In Video Games, What’s Worth A Wiki Entry?

The amount of video-games related content on Wikipedia is staggering; I can’t recall the last time I entered a title into its search and could not find a complete entry. As Wired writes, however, not everything passes moderation. Should it?

Mark Brown, writing for Wired UK, brings up the matter of MUDs – multi-user dungeons, the forerunners of massively multiplayer online games. Obscure but influential cornerstones of that series had their pages marked for takedown or deleted altogether in a conflict that escalated to accusations of ulterior motive and, one imagines, feelings of marginalization.

MUD advocates felt that with their information almost entirely coming from a questioned source – online logs, sort of the Internet’s oral history – it was perhaps best to open their own Wikia for the topic. And that spiderwebs into another dizzyingly comprehensive repository of video game information, the title specific sites like The Vault (for Fallout) or WowWiki (for World of Warcraft).

Brown reasons that Wikipedia can’t archive every detail about video gaming, nor should it be obligated to; but it plays a de facto, vitally important role to archiving the history of the medium.

My question would be, is what is published now on Wikipedia, however interesting and useful to our community, still too much? Or is the site too vast to be overrun by – or even appear to be overrun by – any community of enthusiasts?

Should Wikipedia Be Responsible for Gaming’s History? [Wired]


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