Talk:Merc (MUD)

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Incorrect Redirect

MUD is a far better redirect target for this article than an individual game - to an experienced MUD player, this smacks of an advertisement technique from the '90s. Additionally, the effect here is akin to redirecting a small software company's page to Microsoft, because they're a notable example of a software company.

I've also noticed that the same redirect was applied to multiple other games under the Merc tree (see MUD_trees) including ones that have no connection to the redirected article (compare AVATAR_(MUD)#Avatar's_position_within_the_MUD_trees). If I can get some consensus that this is indeed a bad set of redirects, I'll fix this and some others to point to MUD.

Etmoonshade (talk) 18:54, 16 July 2020 (UTC)

If you have a better target, go for it, but where is it mentioned in MUD that would be a meaningful redirect? czar 00:44, 17 July 2020 (UTC)

Generally speaking, MUD is the classification of this type of game (multiplayer text-based RPG.) MUD codebases are a bit weird, in that they're pretty much all derivatives that can trace their ancestry in some way to the original MUD1; even the unique codebases tended to be made by people who played something in the MUD1 tree. It feels like the main article would be a good default redirect for any MUD that doesn't have its own article.

In this specific case, Merc, EnvyMUD, and ROM (MUD) are all derived from DikuMUD - which may perhaps be a better redirect now that I think of it, since it gets us to a more specific place. My main objection here is linking to a page that goes into the history and gameplay of a specific derivative (which, from the article, is heavily-modified enough from the original that it should probably be in MUD trees as its own derivative...) rather than the history of the game type or the parent codebase's history.

Side question - if I wanted to do some digging and see if I could shore up the Merc and ROM (MUD) articles and getting them undeleted, how would I go about doing that? As a longtime MUD player, I'd argue that Merc and ROM (MUD) spawned enough derivatives themselves that they're probably equally or more notable than Diku itself - the shared history just makes it hard to write a meaningful article that doesn't spend most of its time referring back to the parent or grandparent games (see - ROM (MUD)'s last edit before deletion, which is basically a stub.) I might like to try my hand at that if that's allowed - it's just a matter of whether I can find places where the "institutional knowledge" about MUDs is recorded. Etmoonshade (talk) 13:26, 17 July 2020 (UTC)

I agree that is is redirected to the wrong place. DikuMUD would be much better. Since Merc and the others aren't currently mentioned there, a short subsection on DikuMUD's derivatives could be added at the same time. As to reinstating the article, this article was redirected without any kind of discussion, so the process would simply be to revert that edit. I wouldn't do so without adding at least a couple of sources that meet Wikipedia's reliability guidelines, though. - MrOllie (talk) 13:38, 17 July 2020 (UTC)

It looks like there was technically discussion, sort of? https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Merc_(MUD)&oldid=928257422 (sorry, no clue how to wikilink to that) has the deletion notice. I'll fix this redirect and the others now though. Etmoonshade (talk) 15:13, 17 July 2020 (UTC)

I've set the redirects for the 3 codebases mentioned above, after some fighting with ClueBotNG. :V

I don't quite have the bandwidth to do something about Diku derivatives right now, but I'll see if I can do something useful this weekend. Etmoonshade (talk) 15:31, 17 July 2020 (UTC)