Empire of the Iguanadons

Many of you I'm sure have visited Wikipedia at some point or another. Either you're conducting research for something, or you're just looking for information and they came up as the first link. It's supposed to be a collaborative effort of thousands, perhaps millions, of users all over the internet who write articles about the things that interest them while providing references to other places to get more information on the subject. The problem is, in reality, the place is run by a select few people with a great deal more power than they should have and if you should cross one or more of these people, it's time to find another activity because your articles will get deleted and your user account banned.

Why do I care? Normally I wouldn't. I take everything posted on Wikipedia with a grain of salt. Even on such subjects as George Washington which should have mountains of really good solid historical facts to back it up. The problem of course is that at any given moment, an article could contain complete junk. One need only go fishing on Google to see this.

Specifically, I am referring to the article on Threshold RPG. For those who don't know, it's a text based online game playable by hundreds or thousands of people at a time. It has been around for at least 13 years now and has been recognized several times by fellow administrators and sites dedicated to MUDs, such as The Mud Connetcor, Top Mudsites, and Game Commandos. MUDs in general are the direct ancestors of today's graphical MMOs and many developers who spent their college years working on their MUDs have now gone on to lucrative careers at places like Electronic Arts, Blizzard, and Sony. A number of them have even acknowledged this history as the reason for getting interested in game development at all.

So what does all this have to do with Threshold? The article for Threshold on Wikipedia has been nominated for deletion. This isn't exactly an out of the ordinary thing for Wikipedia. They delete things all the time from the site for not being notable enough. In its current form, the Threshold article has very little useful information other than the basics. Without doing any digging into the issue, one might expect that the article needs to be removed. The situation isn't as cut and dry as all that. If you follow the AfD link to the discussion taking place on the AfD page you'll find a rather disturbing situation has developed there. A user by the name of Mendaliv nominated the article for deletion. Prior to this, several users were attempting to clean the article up and provide proper citations. If you go back over the article's history you can see exactly what's going on. Mendaliv, Black Kite, and Crossmr have systematically reversed properly cited references on the basis that TMS, TMC, and other MUD related sites are not reliable or authoritative sources for information about MUDs. When they could not tolerate people providing proper references, including one from Computer Games Magazine, the article was placed into protected mode by Black Kite. This effectively locked out anyone who was trying to fix it properly. The article was then gutted again and immediately nominated for deletion by Mendaliv.

What's disturbing about this isn't necessarily the pissing match between Mendaliv and Aristotle ( Threshold's admin ). It's the fact that the argument has now shaped itself into sources for information on MUDs themselves being worthless or not notable or somehow unreliable. The larger picture here is that the entire hobby is now in danger of being swept off the pages of Wikipedia forever. Dr. Richard Bartle, the man who developed the first MUD has also commented on the situation and on Threshold in particular. When this was brought to the attention of those in the delete argument, it was cited as an example of Wikipedia's notability and not that of MUDs or Threshold. I boggle. If one of the world's leading authorities on virtual worlds is not a reliable or notable source on the subject, then none of us are. Further still, the issue has now been picked up by Raph Koster who is yet another leading authority in the world of online virtual worlds. And yet Wikipedia deletion zealots consider it canvassing as well. Lets ask this then. If Michael Hartman (Threshold admin) is notable enough to attract the attention of two leading authorities in the field when the Threshold article is up for deletion, does that not make the MUD notable? After all, that's the primary thing the deletion zealots are arguing. That it's not notable enough. We'll ignore for now that the AfD policy itself bends over backward to say that a lack of notability in itself is NOT sufficient reason to delete something.

Further still, when people in support of keeping the article in place began forming logical and valid arguments in defense of it, they began getting banned as being sockpuppets or "meatpuppets" of other banned members. The logic here is quite astounding. If someone is banned, how is it they could be sockpuppeting? I'd surely love to know. In any case, information has been squelched by collapsing contributions from the alleged sockpuppets. This made it necessary for the argument to be brought to TMS. Naturally this gained the attention of people who care. People involved in the administration and development of MUDs. The forum topic is already 3 pages long. But what's interesting and ironic is that people claiming to be Wikipedia admins have appeared, feeling the need to defend their policies from "canvassing". Canvassing is essentially the act of posting somewhere to rally troops to action on a particular subject. Wikipedia claims to frown on this. Yet there's strong evidence (bottom of the page currently) to show that Wikipedia's own aspiring admins are rallying themselves in the same manner. Apparently it's OK for Wikipedia admins editors to canvass in support of their cause, but when victimized users do it, it's Bad Things(tm).

Wikipedia has even gone to length in a number of their byzantine policy documents to say that articles on obscure topics cause no harm in existing. They claim they have virtually limitless space. Trolling through their collection you'll find articles on everything from nuclear physics to 70s TV shows that aired a single episode before being canceled and completely forgotten. There's even a pretty good article on my favorite computer game: TES IV: Oblivion. In the grand scheme of things, why is that there? Because someone decided it was important enough to be cataloged. Britannica certainly wouldn't have wasted their time on it. The world at large could care less, much like the world at large could care less about a 70s TV show with one aired episode, or comic book superheroes with two issues to their names, or, yes, MUDs and Threshold in particular. Clearly someone does care, and influential people in today's gaming industry clearly care.

So what the hell is Mendaliv's beef? Information has come to light suggesting that Mendaliv once played Threshold. Apparently he was banned from the game for playing it under age. Apparently there's an age requirement. All well and good. Until Mendaliv grew up, became a Wikipedia admin editor, and then noticed his former nemesis had an article there. Mendaliv's beef is one of the oldest motives known to man: Revenge. It may sound conspiratorial and deviously evil and worthy of a James Bond movie plot, but there it is. The evidence of his personal agenda is about as clear as a cloudless summer day. He does Wikipedia no service and only furthers the decline of what could have been a truly great service to everyone.

Wikipedia in general needs to get their shit together and stop with this kind of nonsense. Today, Threshold. Tomorrow, MUDs. After that, who knows? Gaming itself? It's not that far fetched.
.........................
"It is pointless to resist, my son." -- Darth Vader
"Resistance is futile." -- The Borg
"Mother's coming for me in the dragon ships. I don't like these itchy clothes, but I have to wear them or it frightens the fish." -- Thurindil

Well. I guess that's that then.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Threshold_(online_game)_(2nd_nomination)

Holy crap. The jackals are at it *AGAIN* with the damn deletion. It's becoming increasingly clear that Cameron Scott and Mendaliv both have some kind of ginormous grudge against this particular entry. Seriously, I don't get it. Why the zeal to purge?

On the plus side, nobody seems to be buying the attempt this time about, at least.

Yeah, they epic failed on the 2nd attempt. It was a near unanimous keep vote.

-Michael
Muckbeast - Game Design and Online Worlds
http://www.muckbeast.com

It's funny how the article still fails the notability guidelines of Wikipedia, Cameron Scott and his buddies must be pretty pissed off that the masses were impressed by a bunch of primary sources.

We have our own Wiki.

Do our MUDs really need their own articles on Wikipedia?

I would think it's more a matter of Wikipedia is much more widely read than whether or not you actually need your own article on Wikipedia if you've got your own mud's wiki. But the issue being discussed here isn't really so much about an individual mud's listing there as the notion that wikipedia is trying to purge all muds and mud related stuff from their articles.

You have your own wiki. We have/had our own website. I have my own blog. I fail to see how this has any bearing on administrative corruption at Wikipedia. It's not just about Threshold. This is about the larger picture of Wikipedia admins with axes to grind setting precedent that all sourcing for MUD information is unreliable and therefore all articles using it are candidates for deletion. The only problem is, it's a bunch of teen age pissants who have no clue about the subject matter who are deciding what is and isn't reliable.