I have no idea if the MUD Threshold RPG is any good. I do know that its founder, Michael Hartman, is one of the most dedicated and prolific posters of MUD-Dev – where, I note, him and I used to get into some knockdown, dragout fights. I note its PLAYERS do – but people are predisposed to consider things they like noteworthy. But is his MUD particularly noteworthy? Beats me. I have no idea where the line is. They apparently consider every Alpha Flight villain and bad metal band I listened to in the 80s to be relevant enough, but not CarnageMUD. Go figure.
So what to make of the Wikipedia kerfuffel that Raph, Scott and Richard have posted about? Bored to death, really. I mean, it’s not like people haven’t been arguing about this for years.
The summary of most studies I’ve seen says that Wikipedia covers more topics than conventional Encyclopedias such as the Britannica, and has longer, more in-depth articles, but the substance of those articles tends to be less accurate. None of which is a particular surprise, given WP’s unique compilation methods, namely based on free labor from largely anonymous sources. If you read any article on Wikipedia, assume its about 80% likely to be accurate. If something raises your eyebrows, google it.
The head-on collision in the Wikipedia-MUD history debate is relatively simple. Encyclopedia Britannica is, by its own nature, authoritative, as it has paid professionals researching and compiling the articles. Not so with WP – and because WP depends on anonymous authors for their articles, all of their credibility depends on their articles being credibly sourced. Thus, they have to be Nazis about sourcing. And the problem with MUD history is that it is remarkably poorly sourced. In most cases, about most MUDs, an article on Wikipedia would be the primary reference source – and that’s not how Wikipedia works.
This was driven home last year by the hot debate over the Wiki article on how DKP systems worked – a debate that bothered me much more, I might add. DKP systems can be incredibly complex, have a deep history, demand more explanation, and unlike some tiny textMUD no one has heard of, are personally pertinent to at least a couple million WoW players in the world today. Unfortunately, it was a social mechanism that wasn’t heavily researched or documented, at least not until recently, aside from a handful of guild sites and personal pages.
The problem is that Wikipedia is bad for documenting MUDs because MUD history is amorphous, on sites and sources that can change and disappear quickly, or is on sites like MUD Connector driven heavily by user contributions. Put another way, Wikipedia finds MUD history to be unworthy because its preservation methods are too much like Wikipedia’s. I love me some irony.
What if the Wikinistas’ arbitrarion committee were put to a vote; what if you had to campaign and run for office, as in a normal representative democracy; what if you could see what the deliberations were and vote on them. What if you could *vote on* whether you think Wikipedia’s entry on Hamas or Chechnya or Waterboarding or Zimbabwe were good research and fair coverage or not. Imagine if Wikipedia got dug like Digg! Funny, isn’t it, that Wikinistas are huge boosters of Web 2.0 and voting on Digg…but they never, ever, ever apply it to themselves.
Sorry, but having democratically elected truth is pretty much the opposite of objectivity. People will believe almost any damn thing you tell them, and then insist it happened to their Aunt.
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