Wikipedia

[Tom]

I just found out by accident that Wikipedia has deleted its page about the Big Model:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Big_Model


I've had a low opionion on Wikipedia for years, but still I'm astonished. Do these people have the slightest clue about what they're doing?
(interestingly, Ron's page is still there, and still links to the defunct Big Model page. Insanity just spiked.)

[Jay Dugger]

It's been deleted for over a year.

Feel free to review the reasoning behind the deletion, and if you disagree, check out the deletion review and requests for undeletion. Posting to the user's talk page might also help.

The most recent entry for it at the Internet Archive:

https://web.archive.org/web/20120130164343/http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Big_Model

[Eero Tuovinen]

Tabletop roleplaying is simply not a very encyclopedic subject, and thus Wikipedia has difficulty discussing any of the more obscure aspects of it. Remember that Wikipedia (rightly, to my mind - it's an encyclopedia, not a popularity contest) strongly prefers conservative, traditional and verifiable sources for anything it handles, and tabletop roleplaying doesn't really have any of those (and doesn't want them anymore - we've all long grown accustomed to the blogosphere and other more personal interactions in lieu of journalism, and the sparse publications have better things to do than covering the basic stuff), so it's no surprise if Wikipedia does not cover the topic in depth. It's not something likely to change before our very understanding of knowledge as a hierarchy of authoritative sources changes. As it is, roleplaying is essentially doomed to be treated from an outsider perspective in Wikipedia, barring the occasional gardening projects when somebody actively fights to include articles about some favourite topic of theirs. The Forge was a hot topic last decade, which is why certain Wikipedia authors created articles and defended them against deletion; as this artificial defense is no longer present, I am not surprised if articles related to the topic start disappearing.

That being said, it's an open project. Theoretically one could e.g. start a working group to determine whether the general best practices of Wikipedia are appropriate for these types of hyper-modern subjects, and whether Wikipedia should have different standards of proof and notability for topics that are traditionally, within the field itself, primarily treated in dynamic discourse instead of traditional publishing. Such work would have to be done from the viewpoint of and for the benefit of Wikipedia, of course, rather than as a round-about means of getting your favourite topic back into the encyclopedia.

The other strategy for getting the Big Model article back would be to produce some credible independent articles about the topic, preferably in paper journals or magazines, thus proving that the topic is indeed notable :D

[Christoph]

While I never cared too much for the wiki entry, serious sources with an editorial process are gradually being put in place by the International Journal of Role-Playing. It's got some credible academicians on the editorial board. As far as I know, there isn't any article presenting the Big Model in there, but that could change. I'd say the Knutepunkt books would qualify too. There's a piece by Emily Care Boss on "Forge theory" in the 2008 book that explains its key concepts. So another solution, instead of changing the Wikipedia standards, would be to write some more articles in channels other than forums and blogs. But that'd be a lot of work.