[MUD-Dev2] The historical significance of MUDs

[Threshold]

I would not normally bring a personal issue here, but I think there is 
the possibility it may have a long term effect on many other muds.

Threshold RPG's wikipedia entry has recently undergone a lot of 
vandalism from a bad intentioned, disgruntled ex-player. Unfortunately, 
this person (who goes by the name Mendaliv on Wikipedia) is a hard core 
Wikipedia user, so he is well versed in their archaic, acronym heavy 
rules and has a lot of "friends" (cronies?) to help him with his campaign.

After getting an admin friend to ban pretty much every person that had 
been productively working on the entry, he recommended it for deletion. 
That's a pretty sleazy tactic, since now almost none of the people that 
would be likely to respond in favor of KEEPing it are even allowed to 
comment. If the only issue here was the deletion of Threshold's entry, I 
wouldn't be posting here. We have had customers of ours put various 
entries up related to our worlds and later found out they were deleted. 
That's how Wikipedia works and we don't concern ourselves with it.

What disturbs me more than our entry being deleted is the all out 
general attack being made on MUDs in general. If you read the discussion 
of the deletion request for Threshold, you will find countless 
statements that various MUD sites are not noteworthy, not good enough to 
be a source of information, and just not important enough. Yes, MUDs as 
a hobby are nowhere near as major as they were 10 years ago, but MUDs 
are a major part of internet and online gaming history. The discussion 
is here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Threshold_(online_game)

In the discussion, numerous Wikipedia members seem to completely discard 
MUDs as having any historical relevance, and old MUD related sites (TMC, 
TMS, etc.) are repeatedly deemed meaningless and of no journalistic or 
informative value. When I read this, I was shocked. Some of these sites 
were made when the WWW was brand new. Sure, they never did (and still 
don't) have the polish of giant sites like Massively, Gamespot, 1up, or 
IGN, but there was a time when these sites (and MUDs in general) were 
extremely vital, major hubs of information for online gaming and for the 
internet in general.

Regardless of how popular MUDs are now, there is no doubt they are an 
important part of internet and gaming history. It is absurd to simply 
discard them as irrelevant and not noteworthy.

I'm not sure if there is anything we can do about it, but if anyone 
reading this feels it is worth the time, sharing your own information 
and feedback on that Wikipedia discussion might be helpful. If there are 
people reading this who are familiar with Wikipedia policies, all the 
better.

Thanks for reading, and once again I am sorry for bringing such a 
Threshold-specific issue to these forums. I feel this is a threat to the 
historical significance of MUDs in general, and that affects all of us.