorial process of a single media source that's more than locally important

There is a ton of stuff that exists on the Internet about which you could write well sourced articles, but you aren't allowed to because those things haven't yet entered mainstream press.

As said, see homebrew, it exists, is easy to verify by everybody with the given hardware, yet the main stream press is pretty ignorant about it. Yes, you can write an article about it, but with just the information of the mainstream press it will be a completly useless one.

Re:I, for one...

[yerpo]

You don't. If you can't find enough info about something to write an article, you simply don't write one.

But you have enough info if you're personally connected with the subject. Who can say that you're not being honest (NPOV) in your writing if you aren't overtly exaggerating your claims?

If on the other side you do find enough info, then there is no reason to go around deleting it.

There is, if you cannot trust this info.

Of course you should not allow crap, but crap is something very different then just something you don't consider important.

What I'm saying is, that it is not possible to tell the difference, if you don't already know what's true. And if you do know, then you don't need an encyclopedia to tell you that.

And yet in my use of Wikipedia I have tripped over far more articles I was interested in that got deleted or cut down back to uselessness then over plain old vandalism.

You wouldn't even notice the kind of vandalism that you suggest opening the door to. You treat this issue much too narrowly, from the perspective of a topic you are familiar with. When people look something up in a general encyclopedia, it's often about a subject they know nothing about. How could they trust information that is based on self-published sources? I'm not just talking about obscure topics, I'm talking (for example) about fringe theories that would start being added to articles en masse.

There is a ton of stuff that exists on the Internet about which you could write well sourced articles, but you aren't allowed to because those things haven't yet entered mainstream press.

No, there isn't. Well sourced means that you can trust the sources. And there is a lot more that is considered reliable than "mainstream" (whatever you imagine under this word). It's just that subjects you care about and would like to promote aren't important enough to get mentioned at all by anybody other than a very narrow group of people. It's immature to demand that Wikipedia change its rules because you feel that this is unjust.

Then cite the Polish sources

[tepples]

I would doubt gaming newspapers would be keen to write about it. It also doesn't help that it's in Polish.

Then cite the Polish sources. English Wikipedia prefers English sources when available, but reliable sources in any language will do.

Re:lol

[naz404]

Only in Wikipedia do you have administrators outright declare that the actual games which *ARE* the game bundle itself (The Humble Indie Bundle -> the subject of the Wikipedia article) to be of low importance and distracting to the article.

History is tough to write if you're not recording

[eepok]

It's pretty difficult to write the history of ANYTHING if you don't record stuff along the way. Sure, we know when certain game systems and games were released, but that's just a time line. Genuine history happens in between those major events and is pretty difficult to summarize if someone didn't put it all down on paper/disc.

Also, Wiki is a starting place for research-- not the end-all academic source of knowledge for the human race. If you see something that interests you, check the sources and go from there.

Re:lol

[Kell Bengal]

Two things here. Firstly, you're making the assumption that you will have contemporary platforms and games in abundance in the year 3000. That's not for certain at all - much in the same way that there is no preponderance of pottery from 0 AD. Time and attrition reduce the supply of artifacts, and that reduced supply makes them more valuable due to their scarcity. It is worth proactively preserving the substance of computer game lore precisely because it is mundane now, and hence easily protected. If you wait until the last copies of a program or the last hardware to run it on has decayed, then it is too late.

Secondly, you're imply that a clone is inherently inferior to the original and not worth preserving if copies of the original are intact. Unfortunately, history has proven that to be a false assertion. There are many, many tracts and works from history that are known through their copies alone (I could list a fistful of classical greek poets, sculptors and paintings here). In the case of renaissance masters, the copies were often technically superior to the originals, even if they were not as well known in their time.

Let future generations be the judge of our creative products, but preserve them now for those generations to enjoy. Much in the same way that even down-right mundane things go into time capsules, so too do we store artifacts of historical and cultural interest. And remember, we're talking about software and data here (and small pieces of hardware). It's not a lot of floor space, and easy to distribute across different institutions.

Re:lol

[Anonymous Coward]

I highly doubt that the only game left for the Dragon 32 in the year 3000 will be some Pacman clone. Either none will be left or it'll be something else. Even if it is the only game left, I still find it hard to believe that anyone would care, unless it was one of hte only games left *and* they had a Dragon32 that still worked. Otherwise it would be a tape, perhaps but probably not with something still written on it, and totally useless. How could they tell it wasn't Enya?

Secondly, I specified a *shitty* Pacman clone. There are Pacman clones that were much better than Pacman and many of them. Codemasters' Fast Food and (arguably) Kwik Snax are amongst the good ones I used to play a lot. I've no idea if any were on the Dragon, though. I never had a Dragon.

Thirdly, you do realise that you're arguing about preserving a fictional (shitty) Pacman clone for a (shitty) 80s computer for some fictional museum in the year 3000 on the off-chance that the curator of the museum would give a fuck or even know what this piece of warped plastic he's been handed actually is?

The actual *point* was the original absurd comparison with pottery from 2000 years back. Pottery survives, which is more than you can say for magnetic tape (or hard drives, come to that), and it's of innate interest. Of the enormous, sheer wealth that will survive in the rubble from our civilisation, there will be a lot of much greater interest than a few totally obscure 80s computer games.

"Mammoth"? Really?

[Petersko]

"Despite their mammoth influence on the current gaming landscape, their insular communities were rarely explored by a nascent games journalist crowd. ... "

I think we're vastly overstating the impact of MUDs on the "current gaming landscape". They were just a link in the chain, like Zork, or Baldur's Gate. Every step that brought us to "here" could be said to have a "mammoth" influence. Singling out MUDs for glorification seems silly. I mean, I like to point out that I ran a 300bps BBS on my Commodore 64 back in 1983, but it didn't have a mammoth influence on the Internet.

Re:"Mammoth"? Really?

[Magius_AR]

I think we're vastly overstating the impact of MUDs on the "current gaming landscape".

Considering the popularity of WoW and its predecessors (Everquest, Ultima Online, etc), I'd disagree with you. All of those aforementioned games are essentially MUDs with GUI front-ends. In fact, if I recall from discussions heard elsewhere, it is suspected that many of the devs borrowed heavily from MUD code.

Stop using public services, start a compendium...

[BenPekarek]

Before there was wikipedia, youtube, livejournal, blogger, and many of the other centralized public services; people ran their own websites. People have become too reliant on these types of behemoth CMS systems. The notion of the "fan site" seems to be a dying theme and people need to be reminded that the power is in their hands to start up their own authoritative knowledge base. Storing information in wikipedia leaves it at the mercy of ignorance, and often times, wikipedia is re-writing history rather than clarifying it.

The sheer volatility of source information on the net makes it impossible for sources based on web based material to stand the test of time. Websites die, mergers go through, and hard-drives fail. Historically accurate information is being stripped out of wikipedia on a daily basis simply because the source links have died, and wikipedia admins stroll through gutting information like mindless drones. This gradual erosion of information online has a trickledown effect.

Case in point: A while back I edited the entry on Shinobi for the Playstation 2 at Wikipedia. There is a gross misconception that the game was envisioned during the Dreamcast era, and that development had already started for the Sega platform. As it turns out, this is not the case, as specifically stated in an Interview at GamePro. However the article link changed, and a user nuked the information from the wikipedia entry, allowing the same old misinformation about Shinobi starting out as a Dreamcast game to seep back into the article.

The link to the interview still exists, but at a new URL:

http://www.gamepro.com/article/news/23740/interview-with-shinobi-developers/

Noriyoshi Ohba: "That's why we [Overworks] didn't make any new Shinobi game for the Saturn or Dreamcast. It wasn't until just this last year [2001] that I had some time and thought I'd tackle the series again."
Takashi Uriu: "This initiative on our part started just as Sega was going multiplatform..."

While it's true that starting up a seperate website doesn't guarantee accuracy, at least the overseers of fansites/compendiums are more concerned about the pursuit of truth on their topic of expertise; and since the sites are within their control, it prevents outsiders from breaking their information repository.

Re:lol

[BobMcD]

You're picking and choosing your logical constants in a way that only supports your own position. Open your mind a bit:

Otherwise it would be a tape, perhaps but probably not with something still written on it, and totally useless. How could they tell it wasn't Enya?

Do you assume that the LP's in the Smithsonian actually get played? Do the ancient pieces of pottery still ever hold food and drink? Or do people just look at them as examples?

Secondly, I specified a *shitty* Pacman clone.

Perhaps future generations would marvel at how shitty it was. You can't rightly say. Again there are a lot of pieces of pottery that are mere fragments of a functional device. You'd be pretty pissed if I tried to pour your soup into such a fragment, because it makes for a really shitty bowl. Yet it is under glass, all the same.

Thirdly, you do realise that you're arguing about preserving a fictional (shitty) Pacman clone for a (shitty) 80s computer for some fictional museum in the year 3000 on the off-chance that the curator of the museum would give a fuck or even know what this piece of warped plastic he's been handed actually is?

Actually, I believe he's arguing that those who wish to preserve it not be prohibited from doing so. It isn't as if this is some 'you must preserve it' mandate. Only an appeal against the arbitrary restrictions.

You're saying it shouldn't be kept, while failing to realize that a lot of our antiquities in museums today were found in burial sites, sewers, and/or toilets. The people of that time didn't necessarily want to keep it either. They didn't judge the value of it in the same way we do today - which is rather the problem with your position, isn't it?

I'd quote the final stanza and rebut it thusly, but the point's made: You're not in the future, and are incapable of accurately anticipating what will or will not be of value. Gnash teeth if you wish, but lay of the obstructionism until your time machine is completed...

The importance of MUDS

[geekoid]

isn't nearly as much as the fans of MUDS think it is.

Re:lol

[Anonymous Coward]

WTF is the turtle thing at the bottom of that page.

It makes me hate wikipedia even more now than I did teaching...

This is a clear case of WWIA

[geekoid]

Why Wasn't I Asked?

People seem to think they could be talked to if someone want's to write about their interest, no matter how irrelevant that person is.

My generation calls those people "Whiners".

you got Wikipedia wrong.

[Phiu-x]

you or Jason Scott :
"Wikipedia is not, and never will be, an accurate encyclopedia. "

I agree , but that is not the point...
See, none of the contributions I've made to some articles over the years has been reverted. Sure, they've changed, others have added things , some has been rephrased, but this is Wikipedia.

Wikipedia is like a living encyclopedia, its almost real-time. When you accept that, you can start contributing wihout worrying for anything else. If what you add to it is good, it will be kept, one way or another.

Wikipedia is akin to natural selection. Only the best will survive. And about the *realtime* *right now* nature of Wikipedia : Sure, you can read about all the species that ever existed on this earth in any good natural history book. But if what you need is a correct representation of the species alive today, right now, go to a zoo or take a walk outside. You'll get what's on earth TODAY. See. Wikipedia is not an history book, but is representing all about what is true right now. So it IS a zoo :) Pun intended.

Seriously, some specific subject must certainly be the stage for ego wars , but what you describe here seem like its Wiklipedia as viewed by an obsessive compulsive. I agree that it would look like a nightmare.

Oh, and you can cite me. thank you :)

Legends of Terris

[terrisus]

Legends of Terris is a MUD which had been on AOL dating back to the mid-90s, and is still active and being played online (legendsofterris.com).

Wikipedia used to have a page listing for Legends of Terris with plenty of information. Soon after, much of the information was cleared out, due to it "not being from a reliable source." Soon after that, the page was deleted, due to not being "important enough," or something to that effect.

Yes, my username here (and most every place I've registered for anything over the past decade) is based on Terris. No, I don't run Terris, nor am I involved in its administration. I've just been playing it for the past decade plus, and love it very much. And no, I'm not involved enough in Wikipedia to go through the effort of trying to jump through their hoops in order to try to get the page back up or anything like that.

Seeing what Wikipedia did to the Legends of Terris page, while plenty of pages that seem extremely irrelevant with hardly any sources, or sources from random people, has been plenty of reason for me to not rely on Wikipedia for anything.

This is true of all non-mainstream Wiki content

[hessian]

Wikipedia is awesome for paraphrasing collegiate and graduate textbooks, and mainstream culture.

But what about a non-mainstream culture, like death metal? Same thing happens as with gaming: they reject the credible sources and replace them with mainstream ones.

ANUS vs Wikipedia

Here you have angry Wikipedians telling the net's oldest metal site that it is not a credible source.

Wikipedia is basically Google's way of ensuring that every search has a semi-accurate result, and it's destructive in that it standardizes knowledge without eliminating bias. This is why I avoid Wikipedia except for mainstream culture or paraphrased graduate school textbook content.

A reference source

[Caerdwyn]

Buy a copy of Richard Bartle's "Designing Virtual Worlds". He lists literally thousands of references in his discussions of online gaming.

Oh, and one other thing. Wikipedia may be an interesting start-point for researching something, but using it as a primary reference just sets you up for repeating someone else's mistakes/prejudices/agenda as fact. I've found errors of fact in many of the articles in which I have first-hand knowledge of the event, place, item, etc. of interest. If they're wrong that often on subjects which I know for sure what the facts actually are, why would other articles on which I don't have first-hand immediate knowledge be any better?

Wikipedia and the GNAA...

[Anonymous Coward]

For me, it seemed obvious that once our very own Gay Nigger Association of America finally had its article deleted (why do they get to try again and again; over 15 times?) that Wikipedia was corrupted to the core. No, your begging pedoeyes do not entice me to donate, Jimmy Wales.

Re:lol

[Kell Bengal]

You make an excellent, reasoned rebuttal. Thank you, sir.

Personally, I wouldn't trust wiki on this

[WillAffleckUW]

Back when we literally created video games in the 70s and 80s, to run on mini and mainframes, we were not very good on documenting what we did.

I'd trust wiki on console gaming, tabletop or standalone game machines, but not on what we did back then. Coding Lunar Lander and Star Trek variants for example. A lot of what we did back then used punch cards to run, and we would hand code PUSH POP instructions and do LSHIFT and RSHIFT on the literal registers of the CPU. The best we had for archive was tape - cassette tape, and most of us couldn't afford magnetic drums and maybe used bubble memory storage at most.

While technically copyright existed, we mostly ignored it, and we'd get our source code from various magazines - I remember BYTE coming out was a big deal.

This is way before PC games came out. Until the mid-80s gaming was something that we hobbyists did for fun. And we'd write the games ourselves. I remember writing my first RAM drive to speed up game ops from my first Apple II+ by loading the game program code (which I wrote) from the dual floppy drives so it would execute 1000 times faster, using a 128k (yes, K not MB) RAM board I stuck in there and how shocked all my neighbors were at how fast it ran.

Virtually none of this was written down or "published".

So did you donate money to Wikipedia?

[Alimony Pakhdan]

I sure as heck did not. Its like giving money to a cult.

This was a complete fiasco...

[dentin]

We at Alter Aeon ran into exactly this issue, and like Threshold fought bitterly to keep pages in Wikipedia. The proposed deletions were massive, alarming, inconsistent, and very difficult to fight even for established games with over a decade of history.

I’ll be the first to say that there is much to be desired regarding “conventional citations” for these games. A number of the most famous MUDs are mentioned in out-of-print books of the previous century; many, many more had web articles written about them, before anyone considered the web to be a true publishing medium. But because so many games existed before permanent web archives became commonplace, many of the sources that would have been called upon have simply been destroyed.

The worst part of the whole Wikipedia affair was that there seemed to be no rhyme or reason to the proposed deletions. All of the mud pages were clearly linked and indexed, very easy to find. Ironically, the games with the most well constructed pages and most solid references seemed to be the ones most strongly targetted. Countless MUD stub pages were ignored, while battles raged on for deletion of such landmarks as Threshold and Alter Aeon. The targetting was baffling.

Sufficient reference was eventually found for many games. Some games waged made their own contacts with the press get third party references; some doubtless simply purchased articles so that the required ‘notability’ check mark could be ticked off. Unmaintained games that had been the bedrock of the past simply vanished.

It still leaves a bitter taste in my mouth.