Wikipedia, muds, and where the sources are

 Posted by (Visited 16699 times)  Game talk, Misc  Tagged with: , ,
Jan 082009
 

Edit: slightly updated with one more “what have I learned” and a few more links. But I could add links to this for hours. 😛

So at this point, the whole kerfuffle over the MUD articles on Wikipedia has reached a fever pitch, and I am a bit exhausted by it all. Of course, not so exhausted that I can’t write 2500 more words about it.

But it has been an interesting education for me in how Wikipedia works, and I’d especially like to thank Adam Hyland for his patience explaining it all. I am a bit dismayed that both Richard & I were tagged by some in the debate as biased or “canvassed” or whatever the term is, when I think we both acted in good faith… but there are plenty of folks on the AfD discussion who have pointed this out.

Me being who I am, it of course led me to dig deeper into citations there in Wikipedia (hey look, ma, I’m a reliable source! No, wait, I’m not!). I think at this point that in theory, I’m a valid source. This may seem like an odd thing to wonder about or worry about, but hey, how can I help issues like this if not? I mean, this is right at the top of the whole MUD category:

MUDs and Notability — It Ain’t Gonna Work

Alright, I’ve been pondering this for several days, and I gotta tell you, I’ve got next to nothing. I’ve been in the Mudding community for over eight years at this point, and I’ve been a Mud administrator/coder/builder for over four years. I’d like to think I know the community pretty well. Here’s the dilemma: wikipedia guidelines require that articles on subjects maintain a certain level of notability. That is there are sources not directly related to the subject of the article. In the case of Muds this means we need to find some sort of third party source (be it a review, a listing, etc…) for each and every MUD listed on wikipedia that wasn’t written by players or staff of the MUD in question.

Well, that’s bloody near impossible.

— from the Talk page for the entire MUD category

So I decided to take a look at sourcing. I picked LegendMUD and my name, because though I may not be able to edit those articles, I do know the topics! In fact, I am an expert on me, though biased. 🙂 Continue reading »

The borders of user created content

 Posted by (Visited 11516 times)  Game talk  Tagged with: , , , ,
Jan 072009
 

SusanC has a comment on a Terra Nova thread in which she observes,

So the main criterion for being considered is that there is some kind of creative expression involved. I’m OK with that, although it opens the door for arguments about exactly how much creative input is needed to qualify. Text chat, instant messages, and blog postings (like this one) clearly can be used for creative expression: so maybe these are within the paper’s scope, provided that they are sufficiently creative.

— comment on Terra Nova: New Paper on UGC.

It is an interesting problem, actually. There is hardly a site these days of any sort on the Net that does not support some form of user-generated content. But by unspoken convention, we seem to not consider chat and other basic synchronous social interaction to be the same sort of user created content that uploaded models and textures are.

I think the reason is interesting and subtle, and marks out a distinction between “extending the possibility space” and, well, “not.” So here go 1700 words… Continue reading »

Flash on TVs and set-top boxes

 Posted by (Visited 5602 times)  Game talk  Tagged with: ,
Jan 052009
 

A long while ago, I blogged about Adobe’s Open Screen Project, which is a big consortium pushing Flash onto as many devices as possible. Well, here appears to be some of the first fruit of it:

Adobe® Systems Incorporated (Nasdaq:ADBE) and Intel Corporation today announced plans to collaborate on the development to port and optimize Adobe® Flash® technology for the Intel® Media Processor CE 3100. This effort is expected to provide consumers with richer and more seamless Web-based and video viewing experiences through advanced Intel-based cable set-top boxes, Blu-ray Disc players, digital TVs and retail connected AV devices….

— Intel and Adobe to Extend Flash Platform to TVs.

They go on to mention plans to ship this chip within 2009, as well as an initiative around Air. We’ll see what comes of this… Intel has to get that chip adopted, after all.

In the meantime, I also noticed over the holidays that Microsoft is beta testing a new download center that requires Silverlight — that’s a way to push plugin adoption right there…! Of course, they also push it via pop-up on Microsoft’s front page… the war continues.

Newlively!

 Posted by (Visited 9316 times)  Game talk  Tagged with: ,
Jan 052009
 

Newlively is a VRML-based clone of Lively, based out of China. And I mean clone, they claim one done in a month. Not yet feature complete to match the original, but apparently actually backed by a company with funding (though the website doesn’t say who).

Not surprisingly, looks like there’s Lively folks moving over already.

We are often emotionally moved by thoughts of past experiences and occasions. Likewise, if we could create a cyberspace environment and an Avarat where users are already familiar, we help lessen the impact of loneliness and disappointment. After the closure of Lively, there is no greater happiness than to duplicate Lively for the sake of the Lively users. We understand that this activity would generate a certain degree of legal risk. However, whenever I remember the disheartenment and disappointment of that many Lively users, this risk is worth taking and the users will support us. Google is a great company. Its greatness develops upon quality customer care. What we create is similar to Google Lively, which the users like. Based on this, there should be no problems. We want to prove it. Google Lively’s concept is great and good. Besides, we are not using any codes whatsoever from Google Lively. The entire platform was created new from scratch. Only the concept and the interface remained as Google Lively and the amount of work involved in doing this was quite insignificant in comparison to the creation of the entire system. Moreover, in our understanding of the kinds of platforms, copyright privileges should go to the content providers. As long as these content providers are willing to transfer the platform to Newlively, there will be no issues.

— from the FAQ

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