[chaosprime]

What with how I've probably been the most active Wikipedia editor in MUD-related topics by a couple of orders of magnitude for the past year or so, I feel like I should comment on this.

There is no conspiracy. Seriously. Wikipedia has issues and Threshold got hit by some particularly nasty ones, but it's not that bad. The ongoing progress of Wikipedia, and the Threshold controversy's contribution to it, is part of that. It is presently better than it has been at times in the past. I've seen entries like "MU* inherently non-notable" in old deletion discussions; nobody would make that argument today, because if they did it would be ignored. That's because the evolving consensus of Wikipedia has moved past "I personally think it's stupid" being accepted as relevant. There are wikisnobs who think MUDs are a footnote to a footnote, and I've , but these are individuals, not the system. They can be worked past.

Now, as many of the voices of reason have noted, it's all about the sources. By far the most importance sentence in the issue of whether a WP article will stay around is this: "If a topic has received significant coverage in reliable sources that are independent of the subject, it is presumed to satisfy the inclusion criteria for a stand-alone article." That is, . And yeah, there really are books and magazine articles and newspaper articles about MUDs out there.

The previously noted infighting-oriented nature of the MUD "community" doesn't help anyone when brought to Wikipedia. If your whole mindset is about treating WP as another MUD listing site to get an entry on, your article is probably going to get deleted. If it would never occur to you to write or improve an article about a MUD other than your own, you're not thinking like a Wikipedia editor, which isn't going to work out for you any better than, say, somebody coming to your MUD, getting a staff position and proceeding to try to implement everything they like about WoW and remove the rest.

I've created or recreated a number of articles about MUDs that I have nothing to do with (and in some cases actively loathe), like:










Then there's articles that aren't about a particular MUD at all, like:













I've also added sourcing to a lot of existing MUD articles, and done my best to save several from deletion (I tried with Arctic MUD and failed).

There are a lot of good reasons to do this; one is because the actual nominal mission of Wikipedia is awesome, and helping it is a Good Thing; another is that every such article that meets Wikipedia's standards makes it more obvious that our field of endeavor here matters.

Point being, I've been successful at building out MUD-related content on Wikipedia because the content I'm writing contributes to the encyclopedia more than it contributes to getting traffic to my MUD, and because it cites sources and otherwise tries to follow Wikipedia's rules.

Honestly, while I don't feel that the "has been mentioned repeatedly in mainstream media" benchmark for notability is all that great (to my taste, it's a bit too much privileging of the viewpoint of soulless organizations that exist to make people like Rupert goddamned Murdoch richer), it's there for a reason, one that's about the entire project, not just MUDs, and nobody has come up with a better alternative. Trying to get things that anyone can see don't mean anything, like listings and forum posts on sites like TMC and TMS, to count toward notability will not, and should not, happen because, as plagued with nonsense as WP already is, it would become exponentially worse if there were no longer any rationale to remove the nonsense. Long story short, it's not all about you.

So, y'know, how about instead of telling ourselves drama-filled stories about how we're persecuted and they're out to get us, we do the damn work? (And part of what I mean by that is somebody other than me friggin' joining the WP . What the hell.)