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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 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?
...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
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 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.
I piss off bigots.
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.
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.
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.
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
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...