Wikipedia troubles - again

[BufordTJustice]

This thread is a funny read! You guys should be happy about the english wikipedia. In fact it is still way more inclusive than the german one. There is a debate going on about this in the internet for quite some time. Germans are very good in declaring themselves experts on a topic and then they guard the wikipedia like a fortress. Many new entries are deleted with the remark "no encyclopedic content". Now you can guess where that argument leads to...

There was a war going on in the german wikipedia for months about if a certain tower in Vienna is a broadcasting tower or a look-out tower. Hell broke loose! In the end, a woman spent weeks in a library and compiled a 7 MB document to end this debate...

Many people still have the image of a book with certain pages, which are limited. There was a huge debate, if every pokemon should have an own entry or if they should be a list in a pokemon article. As if that mattered in an online wiki!!

I wish you all the best! Fight the exclusionists (official mobbing term)!

 

[AnotherPacifist]

It wasn't that the creep was an exclusionist, it's that he's a
1. Hypocrite (a talk page that he edits out twice, saying "If I don't want to talk to you, tough.")
2. Ignoramus (not having played Civ or made any suggestion he investigated the game and found it wanting for the page)
3. Coward (now that we're more numerous than him, he gives up), and finally,
4. Uncivil, lazy bastard (deleting and reverting without bothering to explain his dastardly actions)

It would actually be better if he had the German penchant for research.
This is not Wikipedia so I call him all the names I want, as long as I have evidence (and it's plastered all over the talk pages).

 

[Úmarth]

I think we're winning. Check the history: Eaglestorm edited the page, and changed some stuff, but he let Civ be. **Knock on Wood**

That's really not in the spirit of Wikipedia. Edit wars are bad. Even if your "opponents" aren't being as honourable you should try to reach a compromise or consensus rather than seeking to get your own way by attrition.

I can see that guy's point about peacockry. There were perhaps too many adjectives ("huge number of scenarios", etc.) and the relevance of civ to alt-history wasn't stated explicitly enough for people who haven't played it. I've made some edits that I hope redresses some of those issues and will stop people from reverting and re-reverting. Still, that guy should have tried to improve it rather than reverting. That kind of attitude -- exclusionism and "if it's not 100% perfect get rid of it" -- is ruining Wikipedia. And Eaglestorm is just a douche.

 

[Rhye]

That's really not in the spirit of Wikipedia. Edit wars are bad. Even if your "opponents" aren't being as honourable you should try to reach a compromise or consensus rather than seeking to get your own way by attrition.

I can see that guy's point about peacockry. There were perhaps too many adjectives ("huge number of scenarios", etc.) and the relevance of civ to alt-history wasn't stated explicitly enough for people who haven't played it. I've made some edits that I hope redresses some of those issues and will stop people from reverting and re-reverting. Still, that guy should have tried to improve it rather than reverting. That kind of attitude -- exclusionism and "if it's not 100% perfect get rid of it" -- is ruining Wikipedia. And Eaglestorm is just a douche.

Thank you for your contribution, but I have to point out that there's an incorrect detail - Desert War wasn't in BTS, but in vanilla Civ4.

 

[Úmarth]

Oh, I guess I'll just remove that sentence then.

 

[nody]

@ those Germans: I guess 'ordnung muss sein'...

 

[AnotherPacifist]

Wow, this Eaglestorm guy can sure disappear--he basically deleted ALL his traces in the revision history. COWARD!

 

[Úmarth]

Ugh. I doubled the size of the RFC article trying to address some of the issues it has been tagged with, and what was the response to these edits showing up in recent changes? It gets nominated for deletion for the second time. I understand looking out for really non-notable articles that are likely to be bad articles, but why are there people out their actively trying to remove perfectly good content from an encyclopaedia ("general knowledge")?

 

[Alexius08]

Discussions are leaning towards unanimous retention of the article in question.

What concerns me is that 10 out of the 14 citations are first-party sources (material written by people closely associated to the subject). What about replacing those references with third-party sources for greater odds of survival?

 

[Úmarth]

I doubt you'll find many secondary sources duplicating the information on rhye.civfanatics.net. Looking at other game articles it seems to be acceptable to use primary sources for things like the description of gameplay mechanics. The Civilization IV article, for example, references the game manual, CFC and the 2K website extensively. I'm not saying that's a perfect article, but it shows that articles of marginal notability are often held to a higher standard than others.

 

[onedreamer]

I think that, RFC aside, Civ is the game with the biggest number of alternate reality user-made scenarios.

Alternate reality isn't alternate history.
Alternate History is almost always a scenario in which there is a hypothesis of something particular of History that has developed in a different way and then the possibile consequences.
Civilization is a game in which at every turn everything can go in a different way from History, creating uncountable variables, and it spans the entire History so it really can't be alternate History.

 

[Alexius08]

Alternate reality isn't alternate history.
Alternate History is almost always a scenario in which there is a hypothesis of something particular of History that has developed in a different way and then the possibile consequences.
Civilization is a game in which at every turn everything can go in a different way from History, creating uncountable variables, and it spans the entire History so it really can't be alternate History.

Alternate history, to be considered as such, must have:

1. A point of divergence
2. The change on that point
3. And the result afterwards

Thus, Civ4 RFC is alternate history from the divergence points of 3000 BC and 600 AD. Try playing RFC as the Chinese (so far the oldest continuous civilization) and try guessing what would happen. Chances are your guesses are wrong.

 

[Rhye]

Alternate reality isn't alternate history.

I meant alternate history

 

[onedreamer]

Alternate history, to be considered as such, must have:

1. A point of divergence
2. The change on that point
3. And the result afterwards

Thus, Civ4 RFC is alternate history from the divergence points of 3000 BC and 600 AD. Try playing RFC as the Chinese (so far the oldest continuous civilization) and try guessing what would happen. Chances are your guesses are wrong.

First of all 3000BC is the beginning of History, so it can't be "a point of divergence". Everything would be divergent
Second, just because everything is divergent the third point you listed isn't applicable to RFC.

 

[Leoreth]

I think Alexius' definition is very much applicable.

3000BC isn't that start of history, but only the start of RFC. Unless you're a young earth creationist, I think you'll agree with me that there were things that happened before 3000BC (heck, regular Civ even starts in 4000BC). So 3000BC is a perfectly fine diverging point.

And it doesn't matter how wildly the outcome varies, as long as there is a logical connection between all events that lead to that outcome. And we have exactly that: the player's decisions and the game rules.

 

[AnotherPacifist]

But we're talking about history, i.e. written records of what happened. 3000 BC is a perfectly good choice because most civs (other than Egypt and Sumer) didn't have writing then. We're not talking about alternate prehistory or archaelogy.

 

[Leoreth]

But I don't see any reason to preclude the beginning of history to be a divergence point. It's not as if you can wildly make things up from that point just because we have no earlier recordings. For the purposes of a PC game, RFC models the starting situation at 3000 BC quite accurately.

 

[Rhye]

we won the war... The only way to express my gratitude was releasing the patch.

Besides, I wonder when those tags will get wiped out of RFC page

 

[onedreamer]

But I don't see any reason to preclude the beginning of history to be a divergence point. It's not as if you can wildly make things up from that point just because we have no earlier recordings. For the purposes of a PC game, RFC models the starting situation at 3000 BC quite accurately.

SHEEZ.
The reason is that there are way too many variables that can change, a alternate history is a scenario with defined patterns, it's not anything like a Civ4/RFC game, unless it's a scenario built for that purpouse. Plus another fundamental difference with alternate history is that alternate history has a STARTING point that differs from real history, RFC does not. So if anything, vanilla Civ4 is more suited to alternate history than RFC, not the other way around.

 

[Leoreth]

SHEEZ.

Yes, indeed.