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Old 01-16-2009, 08:10 PM   #221
Lurker94
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Re: In defense of all MUDs. Our genre's noteworthiness is being questioned.

Don't forget the mud community also includes people who simply play muds and aren't coders, creators or admins.

Speaking as one such person, I can attest that I watch out for newcomers to whichever mud I happen to be currently playing and if they express discontent with that mud's style of play, and I know of another mud that would be a better fit, I send them there.

I've quietly done this over the years and I suspect I'm not the only one who does this. There is no one mud that is right for everyone and the more people who acknowledge this the better.

So whether you are a player, owner, admin or whatever. Do the right thing and help newcomers get placed in the right sort of mud for their tastes. It's really not too difficult to educate yourself to the different styles of muds out there and teach people how to find them.
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Old 08-10-2010, 09:19 AM   #222
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Re: In defense of all MUDs. Our genre's noteworthiness is being questioned.

In case anyone is interested, the Wikipedia people are at it again. This time they're targeting .
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Old 08-10-2010, 09:25 AM   #223
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Re: In defense of all MUDs. Our genre's noteworthiness is being questioned.

This says to me that someone needs to step up and make some sort of mud information site that isn't centred around forums and traffic-generation.
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Old 08-10-2010, 09:41 AM   #224
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Re: In defense of all MUDs. Our genre's noteworthiness is being questioned.

There's Mudpedia which has pretty good organization, making it usable as a primitive mud listing as well.

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Old 08-10-2010, 11:14 AM   #225
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Re: In defense of all MUDs. Our genre's noteworthiness is being questioned.

Thanks for the heads up.
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Old 08-10-2010, 04:09 PM   #226
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Re: In defense of all MUDs. Our genre's noteworthiness is being questioned.

As I understand it that won't help keep things on Wikipedia, because you have to reference a source which can't just be edited by a user as 'self-publishing'.

We need something with actual editorial oversight which covers the area a bit more critically.

To be honest I don't really see anything on the Arctic MUD Mudpedia page that tells me it's important enough to have a page of its own on Wikipedia, more like a mention on the Diku page under 'Notable examples' or something.
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Old 08-10-2010, 04:36 PM   #227
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Re: In defense of all MUDs. Our genre's noteworthiness is being questioned.

Frankly it is hard to define what is important on Wikipedia. I mean come on, the place is a haphazard rumor mill of very important things and things that have little or no importance so who is to say? Them? Exactly.
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Old 08-10-2010, 05:03 PM   #228
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Re: In defense of all MUDs. Our genre's noteworthiness is being questioned.

I see where you're going, but why waste time keeping 20 to 40 MUDs on Wikipedia that don't meet the notability requirements because they don't have reliable secondary sources if you can create articles based on primary sources on Mudpedia?
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Old 08-10-2010, 05:08 PM   #229
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Re: In defense of all MUDs. Our genre's noteworthiness is being questioned.

It's not all that hard to define what's important if you look at the rules they have in place. The danger is that people look at a lot of the smaller articles and assume they set some sort of precedent, but they don't. So eventually they and articles like them will get deleted. The vast majority of pages on Wikipedia have plenty of discussion over their content but no real question over whether they're notable or not, because most have decent sources and more than a mere handful who care about them.

I'm not saying Mudpedia is a bad thing, far from it. Just that it doesn't help with the Wikipedia issue. With regards to this thread's title, "our genre's worthiness" is not going to be increased outside the mud community just because we put together a wiki about it. That would be another example of us looking forever inward, really.
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Old 08-10-2010, 05:24 PM   #230
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Re: In defense of all MUDs. Our genre's noteworthiness is being questioned.

Oh come now, this is directly from Wikipedia's own disclaimer: Please be advised that nothing found here has necessarily been reviewed by people with the expertise required to provide you with complete, accurate or reliable information.

In other words, our entire site is suspect so use at your own demise.
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Old 08-10-2010, 06:21 PM   #231
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Re: In defense of all MUDs. Our genre's noteworthiness is being questioned.

I don't see how that changes anything. The fact that they give no guarantee doesn't mean the content is intrinsically worse, just like the fact that a manufacturer giving a guarantee doesn't mean the product is intrinsically better (merely that they'll offer to fix it). Comparisons of Wikipedia with peer-reviewed encyclopaedia show there is very little difference in quality.

The rules for what should be on Wikipedia are reasonably clear. The problem is that people use other pages as a point of comparison, and that's not good enough. (Just like you can't get off breaking the law by saying, "well I saw that guy do it and he wasn't arrested".) The solution is simply to provide an external source of information about muds that does have some sort of review process, and which includes all these references that imply notability.
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Old 08-10-2010, 11:23 PM   #232
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Re: In defense of all MUDs. Our genre's noteworthiness is being questioned.

It changes everything. It would be like a car manufacturer having a disclaimer: Nothing in this vehicle is guarateed to work. If it fails, we are sorry, but cannot be held liable. Afterall, this car is made by people that have no verifiable qualitifications or skills or knowledge of the vehicle they made.
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Old 08-11-2010, 05:19 AM   #233
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Re: In defense of all MUDs. Our genre's noteworthiness is being questioned.

It changes your perception of the car. It does not change the car.

Misleading analogy. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
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Old 08-11-2010, 04:23 PM   #234
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Re: In defense of all MUDs. Our genre's noteworthiness is being questioned.

Not really, I did say, and I quote: no verifiable qualitifications...

The point is the same, the car has none neither does Wiki and both suck equally in terms of quantifiable quality.

Still we grow off topic. I read back to the beginning of this thread and the truth is spelled out more clearly in earlier posts by Lasher, Proph1515, and Threshold. I suggest going back and reading these posts as the argument is becoming circular.
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Old 08-11-2010, 04:50 PM   #235
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Re: In defense of all MUDs. Our genre's noteworthiness is being questioned.

I read it all the first time around. I have sympathy for people who feel their hard work is being wiped off the face of the internet but the only practical solution is to establish a decent reference for all this stuff. Posting barely-cited stuff on Wikipedia is just going to get deleted sooner or later.
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Old 08-11-2010, 11:25 PM   #236
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Re: In defense of all MUDs. Our genre's noteworthiness is being questioned.

The problem with Wikipedia is that they don't seem to consider anything other than "mainstream" media (network news, major print sources, etc) as a reliable source. So unless you're lucky enough to have some talking head on a network news program the people at Wikipedia actually watch, you aren't notable.

Which means that pretty much everything that was spawned on the internet, covered by the internet, and is reviewed and critiqued by the internet, means nothing to them. Even if a print source does manage to cover it.

Which is ironic, since nobody serious respects anything Wikipedia is doing academically. Schools even flat out warn you not to use it as a source.

Arctic MUD had coverage on a major internet gaming site back in the day. Even according to their own policy, if you establish notability then, it doesn't die off on you 15 years down the road. The guys pushing for AfD on Arctic are probably from the same crowd who tried to have Threshold purged.

This whole BS about notability is a farce anyway, troll random links and you'll find stupid stuff like old 70s TV shows nobody had ever heard of back then with tiny little stub articles that nobody tried to delete. Probably because an admin created them. I guarantee you most of the people targeting MUDs don't know jack about them.

As far as reliable sources, TMC and TMS are as good as that's going to get. It doesn't matter if they're just traffic aggregators, they are the two recognized sources in the field.

Nope. You'll find the sole reason any of these kids do this stuff is to score points and climb the ladder at Wikipedia. How else would they have time enough to throw policy at you left and right from the obscure corners of their website?

Their entire notion of consensus not meaning a majority opinion is also about as ludicrous as it comes. There can't be a consensus on anything without a majority opinion to guide it. What they mean is a majority opinion from only their chosen cabal.
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Old 08-12-2010, 02:52 AM   #237
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Re: In defense of all MUDs. Our genre's noteworthiness is being questioned.

Samson,

I can tell you never cut your hair for Delilah. Good show mate!

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Old 08-12-2010, 04:51 AM   #238
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Re: In defense of all MUDs. Our genre's noteworthiness is being questioned.

But that's the whole point - Wikipedia don't want to be treated as a primary source, because they know they can't fulfill that role. Instead, they want you to go there, learn things on a general level, and find relevant sources attached to the article. That's why good citations and references need to be provided - not links to someone else's wiki, and not just a few Usenet posts.

People can bash Wikipedia all they like, but the fact is, if people didn't consider it important, this thread wouldn't even exist. It's one of the top 10 busiest sites on the web and the primary site that people go to to learn anything.

Why drag this fallacy out yet again? They (which could be you or me) fix things as and when they find them. By definition that means some will get fixed before others. If you had a rule that stated you couldn't possibly fix one page if there existed another page equally bad or worse, then you'd never get anything done. You can't use other bad pages as an excuse to keep your own bad page.

Then our field is pretty poor, to be honest. If we're so 'noteworthy' then we should have more than a couple of banner-clicking forum sites to show for it.
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Old 08-12-2010, 07:00 AM   #239
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Re: In defense of all MUDs. Our genre's noteworthiness is being questioned.

Muds predate the WWW, and magazines are more interested in screenshots of fancy graphics, so we don't have the same sort of sources as other games - and those we do have (usenet, mailing lists and forums) are not usually allowed. There are a few books that mention muds, but even those aren't always enough for Wikipedia (the Arctic MUD entry had three published sources, for example, yet it has just been deleted).

When you get people stripping out paragraphs of text from Wikipedia with comments like "Why are we still talking about MUDs in the 2000's?", it can certainly give a negative impression about the attitute towards our hobby.
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Old 08-12-2010, 08:18 AM   #240
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Re: In defense of all MUDs. Our genre's noteworthiness is being questioned.

I hate to say it, but the article didn't meet the notability criteria, the book sources were non notable one liners, and their Diku patch was probably a one line patch as well.
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