[Milawe]

One of the big reasons I'm not discussing this on Wikipedia.

Also, what you quoted is in an essay. Apparently, those don't count for anything! (At least according to the standards being set for the AfD discussion on Threshold's entry.)

[Jazuela]

I just have to say - I'm a regular wikipedia user, I go there several times a day to check on things...and..
I've never heard of you.

Does that mean you should be discounted as an unreliable source?

Just asking

[Lasher]

The wikipedia discussion was just closed with the result of delete.

Coincidence that it was closed within seconds of this last comment?:

Assuming good faith, I suppose it must have been. Hope nobody needs a favor from me this week, online or offline. This continued assumption of good faith in the face of so much conflicting evidence has just about used up all my goodwill for the week.

If anyone knows the actual answer to the question in the last comment, please post. Thanks.

[Samson]

Well that was sure a lovely way to end things, wasn't it?

[scandum]

No, with the canvassing it was pretty much a given that this would happen. Wikipedia isn't the platform for these kinds of articles anyways.

Perhaps someone should set up a mud wiki - there's but it's littered with ads.

[Samson]

Yes, I agree. With the canvassing the admins did to rally support it was certainly a given.

[Milawe]

Hehe. This actually leads into something very interesting to examine. (Wikipedia's become my temporary hobby.)

Let's assume that the guy who started this and the AfD didn't play underaged, didn't have a conflict of interest, and was never deleted off Threshold, so we're going to assume complete good faith here. (Even if we choke on it!)

Let's assume his ultimate goal is to become an administrator of Wikipedia, which I've discovered, is a voting process of existing administrators. (A little side note, once you're given administrative powers, Wikipedia doesn't have any policies in place to remove them if you become an abusive administrator. The reasoning is pretty sound here because the removal process itself could be extremely abusive.) Let's assume that all he wants to do is become an administrator to make Wikipedia a better place for all. In order to do this, he has to have a ton of contributions. What's easier? Create useful, notable articles with a ton of research and excellent writing behind it, or... go out and delete or re-work what other people have done? Is it easier to work on improving an article and digging up citations for it, or is it easier to say, "Hey, someone else didn't do the work here, we better put it up for an AfD?" before you put in a request for adminship? The goal here is to have a lot of contributions, hopefully in a short amount of time.

How long has Wikipedia been running? I think it was created in 2004. So basically all the "easy" articles have long been established as well as created. A really good option for someone trying to get enough on his/her "resume" to make a successful request for adminship is to have tons of AfDs to display how you've been "cleaning up" Wikipedia.

Why are MUDs such weak targets? Let's face it. Most MUD players and administrators invest all their creative time and effort in their games. It would be extremely difficult to have the time to be an avid player of a mud and a Wiki-warrior. So, you're not going to know the terms, the culture, or the tricks to defend yourself. Very few muds have been written up in mainstream media, and even if your mud has, it's probably not been more than two or three times. Most of the people who have had their muds deleted off Wikipedia just say, "Oh well," just like we will. Fighting it takes too much time. It's only a matter of time before the next Wiki-warrior comes by to try to rock it in order to tuck another AfD under their belt.

[Milawe]

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.

[Delerak]

So let me get this straight. The Mud threshold puts their mud into wikipedia, and it got deleted. Not that it matters, but who cares? Even if you play the game, it's just wikipedia. They can do whatever they want to your articles, it's not that hard to understand. If they delete the Darksun entry I could care less. That's the nature of the wikipedia website, even if you don't agree with it. You're the ones who went to wikipedia to put your mud in there in the first place.

[Delerak]

What's worse, you guys came to TMS and posted a thread trying to rally all other MUDders against wikipedia, which is pretty low. I still use wikipedia and will continue to use it, it's a pool of knowledge. Now that the pointless entry of Threshold is no longer taking up some KB on one of it's servers, I'm happier to be honest. I don't think wikipedia should be abused the way small-time gamers like us mudders seemed to be abusing it.

[Threshold]

Yup. It is a walled garden where the hardcore lifers protect each other from "outsiders." As I said earlier, it is like the worst, most newbie-unfriendly mud you ever played. The editors and their admin buddies bully and abuse everyone else, and make sure they get their way regardless of actual policies and rules of the site.

This decision was a COMPLETE violation of WP:DP#Deletion_discussion. "If there is no rough consensus and the page is not a BLP describing a relatively unknown person, the page is kept and is again subject to normal editing, merging or redirecting as appropriate." The closing admin does not have the right to substitute his own personal opinion for the policies and rules of Wikipedia. What is the point of an AfD is a closing admin can just swoop in and decide whatever he personally feels?

[Samson]

What's even worse is now that the article is deleted, there's no record of the reversion wars by the admins that led to it. So they can now run around claiming it was always just a tiny little stub of an article and there's no proof unless someone screen cap'd the pages ( I didn't ).

The only record remaining is a mess of an AfD discussion which as far as I could see didn't even run it's entire course.

[Aelitan]

I think the AfD was also closed two (2) days before it should have been, as well.

In related news, Colin Brennan wrote an article about the situation, entitled

[Milawe]

There is no "against Wikipedia". It's not a an entity. The entity of Wikipedia did not create this issue. Its guidelines and policies being used as a corporal sword +15 by a few was the problem. I absolutely don't regret asking MUDders for help, though I definitely didn't ask anyone to go participate in the AfD discussion. We did ask for them to look at it and suggest to us what we could do. This resulted in Wikipedia administrators who were acting in good faith coming to actually telling us what to do, how to do it, and started me down the path of learning the ins and outs of Wikipedia.

If it's a pool of knowledge, then it doesn't hurt to have more knowledge. Whereas it does hurt to have less knowledge.

You're making me giggle with the KB comment. You DO realize how cheap memory is now, right? You can get a terabyte of storage for $99. That's 1,073,741,824 KBs, so it's $0.000000092 for 1 KB of space. That's the whole reason that one of Wikipedia's policy is this

"Wikipedia is not a paper encyclopedia; there is no practical limit to the number of topics it can cover, or the total amount of content, other than verifiability and the other points presented on this page. However, there is an important distinction between what technically can be done, and what reasonably should be done, which is covered in the Content section below.

This policy is not a free pass for inclusion: articles must still abide by the appropriate content policies, particularly those covered in the five pillars." (From WP:NOTPAPER)

Please also note that , the thing that was used to bludgeon Threshold's entry and likely many other mud's entries is a GUIDELINE rather than policy.

So, I find it amusing that a few people are declaring that Wikipedia is "not the place for MUDs" and that MUDders are abusing Wikipedia. A MUD entry is hardly different than a , an entry about some , or an entry about a fictional character such as Frodo Baggins (I gave up on trying to link it).

Lastly, if MUDs were not allowed, I don't see why ) would even exist. Lastly, if MUDs were not allowed, then wouldn't Wikipedia have a policy against it? They have a policy for everything else. WP:MUDSNOTALLOWED would have made this much easier on all of us.

(On a side note, Wiki-lingo is kind of fun. You can find all sorts of things to back up your arguments! WP:WTFPWN!)

[Milawe]

Oi. I didn't think about that. Sorry! I guess I keep assuming the things I've listed are objectively notable. Hopefully, Threshold's deletion was actually a result of personal agendas, so they'll leave these other things alone. If not, then I guess Wikipedia will continue to eat itself.

Well, if you do decide to try, I've met some very thoughtful and helpful editors/admins on Wikipedia through this. They could give you some good guidelines. Don't blame you for not wanting to try, though. A shame, though, since Ansalon Mud is a nice haven for fans of Dragonlance and a piece of Dragonlance history. Ansalon Mud, though, has references and mentions on Dragonlance pages apart from the game itself. Didn't that count for something?

[Zivilyn]

Heh, I hear you. I just noticed some were really small on outside sources, heck some had 20 references... from their own pages.


One might think it would count but honestly I doubt it would at the moment with the sharks circling in the water . I might consider writing one up, but I'd want to run it by an editor on there before ever attempting to post it. If all else fails I suppose it could end up as an extended 'about' page on the game's website.
As it is, I'm just glad that people in the community enjoy the story pages and use the building/mprog guides.

[MudMann]

*chuckle*

You get policies and rules rammed down your throat till your head hurts, then they break one of their own -fundamental rules- and what a stupid, immature summation :-)

Bad luck Threshold, but lets be honest, look at the AMAZING press you got from notable experts / webpages. All I take from this is that Wikipedia is a flawed resource.. yeah yeah, I cant find an entry for a mud.. but how many other unrelated entries are modified / editted by people who dont actually have a clue.

Overall. If this was an agenda by people determined to do damage to Threshold, they had the complete opposite effect. You lucky bastards... people pay £1000's for that kind of recognition for SEO purposes!!!!!

:-D

and to those sour, wretched people on this forum who made it SO clear they have a problem with Threshold, and missed the bigger picture here.. you really are a sad, sad pathetic bunch. I wont name names, its not required, but those people who take offense at this paragraph will know who they are.

Thing to take from this for people who give a damn

- We need an independant MUD resource
- We need plenty of coverage of MUD's, independant reviews
- Drum up support and ask Magazines or official press to do reviews. Loads of them have Retro sections, and clearly there are MUD players at magazines such as TOTAL PC GAMING

[Milawe]

Yeah, I'm definitely not going to cry over that. I'm not even going to cry over the fact that the article was deleted, especially if it'll keep a few other muds from going down the tubes the way we did. (And seriously, if another mud gets attacked, we all know much better how to fight it off now.) My hope, also, is with the outcry that came from this, the Wiki-warriors will back off muds, at least for a while. Threshold's entry is a pretty small price to pay to galvanize the counter movement, and honestly, it's nice to expose some of the more ignorant and corrupt editors/administrators. (Seriously, claiming that Richard Bartle and Raph Koster posted about Threshold because of canvassing is just the height of disrespect and stupidity. If Threshold has the kind of power of manipulate these learned men, maybe we're notable and shouldn't have been deleted! Can't have it both ways.)

Thanks for making me smile. I hadn't gotten around to thinking about it that way yet.

Threshold and I have been discussing a project of this sort from the moment the AfD came into effect. (It's very unlikely we're going to go down the independent review path, though. That opens a whole can of worms that I'm not sure would actually be good for the community.) [deleted a bunch of stuff when I realized it's irrelevant to this particular discussion]. It's probably a good topic for a different discussion.

My favorite quote that has come from all this:

I think Wikipedia is now an MMOG, populated by rival editing guilds.

[MudMann]

Trying not going to get too much into the discussion here, but if MUD's still want to be treated as viable, modern day products, they must open themselves up to independant review like every other product in the world.

If Gamespot / IGN choose to review a mud.. you going to say no? If TOTAL PC GAMING, or PC GAMER (an International magazine) pick up on this and offer to write a review / article.. you going to try to lay down terms :-)

However this is off the beaten track. Threshold lost the Wiki battle, but my god.. did they win the war! I just hope other MUD's dont start to suffer the same stupid fate.

[scandum]

It would have been smarter to ask at the MUD article's talk page for help with the Threshold article, but as it is there was little that could be done given the problems with notability and the verifiability of sources.

The only way to restore the article would be to find pseudo-reliable sources on Usenet and other message archives to piece together a somewhat coherent historical entry, but that's hours of work and might still not result in a viable article.