Erasing History: Wikipedia Wiping All Traces of MUD

Here is this genius's contrib list:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/Black_Kite

Notice his intelligent markups and making quips like, "Yeah, right," or, "even more irritated now," or, "duh," or, "ffs." How old is this guy? He's not exactly helping Wikipedia's already damaged credibility as an administrator as well. It seems his reasons behind deleting articles is because it was the only way he became an administrator in the first place. I hope Wikipedia bans the guy. In fact, I wouldn't mind if someone had a little fun with him either. Idiots like this are the reason why Wikipedia remains an unreliable source of information.

 

Oh, I also forgot to mention. Wikipedia contains an unbelievable amount of information that cannot be verified by trusted sources, therefore I call for the speedy deletion of Wikipedia, as per their WP:V guidelines. Fair's fair, after all.

 

I think I've got hard copies of my life as a mudder stored somewhere (probably in a box under the house at the place I lived 8 years ago!). You know print outs of code, GPL's, data structures, email threads, screen dumps, debug traces etc. Maybe I should go see if they're still there and send them to that f-wit Black_kite (and any other 'contributor' who deems muds unimportant).

I played (addictively), administered, developed and coded the things for about 10 years. Everything from 20 player warm and fuzzy moo's to more explicit (nudge-nudge wink-wink, a nod's as good a wink to a blind bat) adult oriented 1000 player muds.

The comparison between "Rogue"-like games and modern RPG has been made before, and it's worth understanding that MUDs, in practice at least, were essentially amongst the first mmorpgs. And true to the rogue-like spirit.

And whilst at the core most had very frequent and often predictable respawning (ticks) of items (objs) and monsters (mobs) the world itself was persistent, not an instance, it was an evolving (players made and contributed their own areas to the game - in fact new content was mostly driven by that rather than the admins), and in most cases very large world. Tools even existed for players to 'portal' between servers. Though a bit odd if poorly managed (like allowing a star wars based mud to link to a hello kitty one) when done right it was kinda cool. And world permanence was also entirely possible - the last mud I worked on, a project I never really got to finish, the world had natural resources (some semi-finite, some renewable), economy, geneology (mobs essentially had social evolution, reacting differently to people/places/races depending on their forebears experiences) and genetics (call it simple evolution) - all saved between crashes/reboots etc

The MUD's epitomised so much of what developers today struggle to mimic, not to mention they often managed to be engaging despite being "only" text based command line games.

Bull**** that their history should be purged from cultural awareness because they existed only as digital entities and didn't live long enough to pick up registered business names. And the wikipedia entry for MU*'s is lame, 63 entries!? Even the poorly maintained Mud Connector has a list of 1300+, and that doesn't account for the countless thousands of closed servers.

 

Unbelievable. The Wiki editors that are responsible for all this nonsense are now trying to ban Cambios (the creator of Threshold and who also dropped a logic bomb on them) listing the "bad" things he has done--things they have done their selves--ever since this has gained some media attention. These guys are doing a wonderful job at running Wikipedia further into the ground.

 

I've just spent the best part of an hour trawling the wiki talk on Threshold, and if this is what goes on behind the scenes at Wikipedia I am terribly disappointed.

That Mendaliv (who was under 18 towards the end of 1999, so to answer the "how old" question for him - no more than 27, black_kite - who knows) is a piece of work. "I've no conflict of interest" on the one hand followed by "don't out me" on the other. Yeah = "don't out me because then you'd reveal I was lying about not having a conflict of interest".

And hell, if Richard Bartle can't be accepted as an expert wtf

 

Don't forget one of them even says he's never played a MUD and has no interests in them and then has the audacity to say whether or not they're notable. That's a bit like reviewing a game you've never played.

 

Indeed.

If wikipedia can list numerous Source mods (and so they should) that are no more popular but simply less obscure (by merit only of the fact that the Source engine is commercially owned and better distributed unlike MUD code bases) then the various MUD code bases should be included!

 

I hate to sound like a conspiracy theorist but it could be possible that some of these Wikipedia moderators are under the employment of Worlds.com. Given Worlds.com's lawsuit against NCSoft and possible future developers for the patent on MMORPGs, they'd have it in their best interest to remove all trace of 'prior art'. MUDs certainly qualify as prior art. 

I wonder if it's a stretch to think it a possibility.  

 

In times like this I don't think it is a stretch at all.  Stranger **** has happened, now whether it is a big enough deal to draw attention. 

I played a few MUDs as they where heading out.  A MUD is basically a story you read instead of visually.  I can see why the current generation wouldn't know much about them since it is old school.  LOL

 

I love a good conspiracy theory Sol - and anything's possible (and not beyond imagining large corporations going to extreme lengths).

It would have to come down to an equivalent to book burning though to remove ALL prior art wouldn't it though? I mean I have factory pressed cd Linux distros over 10 years old that I'm sure contain Diku & derivative MUD packages. As long as something like that existed wouldn't that be enough for prior art proof? I'm no lawyer, I just hope something like that'd be enough. Of course it probably wouldn't. Flaming lawyers... grumble grumble

 

I wouldn't see conspiracy here.  Just big-headed wiki****s as usual.

 

I didn't even know what MUD is until this blog.  Interesting.  I have learned from the past that patience and continus repostings are winner for Wikipedia.  The gamein community needs to watch it, and those who are far more expert than I (like the author) need to update it.  I will take a closer look at the entry at a later date (its late and screen is starting to get fuzzy!)  However, erasing information because you don't like it sounds very familiar to me.  History is a very good subject. 

Because my lack of knowledge of the subject doesn't me I should not care.  Because it is not relevent NOW, does not mean that information won't be relevent LATER.

 

Some people are suggesting that the reason they're deleting MUD articles is because editing articles and removing them from Wikipedia is like a quick ladder for an aspiring editor to become an administrator, based on the number of purges they perform on Wikipedia. MUDs are an easy target because they lack proper citations (no books have been written about them) and the community isn't as big as it used to be so nobody really jumps to its defense. 

It's sad, really, that they'd choose to delete history for the sake of personal gain.  

 

It's still wrong.

 

Thanks for writing this article and bringing attention to the issue. I am the owner and creator of Threshold, and it has been a giant pain in the butt dealing with this situation for the last week and a half.

I finally had time to write up an article with the full details of the incident, from beginning to end (well, end at the time of the writing). You all might find it an interesting read:

http://www.brighthub.com/computing/windows-platform/articles/22166.aspx

Sol Invictus: Thank you SO MUCH for writing about this and keeping the issue alive. The feedback from the gaming community has been a HUGE HELP to us.

Thank you everyone!

 

It's no problem at all. I don't think that I nor the Hellforge community are ones to just sit and watch from the bylines as something like this happens. Bringing massive public attention to the issue is the only way to solve it, especially given how Wikipedia's inner circle tends to operate. 

 

I just read your article, and I wholly agree. It was a good read. 

 

It's just sick to how everything happened. These people don't even seem to realize that they are killing what little good reputation Wikipedia has, even continuing to nominate the article for deletion. Seems like their egos go a lot farther than the true purpose to Wikipedia.

Great article, you should definitely spread the word for more Diggs on it. People should really read about this.