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Old Man Murray Entry Deleted From Wikipedia
shoptroll writes "In what can be best described as an unfortunate interpretation of the 'notability standards' at Wikipedia, Rock, Paper, Shotgun reports that the entry for Old Man Murray, once a mainstay of PC Gaming reviews and commentary, has been deleted. A sad day for gaming journalism everywhere." This is notable both because Old Man Murray was completely and totally awesome, but also because it was notable and influential on countless writers.
Never heard of OldmanMurray.com?
I don't see any wiki articles about PSXnation.com or scifi.com either.
FREE magazine : http://clarkesworldmagazine.com/prior/
I've never heard of Old Man Murray but that doesn't mean it should be deleted. This all got argued about last time over obscure programming languages but, why are we deleting history? Are we running out of disk space? I think not.
Eric Wolpaw and Chet Faliszek have worked in the gaming industry, and the site itself is referenced in numerous interviews, articles, quotations, and even in games. All valid reasons for a Wikipedia entry, I'd think.
Weren't you the guy yesterday who tried to tell us that Slashdot is the Fox News of tech?
If anything, John Dvorak is the Bill O'Reilly of the tech news world.
Wikipedia needs a better moderation system.
Articles that are not verified or not notable can go into a second tier where they have to be searched for by specifically requesting second tier access.
As it stands now, I've seen articles deleted because their sources have started falling off the net. This makes Wikipedia one of the absolute worst encyclopedias for anything outside of standard historic events.
The deletion of OMM was instigated by Ben Schumin, a sad man who still holds a grudge against Erik Wolpaw, a writer at OMM, now working for Valve as a writer for games such as Portal. The fact that some sad sack like him can point at an article and say "this should be deleted" and the circle jerk of deletionist admins ignore the salient points made by users and experts of games journalism such as Kieron Gillen, delete the article and then pat themselves on the back for a job well done.
Barnstars all-round you deletionist creeps, keep ruining Wikipedia one kangaroo-court AfD at a time.
I used to contribute a fair amount to Wikipedia to get my brain going in the morning. I quit doing so a couple years ago, because the whole infighting and "notability" crap was ridiculous. Every single character from a book, movie, cartoon, video game, anime (pokemon, etc) gets a many-paged detailed entry while real people quickly get the brush because someone gets a thorn in their ass over something. And those "somethings" are hard to pin down. Some entries surprisingly don't exist, while others (someone with a podcast you've never heard of or who is supposedly some self-described social media expert, etc) gets an entry. That idiot from "Hot For Words" even has a wikipedia entry.
I won't be surprised if a lot of things get deleted in the next few years, because a bunch of people who are twelve years old today will, in the future, say "I've never heard of this Commodore thing, it must be totally made up. Or at least not notable enough, or I'd have heard of it! DELETED!"
Of course, I don't know how you'd solve the problem, either. It's not a solution to just say absolutely everything can be a wikipedia article. Every self-promoting jackhole is going to create their own entry, then and the quality of each article itself will drop. On the other hand, how much attention can really be given to the countless deletions that are proposed? Especially since, while some deletions occur with no discussion and immediately, others drag on indefinitely and are knock-down drag-out events. It's not a solution, but it certainly wouldn't hurt to raise the bar for deletions, at least. It should be a lot harder to delete something that isn't obvious spam or vandalism than it is to create it.
There's also DeletionPedia, though I can't really tell what the current status of the site is.
I wrote some time ago that Wikipedia should allow any content that could be interesting / informative to someone, after all she did not have the space limitation of a physical encyclopedia. I honestly can not understand why something has to be "remarkable" to be included in Wikipedia, especially when the criteria of "outstanding" is usualy being cited in news sites and the like that are not always have ethical criteria to decide what he saw or not "remarkable." or public interest.
Religion: The greatest weapon of mass destruction of all time
It was deleted by some halfwit called Ben Schumin who appears to have a grudge against OMM.
He should be permanently removed from Wiki staff for being an absolute butt devastated ass of a manchild.
Oh, also, Delete This Ben. Oh wait.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:SchuminWeb
Probably the best solution to this deletist/keepist nonsense is to rate articles according to their noteworthiness. This rating can either be derived according to how many other articles link in, or according to human judgement. Using this system, lower ranked articles will be naturally found far less, but at least they're there if you dig. It'd work like pagerank to a degree.
Keeping or deleting is otherwise a false dichotomy. There isn't a magical line that makes an article suddenly not important any more. There are however shades of grey.
Why OpalCalc is the best Windows calc
One of the neat things about Wikipedia early on was that you could find entries on obscure people or places or things. That was one of the charming things about it. No matter how peripheral an item or event, there was someone, somewhere who could write an article about it.
The review itself cited some good sources. Edge magazine, which is pushing 20 years old itself, has extolled the site's historical relevance. The bother is that the admin in question judged those arguments as unacceptable. It should do better at deletion review, assuming it's been passed there.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
Deletion is supposed to be the last resort No notices were put up to improve the article, no messages sent to a relevant wikiproject for volunteers to help out. Just Ben Schumin (a man a writer of OMM made fun off a decade ago) tying to pull a fast one. Schumin also removed references to Erik Wolpaw from several pages recently.
. this place sucks now...
4chan is more relevant for nerds these days...
Don't let the door hit you on the way out.
There is a war going on for your mind.
Yes, because PCGamer, Kokatu, Wired & the UGO Network are completely irrelevant when it comes to the gaming community.
There is a war going on for your mind.
For those who may be wondering what Old Man Murray is:
Wikipedia Google Cache
Oh the irony
do we really need a Slashdot front page story every time Wikipedia does something suboptimal?
Yes, without public pressure ego-tripping editors could do "suboptimal" AKA wrong things with impunity. Transparency is supposed to be Wikipedia's strength, and good decisions should have nothing to fear from public knowledge.
Generally Considered Lame and not really effective at building consensus
Which is a euphemism for "all the deletionists get butthurt when they can't hide from the public backlash".
I support the Slashcott and will not be reading or commenting from 2/10/14 to 2/17/14. Beta is steaming pile of dog shit
nonsense. wikipedia, has for example, summaries for each and every episode of popular anime *as a separate article*, yet uses "notable" argument against content of actual cultural significance. That is hypocrisy and a double standard.
I wish I could mod you up. They kept using the slang term "meatpuppets" which is apparently somebody who enters the discussion after being tipped off on it taking place. They might as well say outsider.
>>>What is unclear about the word "published"?
What will Wikipedia "cite" when books/magazines stop being published, and only exist in the ephemeral world of the web? I guess all articles will have to be deleted from wikipedia..... or better yet, make a sane world that doesn't require sources to be published on dead trees/weeds/hemp.
Also looking over the discussion it appears KEEP was the dominant vote tally, but somehow the page still got deleted. This is a bit like how Florida tallied votes in 2000.... "Hmmm. 20 keeps; 15 deletes - it's clear who is the winner! Delete."
FREE magazine : http://clarkesworldmagazine.com/prior/
Actually, outsiders are hated and despised. If any of the wiki admins finds out that YOU have been encouraging people to contribute, expect a lifetime ban.
ASCII stupid question, get a stupid ANSI
If Wikipedia had to be consistent, then nothing would ever get done. There are millions of articles, so you'd need to make a million edits all at once if every editorial policy (e.g. establishing notability) had to be applied to all articles consistently. So, when someone with an interest in gaming reviews makes a call on whether Old Man Murray has sufficient notability, there is no expectation that he should therefore have to go looking for animé articles to delete.
You'd have more of a point if "Wikipedia" was a person. It's not. The clique that handles anime articles has different standards than the clique that handles this, that, and the other. You can impose consistency but at the cost of causing people to complain about this or that article being left in or deleted.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
So you run out of 'good-faith contributors' well before you run out of asshats.
This is so true. It seems like every time there is a "Wiki screws the pooch" article there are a dozen comments containing stories of occasional contributors who after witnessing or being involved in some kind of editing drama that always end with "and that's why I stopped contributing to Wiki". It stands to reason that if this sort of antagonism is allowed to fester then the only people who will be left will be those content to engage in it.
I support the Slashcott and will not be reading or commenting from 2/10/14 to 2/17/14. Beta is steaming pile of dog shit
Somewhere, a professional historian is weeping.
May the Maths Be with you!
But on the other hand, apparently dedicating a whole page to some Manga character or obscure comic book sidekick is, of course, relevant and worth the space, right?
Random example include
- Guts from Berserk, who obviously deserves a page of his own. (Along with a couple of other characters that get their own pages.)
- Brainy Smurf
- Penelope Pitstop, Muttley, and generally the whole cast of Wacky Races. Because, you know, it's not enough to know that there was a plot-less and story-less slapstick cartoon series that took the piss out of car racing, you need a whole page about each unidimensional character embodying a stereotype .
- Dino from the Flintstones, along with every single other character, because the fucking dog of a cartoon show not centered around said dog is notable enough to have its own page on Wikipedia
- Pants Ant. Really? Who the fuck is Pants Ant? Oh, right, it appeared in exactly 4 comic books nobody ever heard about, between 1998 and 2001, and didn't influence anything. Right, silly me, that must pass the notability standards.
- Minsc from Baldur's Gate. A character only appearing in a secondary role in a computer game, and memorable only by being batshit crazy and talking to his "miniature giant space hamster" and asking him for advice. And he's not even the only one. There are pages upon pages about every single fucking character ever used in a D&D Forgotten Realms setting. (And Greyhawk, and Ravenloft, and so on...)
- Bayonetta, the character of one action game, obviously deserving her own page separate from that of the game itself. And for that matter Tifa from FF7, and Aeris of "why the fuck can't I use a Phoenix Down NOW?" fame, i.e., a character which didn't even make it past the first CD in FF7, etc. And such fighting game characters as Sophitia from Soul Calibur, or Kitana and Mileena from Mortal Kombat, who, you know, didn't actually have more of a role than generic combatant and drool fodder for geeks even in the movie. And generally every single female character that some editor whacked off to. Because, you know, a character that even the game makers couldn't be arsed to give more than the mandatory half-arsed description or a personality, is something that I need a whole page in an encyclopaedia for.
Etc. etc. etc.
I'm sorry, but if _those_ make the cut as notable enough to have their own page, then so does OMM. Note that I'm not even saying to delete those too. But the circle-jerk gang at Wiki needs to choose one or the other, really.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
I have to be honest; at first when I read this reply, I was pretty convinced you were just another Wikipedia deletion whiner, bitching about how your all-time favoritest web site EVAR was deleted by some obviously incompetent and unfit-for-duty Wikipedia editor. I was just about ready to dismiss this entire thing as "bitch, bitch, bitch, nerd rage is hilarious".
Then I actually read over the AfD for Old Man Murray, and it turns out you're absolutely right. This Schumin character IS a little bitch, isn't he*? I'm seeing citation after citation in that discussion, each following Wikipedia's standards for notability (in terms of video games and video game sites), and he's confidently and smugly ignoring each one just to push his agenda. Wow. There's reasons I stopped trying to edit Wikipedia a while back.
*: Yes, you may cite this post as need be in future discussions, Wikipedia or not, as to the degree to which Ben Schumin is a little bitch.
So, two uncontradicted facts: (a) Schumin has a personal history with the people behind the site whose page he deleted and (b) from his user page and web site, he doesn't appear to have any gaming knowledge whatsoever. Yet the rest of the Wikipedia clique ignore these facts when rushing in to defend his action. I first contributed to Wikipedia back in 2004, and I note my last contribution was over 9 months ago as I got increasingly exhausted with having to defending and revert the most inoccuous edits to topics I'm knowledgable on, from self-appointed admins who knew absolutely nothing about the topic at hand but simply had their own bugbears (in one case, an admitted interest in pederasty). Even Wales says 50% of all the edits are done by just 0.7% of the users; anyone claiming that such few people know so much stuff is deluded. The fact is, after a decade, it takes a particular type of personality to fit in with the Wikipedia mindset and not be actively repulsed by it.
P.
In fact, Wikipedia is not an encyclopedia at all. Wikipedia is in fact a game, specifically its an MMORPG--[NSFW].
This isn't just the opinion of the internet diplomacy bridage of encyclopedia dramatica. It's also shared by the former editor of Encyclopedia Britannica. He also gave this opinion more explicitly in a documentary about the influence of the web, which I can't find at the moment.
So Wikipedia is essentially a game. For the players, the stakes are not exactly high. Ultimately nobody cares how much "WP:EXP" they ammass, or how high they rise on the "WP:SCALE".
But for the rest of the world, the stakes are currently enormous. The reality is that Wikipedia is becoming the world's foremost gateway to knowladge. The end result of these players, their petty squabbles, cliques, and infighting, are the pages which the majority of the world is being directed to when it seeks information and learning. Needless to say, this is a disaster.
The dreadful fallout from so much politics and melodrama leaves pages that are essentially babbling and incoherant. I've ranted about this before, so I'm not going to repeat myself here, except to say that in my opinion, the Wikipedia pages on mathematics are actively damaging the future of mathematics, probably turning many budding mathematicians off the subject before they discover anything about it. Wikipedia shows mathematics in its worst possible light, because no mathematician is allowed near those pages. As an expert, I know this is true of mathematics, but I suspect it's the same for many other subjects.
Our discussion here are of no avail. Ultimately the only solution to the Wikipedia Question will be to remove it from the control of Jimbo et al and place it in the hands of an international, cross institutional, academic body. People who could actually run a depository of knowladge, instead of playing games with it.
May the Maths Be with you!
One of the nice things about sports people is that they tend to get published about, in almanacs and newspapers and the like. You can very easily find some high-quality factual information about their careers (as boring as the career itself may be). Assessing scientists as individual people is a lot harder; you can find lots of papers by scientists but will generally there will be less information about them.
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
A meatpuppet isn't slang, it's jargon.
The definition is anyone who is recruited by a person party to a dispute for the sole or primary purpose of attracting support. This would include stirring the pot at slashdot or any other popular website with a provocative link.
Frowned upon because it turns a discussion into a dumb numbers game. It's basically the wikipedia version of a proxy fight.
The reference to puppet, as in sockpuppet, is because someone who is buzzed into a discussion is deemed to be acting on behalf of the person who summoned him.
Disclaimer: I'm Entropy Stew in the wikipedia deletion discussion
Sources found included PC Gamer, Gabe Newell, RPS, Kotaku, Wired, MaximumPC, Edge Magazine, Quake 3, Postal 2, Serious Sam, the UGO network WHICH OMM WAS A MEMBER OF and a host of others. All were ignored. RPS reacted immediately to the news because it's insane, and their article being directly about OMM should assuage even unreasonable demands. Wikipedia absolutely loathes outsiders, though, so who knows if it will be restored?
I actually like all those - and do use wikipedia to find out info about such stuff.
But I also want the "old man murray" type of articles because in the future Google might not find anything:
That's why you get links to a few semi-reliable gaming sites that don't inhibit short-term memory. For example, gaming.wikia.com allows you to put in anything about games without too much worry about notability. Another site, bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net, allows you to be as detailed about Pokémon as you want.
In fact, "Wikipedia syndrome" is a bad thing. Some sites packed up thinking that they would be stored on Wikipedia, while Wikipedia was citing them as one of their critical resources. Once the site dropped, [citation needed].
a) The rest of the web often has a short memory
I wonder why... perhaps there's a metric ton of stuff being posted that floods whatever is being discussed, complete with a sub-par archive search. Not even a "random article" or "random date" to scour anything special in the archives.
b) I might get a whole bunch of spam sites instead.
That's already happening.
That the term exists is yet more proof that wikipedia is NOT open to all, that wikipedia admins have fostered an us versus them mentality, that wikipedians see wikipedia as a fortress of facts besieged by foreign devils, and that many if not most core wikipedia admins view wikipedia as their personal plaything. Wikipedia admins disgust me, they appear to be entirely composed of petty junior high school students who weren't smart enough to make the chess club or popular enough to get into the A/V club.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Great. So I say fuck you Wikipedia, and my chances of ever editing an article go down even further.
And wikipedia admins rejoice. They don't want any more opinions diluting their own. The more reasonable people they can chase away, the better, from their point of view. If wikipedia really were open to all, they would not be that important. They would not have as much control. No, wikipedia admins, for the most part, do not want to share their toy with you.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
They kept using the slang term "meatpuppets" which is apparently somebody who enters the discussion after being tipped off on it taking place.
How else would you go about entering a conversation that you did not start? How is that possibly a bad thing? Especially for a community based website!
"It doesn't take a rocket scientist" -I guess I should leave then
The person Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart is AFAICT: IS DEAD AS A DOORNAIL since 1791!
Tons of notable stuff has been dead as a doornail for quite some time.
I am officially gone from
Well this was informative. Before reading this article and the comments, I had no idea who Ben Schumin was, or that he was a fat whiny anti-war inclusionist exclusionist precisionist lolcow who deleted wikipedia pages (against the will of the majority and in the face of evidence of notability which he requested, and then ignored when it was brought to him) referencing websites made by a person who once made fun of him.
Now I know. And knowing is half the battle!
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Unfortunately, this is exactly the argument that I've seen in the past for deleting 'non-notable' articles. Someone marks the article for deletion. This deletion notice is then linked to from somewhere that the people who are interested in the topic at hand frequently read. People in that community log in, post citations, and vote for keep. All of those keep votes are disregarded and the citations are ignored, because they were all from people who created their accounts specifically to comment ('meatpuppets'). End result: Wikipedia becomes one page less useful. The Wikipedia procedure seems to be set up so that it's very hard once an article has been nominated for deletion to get it to remain. I gave up contributing to Wikipedia a couple of years ago - what's the point in investing your time in creating something when someone else may come along and delete it on a whim?
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
If real historians and assorted worked as these amateurs then we would be missing an awful lot of history. For instance Atlantis... only mentioned ONCE in history and it didn't cite sources, so BYE BYE Atlantis. A REAL historian simply notes the mention of Atlantis and that there is only one source with no references for it AND THAT IS IT.
That is where Wikipedia fails utterly. Mentioning that something is NOT sourced IS ENOUGH. A full record INCLUDES personal remarks and unverified claim and that is perfectly valid AS LONG as you note this. Yes, some pruning can be needed in extreme cases but the anal retentive "citation needed" is making a joke out the site. A normal encyclopedia would have no trouble saying the Hindenburg was a disaster. Wikipedia requires a citation. So? Well, they NEVER then check that the citation is ACCURATE.
So by Wikipedia and article claiming Nazi propoganda is correct would pass since there are PLENTY of sources to cite from. Just because you can cite from something does NOT make it fact.
Wikipedia is an intresting experiment but ultimately shows why volunteer work and crowdsourcing just don't work for anything important. The type of person to volunteer all to often tends to filter down eventually to the completly incompetent power hungry assholes.
Why do you think Gentoo is failing and Ubuntu is rising? Complete freedom is a bad way to get something done. And the Wikipedia editors are far to free.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Firstly, I won't be donating to Wikipedia again. This is not because I'm an OMM fanboy taking my bat home in a huff, although I am also that. But actually, it's because this story has made me look into Wikipedia more, and apparently this shit is rife. I guess I should have known that, but I'd always been scared to check because I still had some faith in one human endeavour and was happy to let things stay that way, until I felt some pressing need to know otherwise. Well, game over on that front. Back to total misanthropy for me.
Secondly, it's actually quite an interesting read because the Schumin guy who nominated for deletion, is evidently really, really, pathetic. And not in a kind of sad and disappointing, move along cowboy way, but actually to a degree that's almost gripping. This article highlights an almost iconic exemplar of the form of pathetic, to the degree that it's actually compelling.
To whit, and as best as I can tell from summaries, a man who is mocked - for being pathetic no less - by a popular gaming culture website waits a DECADE for revenge, whilst the world moves on around him, and the revengee behind the site goes on to pen dialogue for a video game that many people rightly consider one of the genuinely enduring classics of the new age.
This 'revenge', and I use the term loosely, is a heartfelt, but misguided attempt to remove all evidence of revengee's classic projects from Wikipedia, which is petty to an alarming degree, but also absorbingly impotent. Seriously, I would be amazed if anyone involved in the original site gave one flying fuck, because they're probably too busy banging hookers on their jetskies right now. On a lake of money.
And after literally waiting until he thought this site had decayed into irrelevancy and finallly making his move, he discovers that half the internet still cares, the whole thing goes Barbara Streisand, and we just get to see what a massive, unerring loser at the peak of his skills really looks like.
And, damn, I've enjoyed the ride... but that's sadly all it is. Because tomorrow, said loser will have lost his momentary connection to relevancy. And OMM will still have rocked my world.
Uhhh..WTF? Several games plug OMM directly in the game, such as the monitors in Postal2 or the developers hidden in Serious Sam which follow Sam when freed and call out "Old Man Murry!" Hell it is common knowledge that the reason you see a crate so early both in the original Half Life and Half Life 2 is because the developers tried to beat OMM's "Start To Crate" (which I still do to this day when playing FPS) and finally said "fuck it" and threw in a crate at the front to basically hang a lampshade on it.
OMM seriously affected games of the late 90s/early 00s because OMM was THE review site because if you could get OMM on your side there was serious buzz to be had. I know I bought Serious Sam as soon as I could could and would have never heard of the game otherwise if it weren't for OMM. So yeah, I gotta call it as I see it, another case of delentionism which the Wiki has waaaay too much of as of late.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
The article's been restored. Looks like the Deletion Review process did what it was supposed to do.
All the world's an analog stage, and digital circuits play only bit parts.
Normal users can't undelete articles, they can not even view them. A delete is something very different from an edit.