User:Odd Starter/Where the wiki works

With all the turmoil that's been happening, I think it's worth looking at the state of the wiki. Where do things go right? Where do they go wrong? And more importantly, take a look at the reasons for why this is.

For the most part, big wikis like Wikipedia work quite well, with no really wiki-breaking issues. Yeah, there's vandals, yeah, there's squabbles, but the wiki manages (somehow) to re-route around these issues. It may be a matter of size - a squabble can only incorporate so many people, after all - but I'm convinced there's something more going on, something that we can look at and try to find solutions for.

Wikipedia's mission is to treat subjects encyclopedically, and work towards a standard repository of notable human knowledge. I think it does this well because there is human knowledge out there. Wikipedia can be measured, by anyone you care to name, at any given time, in order to measure it's veracity. If someone sees something wrong, they can fix it, and other people can vet those corrections to see if they're correct. This is something that the wiki philosophy is very good at doing.

And I think people will agree that on much of the Urban Dead wiki, this is the case. Work on such things as items in-game, what abilities do, general mechanics of the game, etc is really top-notch. I don't think I'd be lying if I said that on these topics, we probably have the best coverage available anywhere on the internet. We're a leader in that sort of reference material.

But then we get to groups. In theory, there shouldn't be much difference, right? What groups do in game should be easily verifiable, it should be easy to talk to people to discuss what's happening, get multiple points of view, then distill it into useful, encyclopedic information on the group's wiki page. In fact, I think this is not the case, by any means.

What's the difference? It should be plain to see. When the wiki talks about the game universe itself, this stuff is independently verifiable at any given time. Any schmuck can make a character, put the game engine through it's paces, and work to verify any data on the specifics of the universe. the Search Odds project is a very good example of this sort of verification work. But what people do within the game isn't subject to this. We cannot ask the Game engine to look at three days ago, and run through what happenned, so we at least see the actions. If we have any evidence at all, it's only in the heads (and possibly messages) of anyone who probably wasn't watching at the time it happenned.

And humans are unreliable. Even when the facts are correctly perceived by humans, we still work to interpret that data into some sort of story. And of course, we're never in possession of all the facts, so we're likely to miss important information that would allow us to reach a correct conclusion.

And this is just "factual" information, such as movement and attacking. It gets even murkier when we try and identify motivations. There is simply no record on any computer in the world that will allow a person to independently verify a person's motivations for what he was doing. Occaisionally you see someone gloat about something somewhere, and often that's a very good indicator, but for all you know he's playing with your head.

This is why, I think, we get all these horrible edit wars regarding group pages. Because it's not possible to go through a publically accessible archive of game actions to see what's going on, We can't get someone to go through and give us reliable information on which squabbling party was actually right. And so, because we can't prove you wrong (just as we can't prove you right), you automatically assume you get the benefit of the doubt.

I think that issues involving such things as Sieges (another major issue, with much the same reasons for it's existence) and Groups, we'd be able to be much more impressive about our accuracy if such a query system was created. An ability to ask for information on a specific area in the game at a specific time, and see every action that occured. But it's never going to happen.

So, how can we fix this? The simplest answer would be to kick this sort of information off the wiki, but I don't think that's a viable alternative either. It could be done, don't get me wrong, but I think we'd lose a very large amount of traffic if that happenned. I think we'd also lose a large number of quite valuable wiki editors who, while maintaining their group's page, do other useful stuff on the wiki. Worse, a lot of information regarding Groups and player activity is of genuine utility, even if it's accuracy can't be verified. Semi-correct information, to many players, is just as useful as no information at all.

We could choose to say that any writing on wiki pages can't attempt to ascribe motivations to people. This I think, would do little to nothing. It's easily doable, but it means that instead of saying that "This group PKs this other group because they hate each other", you merely get "This group PKs this other group". Not useful, not really.

To be honest, I can't really think of a viable solution. Many unviable ones, but no solutions that would actually do more good than harm. This is a problem though, and we really need to try and solve it somehow.