View Single Post
Old 01-03-2009, 04:38 PM   #1
Threshold
Legend
 
Join Date: Apr 2002
Home MUD: Threshold RPG
Posts: 1,260
Threshold will become famous soon enough
In defense of all MUDs. Our genre's noteworthiness is being questioned.

I would not normally bring a personal issue here, but I think there is the possibility it may have a long term effect on many other muds.

Threshold RPG's wikipedia entry has recently undergone a lot of vandalism from a bad intentioned, disgruntled ex-player. Unfortunately, this person (who goes by the name Mendaliv on Wikipedia) is a hard core Wikipedia user, so he is well versed in their archaic, acronym heavy rules and has a lot of "friends" (cronies?) to help him with his campaign.

After getting an admin friend to ban pretty much every person that had been productively working on the entry, he recommended it for deletion. That's a pretty sleazy tactic, since now almost none of the people that would be likely to respond in favor of KEEPing it are even allowed to comment. If the only issue here was the deletion of Threshold's entry, I wouldn't be posting here. We have had customers of ours put various entries up related to our worlds and later found out they were deleted. That's how Wikipedia works and we don't concern ourselves with it.

What disturbs me more than our entry being deleted is the all out general attack being made on MUDs in general. If you read the discussion of the deletion request for Threshold, you will find countless statements that various MUD sites are not noteworthy, not good enough to be a source of information, and just not important enough. Yes, MUDs as a hobby are nowhere near as major as they were 10 years ago, but MUDs are a major part of internet and online gaming history. The discussion is here:



In the discussion, numerous Wikipedia members seem to completely discard MUDs as having any historical relevance, and old MUD related sites (TMC, TMS, etc.) are repeatedly deemed meaningless and of no journalistic or informative value. When I read this, I was shocked. Some of these sites were made when the WWW was brand new. Sure, they never did (and still don't) have the polish of giant sites like Massively, Gamespot, 1up, or IGN, but there was a time when these sites (and MUDs in general) were extremely vital, major hubs of information for online gaming and for the internet in general.

Regardless of how popular MUDs are now, there is no doubt they are an important part of internet and gaming history. It is absurd to simply discard them as irrelevant and not noteworthy.

I'm not sure if there is anything we can do about it, but this strikes me as part of a larger, more serious problem for our hobby. I think it is in all of our best interests to fight against the erosion of our historical significance.

Thanks for reading, and once again I am sorry for bringing such a Threshold-specific issue to these forums. I feel this is a threat to the historical significance of MUDs in general, and that affects all of us.

Last edited by Threshold : 01-03-2009 at 05:51 PM.
Threshold is offline   Reply With Quote