06-13-2010, 04:01 AM
Rafael Wrote:The page is not only in dire need of updating, but also lacks some reference to our stuff here
I used to be very active on Wikipedia until the "deletionists" started attacking multiple articles on pretty much any grounds they can. I think you will find that, by Wikipedia rules, this forum would be "challenged" as a source of reliable information about Blackmoor*.
* = Challanging sources is a very good way of undermining the references in a D&D article. If a delitionist can challenge the source of a specific fact, they can get that reference pulled from the article (on the grounds of not being reliable). That then allows them to put out a call for a "reliable source" for the same fact and then try to get that fact deleted from the article. This allows them to slowly chip away at the foundation of an article that is too well established to delete in one go. But if a delitionist can challange five or six different sources, they can rip out a lot of content and eventually make the article look so pathetic that it is too small to be of much use to casual readers.
One of the attack forms, used by delitionists, is to accuse an article of not being "notable" (in other words it "is not important enough to history to be on Wikipedia"). I think you can establish that Dave Arneson's campaign setting was early enough to warrant its own article. To give an example of an article challanged as not being "notable", the one for "Trampas Whiteman" (founder of Dragonlance Nexus - the award winning Dragonlance site that was given official site status) was challanged on notability. I noticed that the challanger was a "tag and run" delitionist** found a couple bits of information to show Dragonhelm's importance to the DL product line (i.e. he is credited in all the MWP 3e products) and then pulled the tag.
** = The tag and run delitionist will tag a number of D&D articles as "needing fixing" and then do nothing themselves to look for ways to solve the problem they have highlighted. They will then return to the article after some time (they used to do this very quickly) and try to cite the lack of improvement as prooving that the article is not important. Its a kind of one-two attack manoeuvre, that appears to the greater community to be people consulting the community before applying for deletion.
I've seen lesser articles about other D&D settings dump-merged into the "main" article for it. (I wrote an article called "List of Spelljammer novels" which got merged into the "Spelljammer" article within 3 days, because it wasn't long enough to warrant being another article.) That sounds like an attack, but it isn't. It is someone pulling content into the main article to give it more substance (and improve its importance).
So getting back to this forum. You have The Great Svenny here, who can obviously provide input on Dave Arneson's personal campaign (if people ask him particular questions). But you also have people here who might talk about campaigns that are nothing to do with Dave Arneson. And (to Wikipedia) those sort of things are not relevant to Blackmoor. I have seen other forums challanged (as sources) on that basis.
I think you need to get in touch with BOZ. He has been actively improving a number of article and fixing the weaknesses that have allowed deletionists to challang them.
I think you also need to learn what can and can't be put up on Wikipedia. Because, while I would love to see more Blackmoor articles go up, I could see most of them get pulled straight down, because (like my SJ novel article) they do not have enough references to prove that they "need" to be outside of the main Blackmoor article.
If you really want to see Blackmoor get the encyclopedic content it deserves, I think the only way to do that is to set up a standalone Blackmoor encyclopedia. It is what the Forgotten Realms fans did when they got fed up being bullied on Wikipedia and Forgotten Realms Wiki is a model of what I'd love to see done for Blackmoor. :twisted: