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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."
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.
For every problem, there is at least one solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
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.
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.
Burns: We're building a casino!
McAllister: Arrr. Give me 5 minutes.
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.
FTFA:
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?
Keep writing, Wired, as you're publishing material which can be used as Wikipedia sources.
...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
and old/obscure games are not notable.
a pottery bowl wasn't notable 2000 years ago but now we show them off in museums
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.
which is totally what she said
"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
Many obscure games have been highly influential. The entire rogue-like genre is obscure, but has been extremely influential in games like Diablo.
If you had super powers, would you use them for good, or for awesome?
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.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
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.
To prevent this day from getting worse, I'll just read ERROR as GOOD TH
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."
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.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
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.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
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.
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]
which is totally what she said
I piss off bigots.
Obscure to you, perhaps, but anyone who went to arcades in the 80s definitely saw Karate Champ.
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.
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?
which is totally what she said
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.
And 2000 years ago nobody thought anyone in a museum in 2000 years would give a fuck about their shitty beer mug.
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.
So in order to increase the value of games we should destroy most of the game makers..
Can we start with EA?
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Do you really think wikipedia will be around in 100 years?
I'm betting it fades into obscurity in 25 years.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
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.
Slashdot, fix your code or at least hire someone who is competent at it to do it for you.
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.
For every problem, there is at least one solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
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.
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."
Since I can't tell them apart, I treat all ACs as the same person.
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.
http://www.object404.com
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.
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.
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.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
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?
Slashdot, fix your code or at least hire someone who is competent at it to do it for you.
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.
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.
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...
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".
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
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?
For every problem, there is at least one solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
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:
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
Slashdot, fix your code or at least hire someone who is competent at it to do it for you.