Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Video games/MUD/Archive 1

MUDs and Notability -- It Ain't Gonna Work
Alright, I've been pondering this for several days, and I gotta tell you, I've got next to nothing. I've been in the Mudding community for over eight years at this point, and I've been a Mud administrator/coder/builder for over four years. I'd like to think I know the community pretty well. Here's the dilemma: wikipedia guidelines require that articles on subjects maintain a certain level of notability. That is there are sources not directly related to the subject of the article. In the case of Muds this means we need to find some sort of third party source (be it a review, a listing, etc...) for each and every MUD listed on wikipedia that wasn't written by players or staff of the MUD in question. Well, that's bloody near impossible. I don't mean to be a downer, but there are currently over 1800 MUDs listed on MudConnector (largely considered to be the best and most well established MUD listing site in the community). I'd be willing to wager we could find acceptable third party sources for at best 1% or 2% of those. IE 18 to 36 Muds. That's pathetic. Granted a lot of the MUDs we'd not be able to find sources for are dead and gone, or only barely alive, but many of them are living, breathing communities. They are excellent and innovative MUDs. They really deserve to be listed here in Wikipedia. So near as I can see it we've got two choices: either reconcile ourselves with the fact that wikipedia is just gonna have a gaping hole in its coverage of MUDs, or try to find some way to convince the greater wikipedia community to make an exception to the notability guidelines for MUDs. That's all I've got. Alternately I could try and gather together a neutral body of MUD gamers to start systematically testing and reviewing MUDs and posting the reviews on a site I host. Then using said site as the third party source. But I'm gonna go out on a limb and bet that that wouldn't really fly. Maybe I'm just being dense, does anyone else have any better ideas? --Truealcon 04:05, 31 July 2007 (UTC)
 * I haven't. We strictly should only be reporting information that has already been reported by reliable sources. We don't make articles on MU*s based on the game quality, popularity or importance, nor are we a directory of games.
 * If only 1 or 2% of MUD*s have coverage in reliable newspapers, magazines, books, websites etc, then that's all we should be covering.
 * Your idea of starting a review site would require two things: 1) You show that the reviewers have a "reputation for fact-checking and accuracy" with some level of editorial oversight, and 2) You completely distance yourself from this wikiproject and any related articles for the sake of neutrality. MarašmusïneTalk 06:54, 31 July 2007 (UTC)
 * To be fair, the review site was me being sarcastic ;) Alright, fair enough.  Reconcile with a total lack of coverage for the Mudding community it is.--Truealcon 16:38, 31 July 2007 (UTC)
 * I'm useless at detecting sarcasm! MarasmusineTalk 16:46, 31 July 2007 (UTC)
 * I think the biggest problem is that text-based hack'n'slash/rping has been massively overshadowed by MMORPGs such as WoW and CoX, so most of the mainstream media is going to be focused on those, and prior to that, well, who cared about MU*ing, aside from the geeks on the internet who actually did it? The culture of online RP (including avenues such as IRC) should have some kind of mention in Wikipedia. As it stands, not even the WoW or CoX articles mention the RPing aspects of their respective communities.
 * And as it stands, you can't find out about that stuff without becoming part of the culture, which puts you too close as I understand WP's standards, so it's a Catch-22. No 'reliable secondary sources' are interested in MU*ing unless it's as an investigation into something a particular MU* is relevant to (Tapestries MUCK and FurryMUCK come to mind), or for their commercial aspects, or because they're the flagship game for a particular codebase. The purely free 'come and play if you are interested' sites that may be genuinely noteworthy just don't garner the particular type of attention that WP demands they get to satisfy its guidelines. -Degraine 02:12, 22 August 2007 (UTC)


 * There's some justice to the overall protest, but it's not really as pervasively impossible to find unquestionable RSes for MU*-related articles as all that. I've been adding book citations to MU* articles left and right, and many of the more significant articles have three or four non-trivial mentions, which addresses notability right there.  We'll lose stuff like poor SlothMUD, yeah, but that's probably okay.  MUDpedia can handle that load. &mdash;chaos5023 (talk) 19:30, 7 April 2010 (UTC)


 * Been thinking about this some more. The thing is, WP:N and WP:V aren't there to be mean to people, they're there to stop things from happening that really need not to happen, like Wikipedia being overrun with cranks using it to promote all kinds of nonsense.  The community doesn't want to make exceptions to them because that gives ammunition to the hordes of spammers, holocaust deniers, creationists, pseudoscientists, and so on.  But even if the difficulties of MUD coverage earned sufficient sympathy that the broad community consensus granted a lower standard of notability and verifiability to MUD-related topics, that'd just be shooting ourselves in the foot.  Because we have our own cranks.  Not to put too fine a point to it, but if we obtained that lower standard, Herbert Gilliland, aka famous sockpuppeteer Young Zaphod, would be all over it.  We're protected by those policies as much as more critical topics like the Middle East and BLPs.  So, yeah, I think we should suck it up and go digging for every damn source we can.  I also think MUDs can stand on their own two feet as far as sourcing goes, and that the articles I've brought from citation-free to clearly-notable demonstrate that. &mdash;chaos5023 (talk) 14:41, 9 April 2010 (UTC)

Taskforce
So I made a taskforce. I had never done that before, so altough it is a (nice) try, it might be wrong.


 * While we're at it, it might be worth making a list of external sites commonly cited by these articles (such as Mudconnector) and note if each one is reliable or not (per WP:SOURCE). Marasmusine 19:17, 19 May 2007 (UTC)


 * The 'Borderline' section are those that I don't think should be included in a mass nomination; either because they have some claim to notability, or I feel that there may be another reference out there that may tip the scales. Marasmusine 07:22, 20 May 2007 (UTC)

External sources
Some list like this could be used on the project page:
 * http://www.mudconnector.com/ - A mud directory; entries are user submitted (so not independent), rankings by user-vote (so not reliable); therefore should not be used to assert notability. Mud of the Month reviews are possibly staff-written?
 * http://www.topmudsites.com/ – A mud directory; entries on their own are not enough to assert notability, but site also has staff-written reviews . Reviews appear to be not only not staff-written, but are sometimes written by admins of the games themselves.

etc. Marasmusine 06:53, 20 May 2007 (UTC)

You're going to run into much the same problems with these MUD sites as with every other MUD site. All the listing's entries are MUD staff written or staff approved. The reviews are more often than not written by dedicated players or staff of the MUDs they are about. Mudconnector, Kyndig/MudMagic, TopMudSites and many more... they all work about this way. The whole MUD community is very self contained in this way, and it's gonna be hard as all hell to establish notability guidelines that don't just cut out 99% of MUDs. I'm trying to come up with some ways to do it, but if it has to be third party, then MUD listing sites aren't the way to go.

Where are you finding the staff written reviews for TopMudSites? The reviews I can find are all player written... --Truealcon 17:01, 29 July 2007 (UTC)
 * Ah, eh, I'm not sure now. In fact this review shows the site cannot be used as a reliable source. The reviewer, Patch, is the "Head Immortal" at the game he's reviewing. Guess we can strike that site off the list. MarašmusïneTalk 17:58, 29 July 2007 (UTC)


 * This is a concerning issue. If we can't establish the notability of a MUD via WP:N, does the MUD even belong here? Inability to satisfy WP:N generally means that the subject has few or no significant third-party mentions in reliable sources. If we exclude content from these two sites, it's unlikely the bulk of MUDs will have anything except primary-sourced content about how the game works. If this is the case, I suggest that the MUD simply doesn't belong on Wikipedia. At best, it should be transwiki'd to, say, the MU* Wikia. &mdash;/M endaliv /2¢/Δ's/ 22:14, 20 December 2008 (UTC)
 * At best, if a MUD has at least some WP:Reliable sources for verification, but not enough coverage for notability, then we can make a "List of MU*s" article (per "merging into broader article" @ WP:N) Marasmusine (talk) 23:30, 20 December 2008 (UTC)
 * Hm, that's a thought, though my experience working on list articles is shaky. By the by, the official reviews at Mud Connector may qualify as reliable- that is, those at this address. They seem to be written by staff writers. &mdash;/M endaliv /2¢/Δ's/ 23:46, 20 December 2008 (UTC)
 * There have been a couple of books on MUDs, but not recently, I don't think. Playing MUDs on the Internet (ISBN 0471116335) was one that I picked up at Half Price Books at one point.  THAT book doesn't appear to be indexed by Google Books, unfortunately. Jclemens (talk) 01:08, 21 December 2008 (UTC)

Notability
To whoever is listing GemStone IV as non-notable and actually nominated it for deletion, please be aware that this is the longest-running commercial MUD in the world, and that it's been written up in multiple books and newspapers. For details, see the bottom of the page at Simutronics. --Elonka 22:34, 23 May 2007 (UTC)
 * I assumed it must be a massive typo, or vandalism--it seemed so absurd. There's no MUD out there more notable than GS. I suppose someone needs to go out and dig up some sources.... Marieblasdell 22:49, 23 May 2007 (UTC)
 * First thing to do is to note these concerns on the AfD page. An AfD is not a deleted article yet. It may have been lack of sourcefinding from my side. There are more MUDs who claim the first commerical mud, but from my quick search, I didn't find any older ones (Avalon, the Legend Lives is indeed one year older younger *cough*). Martijn Hoekstra 22:55, 23 May 2007 (UTC)
 * Martijn, I wasn't expecting these to be taken to AfD so quickly! Can we de-list them, as the 'non-notable' shortlist needs double checking, and perhaps organized into smaller chunks. Marasmusine 08:28, 24 May 2007 (UTC)
 * Granted I'm biased as I've worked on it, but IMO DragonRealms also has considerable notability, per the references at the bottom of the Simutronics article. Such as being the subject of a writeup in Inc. magazine. --Elonka 16:00, 27 May 2007 (UTC)
 * Okay, agreed. Article certainly requires a cleanup though (large chunks of it are unreferenced, Criticisms for example) Marasmusine 16:04, 27 May 2007 (UTC)
 * I am in complete agreement that the article needs some serious cleanup. Anything that isn't referenced, or is only referenced to a message forum, should be pulled out. --Elonka 23:37, 27 May 2007 (UTC)

I'm very late in entering this discussion. I looked up several citations for DR a year and a half ago, but I messed up on trying to add them. Would anyone be interested in helping me get them put in place? Kallimina (talk) 04:04, 26 August 2010 (UTC)

I have to say, I'm often baffled by the factors that go into notability. OtherSpace was taken down for this, but now its creator and leader has achieved notability due to his large role in the creation of the Fallen Earth MMO. Does notability have a trickle-down effect? Carduus (talk) 18:57, 17 October 2011 (UTC)

Onwards
Now that the AfD fiasco is over, I'll tag the articles in the non-notable list with unreferenced/notability tags, then we can go through them one by one and make an attempt at cleaning them up. And take them to individual AfD's if necessary. Marasmusine 07:35, 30 May 2007 (UTC)
 * I am indeed sorry for providing such a hassle, and waste of time, for you and other wikipedians. I'll guess I'll just start improving the articles. Some sources could be found for many. Notability will still stay an issue, but I'm not really sure how to solve that. Martijn Hoekstra 10:03, 31 May 2007 (UTC)

Where do we go from here
Is this task force still active? I don't see any recent activity. Jclemens (talk) 16:20, 26 March 2008 (UTC)
 * Sort of. We need good sources for MUD related references. Perhaps old gaming magazines. If anyone has access to the back catalogue of Flagship magazine, that would be the jackpot. In the meantime, tidy up/remove unreferenced/unnotable material. Marasmusine (talk) 17:10, 26 March 2008 (UTC)

MfD
This page and its parent (WP:WP MMO), as well as MMO's subpages, are nommed for Miscellany for deletion. See WP:Miscellany for deletion/Wikipedia:WikiProject Massively multiplayer online games. If this project is truly active, you may want to take the road of becoming a TF of VG rather than MMO. --Izno (talk) 14:49, 7 June 2008 (UTC)
 * Thanks for the heads up. This was done successfully. Jclemens (talk) 15:05, 16 June 2008 (UTC)

Defunct?
Over on WT:VG we're discussing the organization of the project and its taskforces. This taskforce seems pretty inactive. Is it necessary? Should it be deleted? —   Levi van Tine  ( t  –  c )   08:04, 13 March 2009 (UTC)
 * Active? Not terribly.  Deleted?  No good reason to.  There are those of us who still read this page, even if development on MUD-related articles is declining in line with their overall popularity. Jclemens (talk) 08:12, 13 March 2009 (UTC)
 * I think it's a valid taskforce, and I've been working aggressively on bringing its resources up to spit-and-polish maintenance state. I'd like to keep it. &mdash;chaos5023 (talk) 19:37, 7 April 2010 (UTC)

MUME incubation up for eval
After working on the MUME article in the incubator enough that I'm satisfied that notability is demonstrated and its content issues are at least dramatically reduced, I've put it up for evaluation for return to mainspace. If anyone would like to evaluate it, has concerns or anything to add, or better yet can add more citations to it, that'd be lovely. &mdash;chaos5023 (talk) 02:02, 9 April 2010 (UTC)

Propose rename MU* task force to MUD task force
I propose renaming this task force to MUD task force, for reasons the MU* article outlines: counterintuitively, MUD is the more inclusive term. Anyone who's interested, please comment. (On a sidebar, I'd also suggest that if you care enough to comment, possibly you should add yourself to the task force member list so I'm not so lonesome on it. ;) &mdash;chaos5023 (talk) 03:08, 22 April 2010 (UTC)
 * Note: this has now been done. &mdash; Martin (MSGJ · talk) 14:13, 23 April 2010 (UTC)

Revving up the Task Force
I've been brushing off my Wikipedia skills and, hopefully, have an understanding of how things operate here again. The Task Force seems to have died down a little bit, but I think the biggest concern is finding and obtaining the old paper sources and references for some of the oldest MUDs. Should we pick a MUD to start working on? I've got searches going for Artic Mud references, but I'm finding very little in the paper sources. I remember reading some article in an old gaming magazine but can't for the life of me remember where. Anyone happen to read the same source and can point in the right direction? Any names at all will help me with the search. Kallimina (talk) 03:58, 26 August 2010 (UTC)
 * Definitely can't help you with Arctic. Did what I could.  As far as stuff to work on goes, if there are any improvements you could make to the MUME incubation I posted about above, that'd be lovely.  It's been languishing in the incubator, with notability pretty clearly established as far as I can tell, for quite some time now. &mdash;chaos5023 (talk) 04:22, 26 August 2010 (UTC)

Just running through some of the articles and hit Mythic Entertainment which became EA Mythic and then Bioware-Mythic. The problem is that Mythic Entertainment's history is not incorporated into Bioware-Mythic's article in addition to the fact that Mythic also ran commercial text-based games for years before they opened their first MMO. Is there any legitimacy to letting Mythic Entertainment stand as its own article and improving it, or is it better to merge it with Bioware-Mythic and add in Mythic's history to Bioware's (which is also pretty poorly written and cited)? Kallimina (talk) 02:57, 27 August 2010 (UTC)

source material
I'm mobile at the moment, but someone should check outhttp://mobile.pcmag.com/device2/article.php?mid=&CALL_URL=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.pcmag.com%2Farticle2%2F0%2C2817%2C2370006%2C00.asp to see if we can use it to source or expand upon some stuff. 62.140.137.105 (talk) 17:54, 2 October 2010 (UTC)
 * It's pretty useless. Slides about MUDs and MUSHes that rehash very general information; slide about MUDs has a passing mention of CthulhuMUD, but nothing that would contribute to notability.  Slide on The Realm Online conceivably useful for that article, since it's almost unsourced, but despite the state of the article I don't think that topic is short on available sources out there.  Thanks for the pointer, though, definitely was worth a look. &mdash;chaos5023 (talk) 18:26, 2 October 2010 (UTC)


 * Oh, MUSH slide has a passing mention of CaveMUSH, equally unhelpful for purposes of creating an article. &mdash;chaos5023 (talk) 18:35, 2 October 2010 (UTC)

Proposal to move Alternative character back to Alternate character
Alternate character was recently moved to Alternative character; proposal to move it back is at Talk:Alternative character. —chaos5023 (talk) 14:58, 13 December 2010 (UTC)

Proposal: Merge MCCP, MXP articles into 'MUD Related Protocols' or a similar title.
As the MCCP and MXP articles are stub-class on their own, and there is little we can do to go into detail other than explicitly listing the syntax and specific telnet negotiations, I'd like to propose the merger of these two protocol pages. In addition to this, if we can find appropriate resources for MSP (which would likely be stub-class on its own, as well, but is referenced in the Comparison_of_MUD_clients article), we would be able to add details about it without generating another stub-class article. The MXP and MCCP pages are both lacking in specifics, but should we even go into that? The only references I could find for MCCP were on the Tintin++ website (which details MCCP2, specifically), basics on one of Nick Gammon's MUSHclient documentation pages, a link to the now defunct randomly.org on Tintin++'s, MUSHClient's, and a copy of the randomly.org documentation http://www.zuggsoft.com/zmud/mcp.htm here. I would post links to the tintin++ and MUSHclient websites, but I currently cannot retrieve them. Kairuni (talk) 00:12, 10 September 2011 (UTC)
 * In addition to the above, perhaps we could add a reference to the ATCP (Though only IRE MUDs use it) and GMCP (Non-IRE MUDs (Aardwolf, possibly more that I don't know about) as well the IRE MUDs use this, though the specification is detailed on ironrealms.com. Once again, currently cannot retrieve links for the above, my apologies.) Kairuni (talk) 00:31, 10 September 2011 (UTC)
 * Actually there are at least 26 muds that support ATCP, but I only know of 8 that support GMCP. There's more details about mud protocols on http://www.mudstandards.org and http://www.mudpedia.org/wiki/Category:Protocols KaVir (talk) 13:50, 10 September 2011 (UTC)
 * All the more reason to include ATCP and GMCP, then. Kairuni (talk) 14:31, 10 September 2011 (UTC)
 * Then you should also include ZMP and MSDP. KaVir (talk) 14:58, 10 September 2011 (UTC)
 * Which leads us back to the original proposal: Would it be appropriate to merge all of these would-be stub-class, and already existing stubs, into one larger 'protocols' page? I cannot currently access mudstandards.org, though the Tintin++ sourceforge site referenced by mudpedia has detailed specification references for MSSP at tintin.sourceforge.net/mssp MSDP at /msdp, and mccp at /mccp (though only MCCP 2). I've never heard of ZMP before, and Tintin doesn't seem to have anything on it. GMCP is here: http://www.ironrealms.com/gmcp-doc and ATCP is http://www.ironrealms.com/rapture/manual/files/FeatATCP-txt.html here. Kairuni (talk) 15:44, 10 September 2011 (UTC)
 * I don't see a problem with creating a mud protocol page, although it might be easier to detail the protocols on the MUD_client page first and then split it off if you can collect enough references - otherwise the page will probably just get deleted. ZMP was the first of the OOB mud protocols, although it was ahead of its time and isn't widely supported, but a google search for "zmp mud" brings up a number of links. KaVir (talk) 16:00, 10 September 2011 (UTC)
 * I'll see what I can write up, and locate tonight. Kairuni (talk) 20:27, 10 September 2011 (UTC)

Proposal to consider Erwin S. Andreasen a "published expert" on MUDs as considered in WP:SPS
Erwin S. Andreasen, of http://www.andreasen.org/, is a long-time participant in and prolific contributor to the MUD community. I believe him to be broadly considered an expert in the area. It's also recently come to my attention that he was published in The Mud Companion #1. This raises the possibility of considering him a "published expert" on MUDs as considered in WP:SPS, which would mean that his self-publications could be considered reliable in the MUD topic area. While this isn't a broad publication history being cited here, it's also plain fact that one does not demonstrate expertise in MUDs by publication, one demonstrates it by contribution to the community's collective knowledge base, which Mr. Andreasen has clearly done extensively. So I think it perfectly reasonable to minimally satisfy the letter of Wikipedia's "publication" criterion rather than dwelling on it as if publication history had the same weight as for, say, a college professor.

Therefore I propose that we consider Erwin S. Andreasen a published expert in the topic area of MUDs and add notes to that effect to the main task force page.
 * Support as proposer. —chaos5023 (talk) 19:57, 28 January 2013 (UTC)

Aardwolf
I have created the article "Aardwolf (MUD)". Please expand it as you see fit. Axl ¤  [Talk]  17:46, 11 April 2013 (UTC)

Redirect this talk page as part of task force cleanup
I've proposed a comprehensive cleanup of WP:VG's inactive task forces (which would include redirecting all task force talk pages, including this one), if you'll take a look czar ♔  02:01, 6 May 2014 (UTC)