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Old 01-05-2009, 01:03 PM   #67
the_logos
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Join Date: Sep 2002
Location: Mill Valley, California
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Re: In defense of all MUDs. Our genre's noteworthiness is being questioned.

You know, I have to disagree here. TMS and TMC are not the IGNs of the Mud world. Mudconnector also has never had full-time staff dedicated to reviewing MUDs. I believe they've always been hobbyist volunteers doing the reviewing. That's not to say the reviews don't matter but I can see Wikipedia's point here. Nothing on TMS or TMC is authoritative in any way. The voting is a game, not a meaningful measure of much (note that the two most popular text MUDs don't even appear in the top 20 here). The reviews are largely solicited, and the rest is largely forum traffic, which I don't believe should count as a reference source.


But that really speaks to TMC's notability, not whether it should be used as a reference for other sites/games or not. There's nothing about TMC's content that's authoritative in any way except to affirm the existence or not of a particular MUD.

As an analogy: MUD I was notable, but discussions within MUD I, even if archived, shouldn't be used as a reference source.

Now come on, that's a bit of hyperbole don't you think? MUDs as a whole never even came close to the ubiquity that Wikipedia has achieved. I'd be willing to lay a lot of money that more people will use Wikipedia this month (close to 60 million people just on the English language version) than have collectively played all text MUDs ever. It's a scale thing as much as anything else. The internet is simply more important and far more widely used now than it was 10 years ago or 20 years ago. Remember that Wikipedia is, rightly, not concerned with relative notability but overall notability (ie as an extreme case: just because someone is really well-known in a hobby shared by only a dozen other people doesn't make them notable at all by Wikipedia's standards, as nothing that only a dozen people are interested in can possibly produce notability).


It's pretty rare, but it does happen. Total PC Gaming magazine recently did a (very) small bit on MUDs, though they literally mentioned only three of them, which is kind of weird given how many MUDs there are, but I suppose most of their readership just doesn't care.

I totally sympathize with your efforts regarding Threshold, and it's very clear that in this particular case the reason it was delisted and is staying delisted has a lot more to do with the biases of a couple of Wikipedia editors than anything else, but I think the Wikipedia guys do have a point once you strip out the bullsh*t antics going on over there.

--matt
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