D&D Modules on Wikipedia

[Big Mac]

The big problem with Wikipedia editing policy, is that like everything else it is voted on by the masses. From what I understand, the anti-D&D delitionists have quitely moved the goalposts by getting policies changed and then used the altered policies as arguments for deletion.

I don't dispute the fact that a lot of D&D articles are badly cited and a lot of them are even badly written. But to me the solution to bad articles is to fix the articles. The people who run around tagging random things for deletion add nothing to Wikipedia. It would be much better if they worked with the various D&D related projects and tagged articles to be edited, rewritten or for citations to be added.

As for notablility, I would say that articles on the official D&D websites (Athas.org, Beyond the Moons, Planewalker, etc) should definately qualify as a source to "prove notability" and that the well respected, but unofficial sources (Dragonlance Nexus, Canonfire, Candlekeep, etc) should also qualify.

A lot of bad editing on Wikipedia is down to ignorance. I wish that the deletionists would stop AFDing articles and instead focus on going to people's talk pages and pointing them in the direction of tutorials that show them how to write better articles.

For me, the thing that is making me give up on Wikipedia, is the quasi-religious belief by the delitionist-horde that dumping bad articles and undoing the work of bad editors is better than education and rewrites. As far as I'm concerned a bad article is almost always better than no article. A tag that says "this article doesn't meet Wikipedia's standards..." is enough of a warning for me to know that article can't be trusted yet. These people should be creating tags similar to stub tags that can be used to flag unreliable and incomplete information. And articles tagged as bad should not be automatically deleted.

Wikipedia editing should be fun. Wikipedia D&D article projects should be as fun as things like ENWorld's Creature Catalogue. People should be fixing bad articles because they love D&D. People should be joining these projects and getting taught how to cite things properly. Wikipedia editiors are unpaid volunteers and shouldn't be forced to edit articles at gunpoint. That sort of stuff takes all the fun out of it.

There are always going to be some articles on Wikipedia that do deserve to be deleted or merged, but the delitionists have gone beyond this and have put themselves on a soap box. There are people out there with great D&D knowledge, but a poor understanding of Wikipedia rules. These people, if Wikipedia could get them, would create great first drafts that need a major clean up. But the deletionist policy makes these people feel that if you don't dot you 'i's and cross your 't's, you are an idiot and should not be allowed on Wikipedia.

If Wikipedia is going to become better, it needs editors that are experts in their field. And if some of those experts are bad Wikipedia editors they need to be paired up with someone else who can follow them around and fix their articles. Deletionists take people away from this sort of thing and cause fire-fighting "save this article" wars.

In the long run, I believe that deletionists are very bad for Wikipedia. I think they could kill it.

There are some good D&D-based alternatives to Wikipedia:

D&D wiki: http://dnd.wikia.com/wiki/Main_Page

Dark Sun wiki: http://www.darksunwiki.com/darksun/index.php/Main_Page

Dragonlance wiki: http://www.wikia.com/wiki/DragonLance

Forgotten Realms wiki: http://www.wikia.com/wiki/Forgotten_Realms

Greyhawk wiki: http://www.canonfire.com/wiki/index.php?title=Main_Page

Spelljammer wiki: http://spelljammer.wikia.com/wiki/Main_Page

Sorry, but I didn't have much luck finding an active wiki for Planescape, Ravenloft, or Mystara.

I actually prefer Dragonlance Lexicon: http://www.dlnexus.com/lexicon/ to the Dragonlance Wiki, as it is hosted by Dragonlance Nexus and has more support from the fan community.

Thanks for mentioning Spelljammer Wiki. I'm the guy that created it. I used to do editing on Wikipedia, but got fed up with deletionists, so decided to do something that would not self-destruct.

Spelljammer Wiki is a bit sparse at the moment. I'm still getting the basic framework built and haven't worked on my policies yet. There was a big delay when I created it and I'm now fairly busy at work. But I am still working on it and will try my best to work with other wikis and official websites for D&D worlds.

(I wanted to get the Spelljammer Wiki onto Beyond the Moons, but that was not possible at the time I created it, for technical reasons. If Static - the owner of Beyond the Moons - ever wants to host the SJ wiki over there, I will move all my articles across and cease work on the Wikia version. I believe that ties with official - or leading - fan websites is the best way to add "respectability" to these wikis.)

It might interest you to know that someone over at Wikia Gaming (who are mostly Computer RPG gamers) suggested to me that all D&D wikias should be merged into one big D&D wiki (to help consolodate the pool of editors). I know this guy and he definatly wasn't being malicious. But he was concerned that these wikis (more specifically the Wikia ones) don't have many editors working on them. (I told him that different D&D Campaign Settings sometimes have conflicting canon and that a big wiki would be more likely to have edit wars. I certainly don't want to work on a D&D wiki where the 'location' of the 'Rock of Bral' gets changed 6 times a week. )

 

[wingsandsword]

I certainly know quite well the frustration that comes from deletionists and goalpost-moving on Wikipedia.

I spent several years and a hundred or so edits polishing and working on an article about a martial art I practice. It's a relatively small art (maybe 1000 or so practitioners that have earned ranks in it, and about a dozen schools) and relatively new (founded twenty five years ago).

When I started the article, the rule was for something like that to be "notable" it had to have non-trivial mentions in multiple non-self-published media sources, so that there could be independent sources for fact-checking. Each of the schools had a number of articles about them from local newspapers over the years, there are also a couple of books about it. Those were just fine for sources and I made what I thought was a pretty decent article using them, with a few citations from their official website here and there.

They started shuffling around the citation and sourcing rules, so that now any magazine article, book, or website produced by anybody with any affiliation with the martial art is now "vanity" and not reliable. Never mind that the books were published by large and well known publishing houses that produce lots of respected martial arts books. Never mind that the articles were in Black Belt Magazine, the most popular magazine about martial arts. Because they were made by somebody with an interest in the school (even though it was independently edited and published) it is treated as "vanity" and unreliable.

Somewhere along the way, the deletionists got to Martial Arts articles, and got this idea spread around that unless a system was 100+ years old or had over 100 separate schools it wasn't notable. They never got that put into a formal policy, but they shouted it often and loud in deletion debates on martial arts articles so much that they got other people to treat it as if it was policy. So, they moved the goalposts and an article goes from being obviously notable, to obviously non-notable.

So, between the two an article I put a lot of labor trying to get up to "Good Article" status gets ripped apart as having no "reliable" sources, then being "non notable" and put up for deletion as being far below the "100 years or 100 schools" pseudo-guideline.

 

[Kesh]

The big problem with Wikipedia editing policy, is that like everything else it is voted on by the masses. From what I understand, the anti-D&D delitionists have quitely moved the goalposts by getting policies changed and then used the altered policies as arguments for deletion.

Um, that door swings both ways. Some are pushing for guideline changes to narrow them, while others try to widen them. And (aside from one guy) there's really no "anti-D&D" group. Really, the whole policy on articles about fictional works is being debated right now, which applies to everything from Pokemon to Harry Potter to D&D.

I don't dispute the fact that a lot of D&D articles are badly cited and a lot of them are even badly written. But to me the solution to bad articles is to fix the articles. The people who run around tagging random things for deletion add nothing to Wikipedia. It would be much better if they worked with the various D&D related projects and tagged articles to be edited, rewritten or for citations to be added.

The trick is, you want an article to have good information. You can find out if the information is good by following its sources. If there aren't any sources, you have to go digging for them yourself, or take the article's word for it. Which do you think 90% of the readership is going to do?

In those situations, unsourced information should be removed when you can't find an independent source for it… but quite often, that leaves you with "X exists." as the entirety of the article.

As for notablility, I would say that articles on the official D&D websites (Athas.org, Beyond the Moons, Planewalker, etc) should definately qualify as a source to "prove notability" and that the well respected, but unofficial sources (Dragonlance Nexus, Canonfire, Candlekeep, etc) should also qualify.

Fansites are pretty much flatly discarded. Anybody can make a fansite or forum for a topic, but that doesn't show notability outside of the fandom.

A lot of bad editing on Wikipedia is down to ignorance. I wish that the deletionists would stop AFDing articles and instead focus on going to people's talk pages and pointing them in the direction of tutorials that show them how to write better articles.

For me, the thing that is making me give up on Wikipedia, is the quasi-religious belief by the delitionist-horde that dumping bad articles and undoing the work of bad editors is better than education and rewrites.

You seem to have some hard feelings against deletionists.

As far as I'm concerned a bad article is almost always better than no article. A tag that says "this article doesn't meet Wikipedia's standards..." is enough of a warning for me to know that article can't be trusted yet. These people should be creating tags similar to stub tags that can be used to flag unreliable and incomplete information. And articles tagged as bad should not be automatically deleted.

They typically aren't "automatically deleted." Usually they get deleted after spending months with those tags on them. And I flatly disagree: a bad article is worse than no article, because it is providing faulty or incomplete information to the reader.

Wikipedia editing should be fun. Wikipedia D&D article projects should be as fun as things like ENWorld's Creature Catalogue. People should be fixing bad articles because they love D&D. People should be joining these projects and getting taught how to cite things properly. Wikipedia editiors are unpaid volunteers and shouldn't be forced to edit articles at gunpoint. That sort of stuff takes all the fun out of it.

… really. You have some issues here. "Edit(ing) articles at gunpoint"? No one is forcing anything, and certainly not coming to your home with a gun. I know it's upsetting to have an article deleted, but seriously.

There are always going to be some articles on Wikipedia that do deserve to be deleted or merged, but the delitionists have gone beyond this and have put themselves on a soap box. There are people out there with great D&D knowledge, but a poor understanding of Wikipedia rules. These people, if Wikipedia could get them, would create great first drafts that need a major clean up. But the deletionist policy makes these people feel that if you don't dot you 'i's and cross your 't's, you are an idiot and should not be allowed on Wikipedia.

Who's soapboxing now?

If Wikipedia is going to become better, it needs editors that are experts in their field. And if some of those experts are bad Wikipedia editors they need to be paired up with someone else who can follow them around and fix their articles.

This is true of any subject.

Deletionists take people away from this sort of thing and cause fire-fighting "save this article" wars.

There doesn't need to be "save this article wars". If an article gets deleted, that just means a new article has to be written: one that's stronger and adheres to Wikipedia's policies. I've seen bad articles get deleted three or four times, then someone comes along and writes a good version that sticks. There's no deadline to writing an article.

In the long run, I believe that deletionists are very bad for Wikipedia. I think they could kill it.

Not in the least. Deletionists and inclusionists are both necessary to keep Wikipedia in balance. Without the deletionists, the project would be overrun with spam, high school garage bands, and libellous "biographies."

snippage, some good points about Spelljammer Wiki

It might interest you to know that someone over at Wikia Gaming (who are mostly Computer RPG gamers) suggested to me that all D&D wikias should be merged into one big D&D wiki (to help consolodate the pool of editors). I know this guy and he definatly wasn't being malicious. But he was concerned that these wikis (more specifically the Wikia ones) don't have many editors working on them. (I told him that different D&D Campaign Settings sometimes have conflicting canon and that a big wiki would be more likely to have edit wars. I certainly don't want to work on a D&D wiki where the 'location' of the 'Rock of Bral' gets changed 6 times a week. )

This is really what I've been pushing for, but no one seems willing to do it. I mean, there's a Star Trek wiki, a Star Wars wiki, a World of Warcraft wiki… even a furry wiki. If we could get folks together to concentrate on a single D&D focused wiki, it'd be much more productive than all the Wikipedia drama.

 

[Kesh]

I certainly know quite well the frustration that comes from deletionists and goalpost-moving on Wikipedia.

As I mentioned above, it's not so much "goalpost-moving" as a disagreement between editors on what "notable" actually means. Policies on Wikipedia are meant to change. Unfortunately, they don't always change for the better.

Somewhere along the way, the deletionists got to Martial Arts articles, and got this idea spread around that unless a system was 100+ years old or had over 100 separate schools it wasn't notable. They never got that put into a formal policy, but they shouted it often and loud in deletion debates on martial arts articles so much that they got other people to treat it as if it was policy. So, they moved the goalposts and an article goes from being obviously notable, to obviously non-notable.

I feel for you here. Unfortunately, I know why they got "shouted down": too many small schools using Wikipedia for self-promotion. I got involved in a rather nasty fight over a pair of martial arts articles. Apparently a small Krav Maga variant school split in two, and both of the current owners were edit-warring to try and keep their article while getting the other deleted. Unfortunately, one had enough sources to pass notability while the other did not: the latter's owner just couldn't accept that and kept editing the former's article to try and denigrate it while spamming his own article back in place. The former school's owner didn't help, because he kept putting self-promotional crap into his article, no matter how often it was deleted and explained to him. That situation made me take a break from Wikipedia for a couple months.

So, between the two an article I put a lot of labor trying to get up to "Good Article" status gets ripped apart as having no "reliable" sources, then being "non notable" and put up for deletion as being far below the "100 years or 100 schools" pseudo-guideline

It's an unfortunate fact of life on Wikipedia: there's a very real chance your article will get deleted and/or altered to be completely different from what you started with. It's frustrating, but that's the way Wikipedia works.

 

[hong]

Wikipedia is not a D&D wiki. It is a general-purpose wiki, and its articles have to be relevant to all sorts of readers, not just those interested in D&D. This also means that it's playing in the same field as high-profile general-purpose encyclopedias, and its reputation will be decided on the same terms as apply to those encyclopedias. Having lots of articles of interest mainly to the geek community only perpetuates the image that it's a geek ghetto, and doesn't help WP's standing.

 

[brehobit]

Yeah, I gave up on wikipedia editing, and find it randomly valuable.

The notability clause is the real killer in my mind. The 4 cites per sentence is also getting difficult to read.

Mark

 

[Celebrim]

Are D&D modules notable? (By wikipedia standards, I mean). And how would you convince someone of that fact? Is there a D&D-specific wiki that's better suited to that kind of thing?

I personally find the notion that an article is 'not notable' to be a very elitist old fashioned standard of what is deserving to be read about. Essentially, you can prove notability by wikipedia standards if you can find reference to the work in a published book or journal. By those standards, you could probably establish relevancy to much of the D&D cannon but it would take alot of work because academic writings on roleplaying specificly and gaming generally are obscure and rarely read.

The irony is so thick that you can spike railroad ties with it. Wikipedia - the ultimate new media information source - is claiming that things in it are only relevent if they've been published and talked about by the established old media and thier ivory tower gaurdians of relevancy. Wikipedia - the most well read information source in the world - is staking the relevancy of most of its information on journals, obscure academic tomes, and books from small college presses.

Most of the citations by which you could establish the relevancy of Wikipedia pages would love to have even a tenth of the exposure of the page about that topic. The whole 'relevancy' movement in wikipedia is just a late game attempt to put the information genie back in the bottle. It runs counter to the synergy of popularism and individual power that makes wikipedia work. And its not even remotely logical. It's hidebound paper thinking. Maybe if you are traditional editor of a paper encyclopedia it makes sense to throughly critique each article for relevancy because well paper is expensive and heavy and each article takes up some of your very limited space. But in the electronic world, text is cheap and for all practical purposes the space available for text is unlimited. Why would you tear pages from your book and burn them under those conditions?

My standards of what ought to be deemed relevant are more pragmatic. If people are reading the page, then its relevant. It ought to be easy to track and it ought to be noncontriversial.

 

[Celebrim]

Wikipedia is not a D&D wiki. It is a general-purpose wiki, and its articles have to be relevant to all sorts of readers, not just those interested in D&D. This also means that it's playing in the same field as high-profile general-purpose encyclopedias, and its reputation will be decided on the same terms as apply to those encyclopedias. Having lots of articles of interest mainly to the geek community only perpetuates the image that it's a geek ghetto, and doesn't help WP's standing.

I don't agree.

Wikipedia is the high-profile general pupose encyclopedia. Who in the world needs or wants those overstuffed tomes of the past anymore? What good are they for now except emergency booster seats for kids? Why in the world should wikipedia be competing with any of them? It is superior to all of those dinosaurs in every way. In five years, the Britannica will consider it important that wiki cites it. In 10 years, the Britannica and the rest will be only of interest to library historians.

 

[billd91]

I don't agree.

Wikipedia is the high-profile general pupose encyclopedia. Who in the world needs or wants those overstuffed tomes of the past anymore? What good are they for now except emergency booster seats for kids? Why in the world should wikipedia be competing with any of them? It is superior to all of those dinosaurs in every way. In five years, the Britannica will consider it important that wiki cites it. In 10 years, the Britannica and the rest will be only of interest to library historians.

One would hope that we could teach researchers to be savvy enough to understand the value of a source with some authority control, that can actually stand behind the research into its articles. No popularly edited source is going to come close to that any time soon.

But, I do agree that wikipedia's whole relevancy issue is elitist and foolish. What articles are probably the most reliable ones on wikipedia? The trivial ones that geeks have the time to lovingly fill out based on their vast knowledge of their hobbies. Why? Because that is an area where large numbers of internet posters can claim to have some authority.

So wikipedia wants to be a general resource? So what? I'm not going to find articles on "Keep on the Borderlands" when I search for the molecular weight of boron or on the climate of Burkina Faso... at least not if wiki is well and properly indexed. There are no printing costs, so that issue is gone. All I have to worry about, for the most part, is storage capacity and efficient retrieval of information. Neither of those are so insurmountable that wiki has to limit its scope to things that are "notable".

 

[Celebrim]

One would hope that we could teach researchers to be savvy enough to understand the value of a source with some authority control, that can actually stand behind the research into its articles. No popularly edited source is going to come close to that any time soon.

No, but I would argue that no humanly edited source is going to achieve it either. The same sorts of politics, biases, geekgasms, out right errors, and in fight occur when scholars get together to compose an encyclopedia. This is why reviews of wikipedia's accuracy compared to tradiational survey material have shown no real difference in the quality of the two works. The difference is first that in print media fewer people may actually be involved in the process and secondly that the process is opaque and intractable to the reader who wants to dig deeper. At least in wiki, you can go and see what the various sides have been fighting over should you care to.

But, I do agree that wikipedia's whole relevancy issue is elitist and foolish. What articles are probably the most reliable ones on wikipedia? The trivial ones that geeks have the time to lovingly fill out based on their vast knowledge of their hobbies. Why? Because that is an area where large numbers of internet posters can claim to have some authority.

In areas which are not contriversial, the average wiki article ends up being cared for largely by a couple of people who care about the topic more than anyone else in the world (or at least more than anyone else in the world who writes on wiki). In many cases, these are among the most knowledgable people on the topic. These often are the experts. Wiki's mathimatics articles for example beat hands down any other general encylopedia. It's only where we disagree over what is true about the topic that the nasty fights over what the content of the page is really occur. Even this isn't entirely a bad thing though, because you at least get to hear from both sides. Maybe one or both sides are lunatics, but that's going to more clearly come out in wikipedia than it would if the author was a single creepy academic promoting his pet belief system.

So wikipedia wants to be a general resource? So what? I'm not going to find articles on "Keep on the Borderlands" when I search for the molecular weight of boron or on the climate of Burkina Faso...

Exactly. The biggest protection from self-promotion is that a self-promotion site isn't going to recieve traffic unless its topic is really relevant and something people care about. And if it is, pretty soon its going to draw in a crowd of geeks who will fight for the integrity of the topic.

It's not perfect. It's an ugly system and its easy to get disenchanted with it. But its like Democracy: it's the worst possible system with the exception of all the other ones that have ever been designed.