[game_preservation] Wikipedia thoughts?

[Jim Leonard]

Andrew Armstrong wrote:

> I wanted to know if anyone on the list had thoughts on Wikipedia - as a 

> resource, as a solution or problem, or whatever. I'm just interested, 

> I've not investigated it much myself, and only ever use the 

> encyclopaedia for general reading, but the quality of some subjects is 

> pretty poor (or, as we can see, not even there now).


Congrats, you've discovered the cancer of Wikipedia:  Not Notable. 
People are free to delete entire articles because they think they're not 
important/relevant enough, while hypocritically ignoring the core slogan 
"sum of all human knowledge".

I gave up on Wikipedia a long time ago when I wrote 90% of the CGA 
article only to have entire sections jettisoned with "no original 
research".  That's not why I gave up on it -- I gave up on it when I 
took the exact same information and put it on webpages I host, then put 
it back into Wikipedia with references, et voila, it was accepted. 
That's idiotic.


> Hopefully the situation will improve over time. I was also going to see 

> what perhaps Mobygames were doing to expand their database (if they were 

> going to) - there is a lot of credits, covers and screenshots, but not 

> much actual written content about the games in the database, which is a 

> shame really.


MobyGames is at the mercy of the people who contribute to it; some games 
have a ton of information you can cull; others don't.  MobyGames tries 
to keep the descriptions objective, but the reviews and trivia contain a 
lot of the hidden details.
-- 
Jim Leonard (trixter at oldskool.org)            http://www.oldskool.org/
Help our electronic games project:           http://www.mobygames.com/
Or check out some trippy MindCandy at     http://www.mindcandydvd.com/
A child borne of the home computer wars: http://trixter.wordpress.com/