Wikipedia talk:Votes for deletion/LexiconRPG

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[edit] Ben's Rebuttal to various allegations

General Points The [LexiconRPG] is an emerging wiki-based RPG. It is an art-imitates-life game where fictitional scholars write a mini-wikipedia on a fictitional historical topic. It uses a few rules to help structure the collaboration, but is otherwise free-form.

I conducted a fair amount of research on the topic and sought to cover the game in broad brush strokes. I think I did a suitable job worthy of inclusion. There are certainly other entries more deserving attention.

Another very interesting point, and one that at some level motivated my posting Neel's game here. The LexiconRPG is an art-imitating-life game. The result is a fictional wikipedia, where the theme is initially set by the Lexicon owner. I will edit the page to reflect.

1. This is a vanity entry.

  1. This is not my game. If you read the article you'll see that Neel created the concept. I wrote the article and distilled the rules. I presently am using those distilled rules in a lexicon.
  2. I chose not to directly quote the original creator's rules, because 1) I'd not asked him if I could, and 2) being a law student I'm accustomed to distilling rules and I though he had a good idea but there was need for work.
  3. There are much more effective ways to "gain press" than to fight a wikipedia deletion assault. My preferred methods are Slashdot and asking like-minded people to add links to their sites. The latter method increases the likelihood of a favorable listing on Google. The former method increases actual interest. Even so, I have rarely sought to do either.
  4. The only "vanity" entry, if you will, is linking to my own Lexicon. I consider that reasonable in light of the fact that it is but one of several. Additionally, I am not advertising for more players. I have a small group who share a like mind on how the game world we are developing should turn out. Therefore, we're not interested in any "outside" players (although we do have other members of our discussion group whom we are soliciting).
  5. If the reference to my Lexicon is at issue, that is easily fixed by removing it. I've read no call for that.

2. Only (one|few) site(s): One claimant said that the canonical name was "LexiconRPG" (no space). However, it is "Lexicon RPG" (one space). Based on the assumed canonical name, the claimant said only one site has the Lexicon RPG.

My research could not follow Google due to a dirth of sites found. Remember, however, that google crawls based using fairly complex rules, among which is the frequency of that site being linked. Therefore, if personal Lexicons are not linked, then there will not very many google hits. The problem is that without a dedicated community, it is difficult to get a census on how many players there are. After all, how many role-players are still playing AD&D 1st Ed? You can't census that any better. Furthermore, I did not want to spend time finding a rough count.

Due to this, most of my research involved reading blogs that discussed the Lexicon RPG and from there found a sampling of six sites--the seventh being my own. There were more, but what's the point when a diverse sample is available?

3. Not Notable

This was the original claim. My counter argument is "what is notable?" It appears to be an arbitrary definition used to squelch creativity or used as a generic term to "let's delete this page." When I look at the rules for deletion, I did not see notability cited as a reason for deletion. I thought the goal of the Wikipedia was to provide an encyclopedia, not a majoritarian view of the world.

There are certainly hundreds, if not thousands, of entries that are not notable. I pointed out the original deletion poster's birth town that comprises less than one-millionth the global population and is non-descript, apart from the fact that it was authored by the poster and he was born there.

Additionally, there are other RPGs that have a low user population. However, they remain. I cited one, which has oddly enough fallen into what I would call a baseless copyright claim. If you looked at the original site, the site owner releases the material (in a rather amaturish fashion) under what could be redefined as a Creative Commons licence. Furthermore, it appears that the original poster was the original author of the game, so no need to claim copyright violation.

4. That I tried to "game" the vote.

Absolutely baseless and an attempt to discredit me. The IP address listed is not even in the same domain as mine (first octet 62 where I am 64). If you traceroute, you'll see I'm from the Comcast domain, and that other fellow from somewhere quite differently.

There have been other allegations of me using sockpuppets. I'm insulted by such comments. I'm a hell of a lot more mature than that. It's talk like that that convinces me that the Wikipedia is actually on the decline.

--BenWilson 19:07, Jan 5, 2005 (UTC)

I'm the one who used the "game" terminology. Nowhere did I claim that you were the person attempting to do the gaming. I was merely pointing out in general that such activity was occurring. You might want to spend more time working on the notability of the article and less worrying about the VfD page. RickK 23:32, Jan 6, 2005 (UTC)

Well, how do you "work on the notability?" There's nothing in the deletion criteria stating that notability is a criteria.

Look, the sockpuppet comments seem to me to be a direct attack on my integrity. This is my first time to write an article for the Wikipedia, and likely my last. You guys seem pretty hostile, which I can understand since there's probably a lot of crap out there. However, most of the delete votes violate the rule of stating facts.

I think it would make more sense to leave the rules out of the Wikipedia entry and link to samples of the rules (yours, Neel's, the Phoenyx, etc). If you were writing about Monopoly, you wouldn't list the rules in WP, you'd just describe in general terms how the game works.

I'd also suggest that Lexicon games are, at best, loosely roleplaying games. Lexicon Game is more appropriate than Lexicon RPG, in my opinion.

The argument that it's "non-notable" doesn't seem to hold any weight in the "list of reasons for deleting an entry". Sounds to me like those asking for deletion really mean, "we aren't interested in it, so we don't want it."

--Ravenx99 02:48, 6 Jan 2005 (UTC)

AFAIK, the only requirements for a vote on VfD is that it be made by a logged-in user and in good faith. There is no list of reasons that are acceptable for voting on VfD. We can vote for whatever reason we like, and the admin who makes the decision will decide if a vote is made in good faith or not, generally with appropriate input from others. Your claim that non-notability means we aren't interested in it, so we don't want it. is, in fact, correct. We are aiming to make a particular kind of resource at Wikipedia (see Wikipedia:What Wikipedia is not and Wikipedia:What wikipedia is), and we feel that having information on non-notable games will detract from the goal of making that kind of resource. This does not mean that Lexicon is bad, stupid, useless or pointless, it simply means that we don't feel it is notable enough for inclusion in the Wikipedia -- please note that our standards for inclusion are actually quite low, but they do exist. Also please note that by we, I can really only speak for myself, though I don't hesitate to guess that most or all of the others who vote to delete for non-notability would agree with my claim. There are those who feel that notability should not be required, and even those of us who do agree that notability is necessary often disagree on how much; the fact that all but one or two Wikipedians feel this falls below that line, wherever they feel it may be, indicates that there is consensus that this falls into the category of something Wikipedia does not want. If you would like to set the bar lower, the only way to do so would be to start trying to convince people to agree with you, a goal that I strongly doubt you would succeed in. In conclusion, the only rule about voting is that it be done in good faith (i.e. by a person who knows and understands Wikipedia and its goals, and is voting for the purpose of striving towards those goals). If you do not share Wikipedia's goals, you may fork every last word of our content and make a new and improved Wikipedia with different goals. As a matter of fact, I think someone has already created a mirror that includes all or most content that is deleted from here; feel free to work on that Wikipedia instead of this one. Tuf-Kat 22:34, Jan 7, 2005 (UTC)