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Old 01-06-2009, 11:52 PM   #108
Milawe
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Join Date: Jan 2006
Location: USA
Home MUD: Threshold RPG
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Posts: 653
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Re: In defense of all MUDs. Our genre's noteworthiness is being questioned.

I think this played a huge part of justifying the final deletion, yes, but here's the problem with "punishing" someone for canvasing rather than judging on the merits of the issues involving the actual article. (Remember, an AfD is supposed to fail if there is no concensus, and there was plenty of canvassing for DELETE as well.) The reason that there was canvassing in the first place is that the people who were trying to deal with it on Wikipedia were getting banned left and right even without provocation. Anyone who was trying to actually better the article was getting banned for being a sockpuppet or a meat puppet, and all their changes were being reverted. Even while the AfD was going, attempts at improvement were being reverted. So, if you now have absolutely no voice on Wikipedia and no recourse on Wikipedia, what do you do? You can sit down and watch an entry that you have interest in die a slow death, or you go to people who might be able to give you suggestions on what to do and maybe have some hope of saving it. Once the entry was targeted, it was placed in a lose/lose situation immediately in the current culture of Wikipedia.

The administrators of Threshold did not create the Threshold Wikipedia entry. I don't actually know who created it, but once it was created, we were happy to help support it along with the players working on it. Heck, I went and tried to improve it a few times myself.

Again, the deletion of Threshold's Wikipedia entry will not affect the game one bit except that some of the admins will re-allocate their time back into the game rather than in this issue which was going to have to happen anyway. I do think that this issue served to heavily expose the flaws in Wikipedia's system, and with this AfD there's heavy precedence to remove comic book characters, fictional characters, fantasy worlds, and basically the fancruft that many, many, many people use Wikipedia for. (For example, one of my most recent uses of Wikipedia was to look up Dr. Doom after seeing the Fantastic Four. Whenever I want to look up serious things, I go to far more reliable sources.) I'm speaking only for myself here, but after this, I'll never contribute another word or correction to Wikipedia. It's far too easy for one person to come by and rock whatever work you've done. Sure, you can say, "Well, Milawe never contributed much, so Wikipedia won't really care." But I'm hardly an unreasonable person, and it's extremely doubtful that I'm the only one who feels this way. (Well, actually, I know I'm not since there's a ton of information out there about the exact phenomena that hit Threshold's entry and people protesting it.) What's more, the people who began this will continue to do more of the same, so it's doubtful that I'll be the last person to feel this way.
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