[Milawe]

I don't disagree with your first statement here, Prof. The difficulty comes in because some MUDs ARE run as a hobby in that the mud exists for the entertainment of the admin as much as the players. And in the end, almost everyone in the mudding community is playing a mud, working on promoting a niche section of the community, or making a mud. It's difficult for anyone person to go and establish a professional mud site (though TMS, TMC, Mudbyte, Mud Portal, RPMUD, etc. seem to be trying their best) that has something more beyond what administrators and players can contribute in their spare time.

It's been a long, tough battle, but if you read the initial AfD, the mentality used to delete the Threshold article needed to fail and fail badly because it could be applied to nearly every hobby or sub-set of a hobby out there. And seriously, do you really think those same admins wouldn't have found something exactly like Threshold to target next? People like them had already taken out Aardwolf, which has a much larger playerbase than Threshold AND have had mentions by the same experts. They'd already taken out LegendMud and a ton of online comic strips that face the same problems as muds.

You may think that Wikipedia is trying to become some sort of reliable, source-able site. That will never happen with its current structure. Wikipedia isn't unreliable because there's a ton of random stuff on there. It's unreliable because anyone in the world can go edit most of the articles out there regardless of whether or not they know anything about it. It's also unreliable because you do not need ANY credentials to speak authoritatively on any given subject. Until the core operation of the site is changed, it's going to be unreliable. Getting rid of muds or amigurumi or rubber stamping isn't going to fix any of that.

On the bright side, deletionists will have to operate more carefully now. I'd given up since the most current AfD, but I went back to look tonight. I feel that it was worth the fight because what better way to get some legitimacy than for individual games to be listed on Wikipedia, the current best source for all things obscure. Now, I understand that you might not believe it's worth the fight, but do you really think it's fair to claim that it's a waste of time and resources for the people who decided to get involved? Maybe people just saw something there that you didn't.

You have to keep in mind that MOST people who got involved didn't do it for Threshold. I initially got involved because of Threshold (and no, none of the administrators wrote the original article that got deleted or the new one though I've tried my best to help), but like I said before, Wikipedia does absolutely nothing for the mud. It doesn't bring in traffic. It doesn't affect our gameplay. It doesn't affect our customers. If it was purely for what benefited Threshold, I would have just given up after the first AfD simply because it's ultimately not worth my time from a business perspective.