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Wikipedia's war on the demoscene

category: general [glöplog]
viznut, thanks for the lst!

too bad i'm involved in german wikipedia only, else i'd at least drop in some "keep" votes backed up by mentions in scholarly literature.
added on the 2014-09-11 00:01:43 by dipswitch dipswitch
without deletionists wikipedia could be great, now it's just a pile of shit.
added on the 2014-09-11 00:25:42 by nosfe nosfe
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but not groups like Renaissance or Nooon whom every scener in existence knows about?


I never heard of them...

But still, I always (naively) assumed Wikipedia was honoring truth/facts, not the relevance/notoriety of them. But I've been wrong I guess. A quick look seems to indicate they are pretty cleat about not being a directory:

"Wikipedia is not a directory of everything in the universe that exists or has existed" (from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:What_Wikipedia_is_not)

Meh. Difficult to determine what is "relevant" and "notorious". Can't we simply make a bot that adds the list of 11k demo groups to the wiki every other day or something? ^__^
added on the 2014-09-11 05:31:06 by iq iq
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I always (naively) assumed Wikipedia was honoring truth/facts

There is a reason why no-one anywhere will ever accept WP as a valid citation for anything.
added on the 2014-09-11 08:46:22 by ringofyre ringofyre
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But still, I always (naively) assumed Wikipedia was honoring truth/facts,

iq, that's what i thought too 10 years ago too, unfortunately it isn't so.
added on the 2014-09-11 11:15:10 by nosfe nosfe
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I never heard of them...

But still, I always (naively) assumed Wikipedia was honoring truth/facts, not the relevance/notoriety of them.


Isn't that the point of an encyclopedia anyway? So people can look up things they HAVEN'T heard of?

Now of course, that doesn't mean that every single obscure group or prod should be added (we have pouet for that), but a group like Renaissance has done some remarkable things back in the day, mostly related to pmode, combined FM+digi music, and early GUS programming.

Wiki might not be the right place for that, but it would be nice if this information was documented and made accessible somewhere, and I think there are a few people in the scene who are interested in doing such 'archaeology'. Perhaps it's time to get more organized about this?
added on the 2014-09-11 11:33:30 by Scali Scali
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Isn't that the point of an encyclopedia anyway? So people can look up things they HAVEN'T heard of?


That's a pretty good summation of why the "deletionist" mentality over there irks me so much.

@Ringo: trying to pass off Wikipedia as a credible source in the academic world is a huge no-no, & thankfully so. But apparently it's just fine for mass media to use it as a fact source or just crib whole articles entirely, which means suddenly angry every-men/women know Wikipedia's view as "reality" on all kinds of subjects they never even *had* an opinion of before. These "notability" pedants are an arsehair away from being able to rewrite history (at least popular history) with their edit wars.

Yeah, the fate of demoscene stuff on WP is pretty inconsequential from that standpoint, but still...

I think setting up a scene-encyclopedia is a great idea. Hell, I'd contribute. I've wanted a non-WP site to be able to send people to for an "overview"/basic info forever. Our wiki be better anyway, it could have scrollers and spinning cubes.
added on the 2014-09-11 12:06:51 by jmph jmph
Oh, boohoo. Get over yourselves.

Most of these are demogroup articles. A demogroup, ever since most demosceners can legally drive, pretty much means "we got drunk and then we came up with a name so then we coded something". It is commonly accepted in the demoscene that demogroups themselves have very little significance and that it's the demos and the people that matter. The fact that nearly everybody is in a whole bunch of demogroups underlines this.

Does it really matter whether "Chromosphere" is by Kewlers, Synesthetics, SQNY, Mewlers or MFX? Of course not, nobody gives a damn.*

But when someone outside the scene recognizes this, they're "waging a war" on us? If there's one thing about the demoscene that's really nothing more than fun peculiar background info, it's the history, composition and attitudes of demogroups.

Hey, it's not like Wikipedia-style writing allows us to make these articles *fun*. For example, the shitfaced clowns article would've been 10 times interesting if it wasn't burnened by crap like 'The word "shitfaced" is a slang term of drunkenness'. The only thing that's fun about it is making silly jokes (such as the pretense rivalry between SFC and matt current, in this case) seem very serious, but that joke gets old soon enough. Plus, if half an article is basically pranking Wikipedia's seriousness, it's hypocritical to then be up in arms if Wikipedia wants to remove the prank.

Why do we care so much?

* okok, kozmik and all the TRSI people still really care about this stuff, but we've collectively declared them 40-year old toddlers so let's get a grip.
added on the 2014-09-11 13:45:02 by skrebbel skrebbel
"It is commonly accepted in the demoscene that demogroups themselves have very little significance and that it's the demos and the people that matter." --- sorry, skrebbel, but this is historically incorrect, if you look even 10-15 years behind, being in a good group was all that mattered.
added on the 2014-09-11 13:53:18 by dipswitch dipswitch
and who are "we" in your last sentence? speak for yourself.
added on the 2014-09-11 13:54:27 by dipswitch dipswitch
you know that TRSI is recruiting, right? they need people to write on pouet that kozmik isn't in RSI.
added on the 2014-09-11 14:05:03 by skrebbel skrebbel
Quote:
"It is commonly accepted in the demoscene that demogroups themselves have very little significance and that it's the demos and the people that matter." --- sorry, skrebbel, but this is historically incorrect, if you look even 10-15 years behind, being in a good group was all that mattered.


I agree. In the days before the internet, it was important who you knew.
Initially, in the cracker scene, you had to have the right contacts to provide you with new releases, spread them to a wide audience etc.
When things moved from cracking to democoding... Especially as a coder, getting access to the right documentation, tools, source code and other tricks was extremely important.
Being in a group was a good way to get into contact with the right people.
added on the 2014-09-11 14:31:59 by Scali Scali
I do agree that a lot of demogroup articles there are probably not very important, but Renaissance was a somewhat significant group for their technical achievements which were stated above already. Now someone bring up some sources... :D
i totally agree with skrebbel! (but to be honest i only say that because he's a member of bahnhof)
added on the 2014-09-11 15:25:11 by havoc havoc
At least Bahnhof has a wiki-page, they must be relevant.
added on the 2014-09-11 15:27:21 by Scali Scali
(and to be completely honest, yes, obviously i would like to be so awesome and cool too)
added on the 2014-09-11 15:27:46 by havoc havoc
Scali: Crappiest article ever, it doesn't even mention the Matthias Reim remix :(((
added on the 2014-09-11 15:29:21 by havoc havoc
My suggestion: if there are still people who want to write wiki-articles on demoscene/demogroups etc... Let's collect all these articles, and publish them in a book.
That way we have a proper source to refer to.
added on the 2014-09-11 15:34:07 by Scali Scali
a self-published or vanity-publisher book with no relevance and quality control whatsoever would not particularly be a more "proper" source than a random webpage. =)
added on the 2014-09-11 16:43:00 by dipswitch dipswitch
time for a fork that _IS_ a directory of everything and then some!
let's reg openwikipedia.org and make it happen! ;P
I'll always get a chuckle out of how relevant some people think the demoscene is versus what the rest of the world thinks. Yeah some stuff is fun trivia but Skrebbel has leading on the most part.

SO, instead of moaning about Wikipedia in this thread, shall we revive the scene wiki? Wiki.scene.nl is not coming back, I'll ask shifter is there still a dump somewhere and someone can arrange wiki.scene.org? Really people, this shit is not hard.
added on the 2014-09-11 18:50:22 by okkie okkie
Quote:
SO, instead of moaning about Wikipedia in this thread, shall we revive the scene wiki? Wiki.scene.nl is not coming back, I'll ask shifter is there still a dump somewhere and someone can arrange wiki.scene.org? Really people, this shit is not hard.
this
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Let's just make a demo about it.
and then this
added on the 2014-09-11 18:53:26 by Tomoya Tomoya
at least mediawiki is just as poorly made as most partyhack demos :)
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added on the 2014-09-11 20:36:20 by Gargaj Gargaj
I have mentioned pouet in an academic paper (and rocket-editor) does that count? :D

not sure what Antti Silvast, Markku Reunanen are up to here, but it looks useful as well. I do agree that the outreach value of listing an old group that we care about but nobody else does is neglible.
added on the 2014-09-11 22:36:18 by nic0 nic0

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