Wikipedia's War on Gaming History and Threshold RPG

Online gaming history has always been fragile due to the transitory nature of internet sites and web based information. Wikipedia was supposed to be one of the checks on that - a powerful catalog of information supported by good software and active maintainers. But there is a dirty little secret at Wikipedia: they don't want to preserve historical information about online games, MUDs, Threshold RPG, et cetera. They want them gone, and they want them gone now.

This is a hot story right now in the MUD/MMO blogosphere and online gaming press. I am getting to it a bit late, which is inexcusable since the game at the forefront of the story, Threshold RPG, is created and run by my company: Frogdice. What follows is my attempt to summarize what happened to the best of my knowledge, understanding, and recollection. I will then try to share some analysis and ideas for the future.

 Before I begin, I need to explain something about the current status of Wikipedia culture and Wikipedians. There are huge numbers of editors there whose main reason for participating is the goal of becoming an administrator. To become an administrator, you need contributions. Contributions are edits in all forms: new content, corrections, and deletions. Most of the obvious topics already have articles, so it is hard to come up with something new to create. Furthermore, creating, researching, and sourcing new articles is a lot of work that also requires a certain amount of creativity and writing skill. Well, editors with visions of adminhood dancing in their heads are not too thrilled about that. They want to be admins now! They want the power to block and ban people! They want the power to lock pages! They want power they can lord over the millions of people who use Wikipedia! Sad, but true.

In addition to contributions, you also need to do administrator-like things (to the extent you can as a regular editor). Cleaning up Wikipedia in the name of "making it a better place" is a great example. Exposing "troublemakers" to higher ups so they can be banned or locked is another example.

Are you putting 2 and 2 together yet? The best way for an editor to become an admin is get lots of stuff deleted, and get people you irritate while doing it banned. By doing all of that you will be seen as a champion of Wikipedia and awarded with administrator powers. The next crop of wanna-be administrators will suck up to you in their hope of ascension, and the cycle continues.

What follows is a very detailed recounting of what happened to Threshold's article. Sadly, this story is neither unique nor rare.

1) In September of 2008 Threshold RPG's entry came under attack. An editor bucking for admin powers (we will call him WA for "Wannabe Admin") and an administrator friend of his (we will call him AB for "Admin Buddy") discovered the vulnerable Threshold article and started poking it for signs of life. Minor edits and criticisms of the article were met with no response from long term editors of the article. Seeing their chance for an easy deletion and suspecting little resistance, they gutted the article and removed more than half the relevant content.

Eventually, a few original editors (OEs) showed up. The OEs were unhappy. They accepted some of the reasons given for the removals, like the a need for more citations, and got to work finding them. As the OEs found citations and references, they would add them to the article along with the old content that depended on them. Strangely, when the OEs did this, they would get banned for "reverting" or "edit warring." Some were labeled "sockpuppets" (alternate accounts) and were banned for that instead. If any of the OEs got annoyed by this, or accused WA or AB of vandalizing the article, they would get banned by AA for "failure to assume good faith."

Banning in this manner is completely forbidden by Wikipedia policy. Furthermore, when an administrator works on an article as an editor (making edits, changes, etc.), he is supposed to refrain completely from using admin powers when dealing with other editors. They are supposed to seek a third party. Surprise surprise, that never happened.

2) Once WA and AA had the OEs safely out of the way, an "Article for Deletion" (AfD) was proposed. This is a minimum 5 day discussion on whether or not the article should be deleted. WA and AB rallied their buddies to show up and vote DELETE, and even went so far as to comb through old edits of the article to find editors whose comments sounded like they would likely vote to delete.

Next: Read on to page 2 to find out about the gaming community's reaction.