[Parhelion]

I think it would help, in the long term, by creating a source pool for citing materials AND it would send the first olive branch to the wiki mods that our community writers are more serious about playing by their rules. HOWEVER, I strongly disagree that TMC or TMS should be the sites to do this. Why? The short answer is public relations and background.

Most people who are familiar with our overall little MUDverse is likely going to be familiar with these sites - and that includes the Wikipedia people who have been deleting articles. Let's be honest: neither TMS nor TMC have been well-known as bastions of unbiased, non-solicitous information. The most used and most well-known features of these sites have been their forums, which are often kept alive by flaming arguments, and their MUD lists, which are unverified and self published and maintained by the MUDs themselves - lending to the problem of false advertisement, mis-categorization, and dead articles.

Of all of the live MUD-centric websites that I know of, I can only recommend mudlab.org as a starting point for potential growth, due to the fact that its forums have been more civil and adult in nature (attracting mainly only developers). That said, it is still a forum site, and I do not believe they publish articles.

Skotos may be a potential source as well -- some of their articles have a lot of value, but their content is more geared towards their company than to the community.


First of all, if you plan to make any headway, you have got to stop calling them Wikiscum. Approaching them with any form of hostility is not going to get you anywhere - remember, you are playing their game, with their ball, in their court.

Secondly, I stand by my original assertion that most MUDs have no legitimate reason to have their own Wikipage. In fact, I could pop over onto Wiki right now and snatch a good handful of individual game pages that, rather than being informative and noting how they are particularly of worth, are filled with propagandistic material meant to ADVERTISE and PERSUADE. In some cases, the text out-right lies, much in the same way that some MUD listings out-right lie, and do not mention controversial topics which may adversely affect how the game is perceived by the reader.

A direct live example of this is the RPI MUD's site award that was given to Accursed Lands for holding the top place in voting for the year. This achievement is prominently featured on the game's Wikipage; however, there is no mention of the controversy surrounding the award that occurred between the game and the RPI MUD community site after the leadership of that site accused the game of ballot-stuffing. While I certainly do not speak for the people involved, I have a hunch that the event contributed, at least in part, to RPI MUD shutting down a year later.

I would go as far as to say that information such this is actually far more relevant than the fact that they have a playable race called "braman."

Bottom line is that most games list such information as race and class profiles, basic mechanic information, when they were opened/closed, and their overall world theme or religions. This is information that is NOT APPROPRIATE for a Wiki article -- at least not by themselves, and CERTAINLY not as FEATURE MATERIAL. Unless your theme spawned a revolution, a shift in MUD culture, or its own book/TV/AAA-title, then it's just not that special. If you can strip this information out of an article and have nothing left but a stub, then you probably shouldn't have a page.


My suggestion for MUDs who want to be included on Wikipedia:

Review and clean up the important umbrella articles: these articles include the one on MUDs in general, and the ones on various MAJOR engine varieties. What I mean by that is that a codebase and it's derivitives should appear ALL ON ONE PAGE, since forks rarely have anything of mentionable worth. Arrange by FAMILY and HYPERLINK THE CRAP out of all of the existing articles so that readers can navigate between them appropriately. Derivatives can be assembled and listed in dynamic tables much the same way that available engines are listed on the Game Engines page (which separates Open Source, Free for Use, and Commercial engines) - this way they are reachable and can even be cited. Those of particular worth might actually get a paragraph - but this is something that I would say the MUD community should decide on, not the individual developers themselves. An example of a family page would be the LPC family, which lists engines by driver and then mudlib, or the Diku family.

Wikipedia allows for LIST OF pages. This is where our games come in. FAMILY pages may link to LIST OF games pages. Again, we can use dynamically-sorted tables to list games that are OPEN and APPROPRIATELY CATEGORIZED. Games should NOT have their own spotlight (unless they actually are special, in which case, they would be hyperlinked off to another page).