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Saving mud history

January 13th, 2009 (Visited 2352 times) Tags: legendmud, muds, vw history

After the whole Threshold deal with Wikipedia and losing mud history, a new Wiki was created on Wikia in order to preserve mud history.

I’ve put up a detailed LegendMUD entry with a bunch of citations. Yeah, it’s a conflict of interest, and I am sure I am misremembering stuff or letting my bias show. But it’s also the only way some of this history will be preserved.(And wow, I had forgotten a lot of this stuff!)

Go there, and jump in, and help. And hey, if people do the hard work of finding sources and the like here, then some articles can maybe migrate back to Wikipedia.

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11 Responses to “Saving mud history”

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Raph’s Website » Wikipedia, muds, and where the sources are wrote on January 13th, 2009 at 11:56 am:

[...] see this post for more of an [...]

A MUD History Wiki « The Ancient Gaming Noob wrote on January 23rd, 2009 at 12:50 pm:

[...] Raph Koster has put up a big article on LegendMUD. [...]

Reader Comments

Yukon Sam said on January 13th, 2009 at 7:02 am:
I was on the Rock Band forums the other day, and the recent DLC choices (Deep Purple, James Gang, Jethro Tull and Roy Orbison) prompted one poster to lament the “old, old stuff that nobody cares about”.

It struck me that this is another example of the same attitude that purges MUD entries willy-nilly from Wikipedia, namely, if information is not of immediate interest, it’s assumed to be clutter and disposed of.

So we get data without context. How do you describe, for example, World of Warcraft without a passing mention of MUDs, Dungeons and Dragons, Tolkien, or mythology? But that’s just what the Wikipedia entry for WOW does. If you already know the geneology, you can track it back through the hyperlinks, but just from browsing the main article, you’d conclude that the high fantasy genre was invented by Blizzard.

A MUD wiki is a great resource, but it needs to be linked into by the broader MMO community. Otherwise, MUD history is an isolated node of esoteric trivia, rather than one of the foundation blocks of the modern gaming industry.
Adam Hyland said on January 13th, 2009 at 9:14 am:
Oh, in case any of the wikipedia articles are up to snuff, you can transwiki material from wikipedia to wikia if you are an administrator on the recipient wikia and the import function is enabled. A lot of the Warhammer 40,000 information was transwikied to the Warhammer 40 Wikia when it was deleted from Wikipedia. Also, if there are deleted articles on other mud topics (where the material is not a copyright violation or attack on a living person), you may ask me to email a copy of the deleted article to you (or post it to your userpage should you make one on wikipedia.
Michael Chui said on January 13th, 2009 at 9:23 am:
Yeah, it’s a conflict of interest, and I am sure I am misremembering stuff or letting my bias show.

I don’t think that stuff matters nearly as much on Wikia. I don’t expect there’ll be much I can add to the pot here, but I’ll keep an eye on it.
Ben Sizer said on January 13th, 2009 at 9:49 am:
As it happens, there was already a MUD wiki on Wikia – delete the ‘d’ from ‘mud’ in the URL posted above to see.
Raph said on January 13th, 2009 at 9:58 am:

It doesn’t seem to actually be a Wiki about muds, however. Looks full of spam and random articles from other topics.
Eolirin said on January 13th, 2009 at 11:33 am:
@Yukon Sam,

And the worst thing about that situation is that any attempt to fix that in the actual WoW article is likely to be reverted on the grounds that there isn’t much in the way of “scholarly” or notable sources that draw those comparisons, even though they’re obvious to anyone with experience in the genre. This makes such edits somewhat untenable if someone decides they don’t want that in the entry, as they can claim original research or the like.
Michael Chui said on January 13th, 2009 at 3:53 pm:
FYI, my DKP article is still saved under my Wikipedia user account. Unless someone beats me to it, I’ll probably get around to actually making real edits to the wikia tonight.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Saraid/DKP

I can’t find a place to post a general message to everyone, but I wanted to point out that we shouldn’t restrict ourselves to the history of MUDs, but also include the history of MUD design as well.

Also, I’d suggest someone import Raph’s post on Diku in. Diku should probably be a category.

*is at work and probably shouldn’t be surfing the blog anyways*
Fred Bauder said on January 13th, 2009 at 5:58 pm:
I’m sorry I did not spot WikiMU*. I searched for MUD and that didn’t come up. Here is a list of articles on WikiMU* . As you can see, by following up on the articles many seem to be tales from some unknown MUD or even tales of NPC’s from some MUD, such as this: . I envision liberal policies at MUD Wiki but not that loose. Tentative discussions on policy for MUD Wiki are being held on the talk page of MUD Wiki:About I’ll create a “Village Pump” for discussions and put it in the side bar, but may call it something else like Village Green. My position is to be as inclusive as possible without abandoning the subject, so history, coding, administration, terminology, and quality of playing experience would all be included but not detailed information about rooms, monsters, weapons, quests, etc from individual MUDs. These belong on the MUD’s website or even on the MUD’s wiki.

The link with the larger MMO community, I think, is served by wikis within Wikia Gaming which offer specialized coverage of MMORPGs such as Ultima Online, see: and

The best place to pitch in and show what can be done is on the wiki itself.

Fred
Michael Chui said on January 13th, 2009 at 7:21 pm:
Yeah, when I poked in this afternoon, it was just Raph’s comment, so it didn’t look like a discussion was forming quite yet. I’ll try to keep up.

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