Saturday, June 16, 2007

Delisting?

By chance I went over to the wikipedia entry on Worldforge to see what it said. Not so good things it turned out. Apart from devoting a full third of the entry to "Problems", it said nothing of the different clients, the feature set of servers, the media repository and so on. Instead there's outdated and totally incorrect information (branching out into other parts of entertainment?).
What's worse however is that there's a notice now that there's not enough "notability" and that the article will be taken down unless it's filled with more information. Now, I've previously haven't wanted to touch the Worldforge entry on Wikipedia because I understand their position on preventing bias and avoiding original research. As one of the developers of Worldforge I'm quite biased. And therefore I've felt that it would be better if some of the regular Wikipedia editors gathered the information needed and updated the entry.
But it obviously doesn't work that way. And faced with the prospect of disappearing from Wikipedia I had to update the entry with some correct information. I added an software info box and added a screenshot of Ember, but I'm not sure how much more I should add.
I don't want to astroturf, and I fully understand that Wikipedia wants to keep the database clean. If Worldforge isn't notable, well then it shouldn't be there, just as so much other information that's added to Wikipedia every second. But I with my full heart don't believe that, and I think it's more of a case of a neglected entry. There's so much to write about Worldforge, about the clients, the tools, the servers, the AI, the Atlas protocol, the Mercator terrain generation etc.

3 comments:

Max Randor said...

I have added to the Wikipedia article. I hope you like it.

nielsellegaard said...

Perhaps the wikipedia article could be restructured in the following way
1) Description of the server and clients. What has been done so far?
2) History (including problems)

Erik Hjortsberg said...

Yes, I think the article really needs more info about the actual technologies. The common Atlas protocol would be a great star.