Bryan Needs a Title for His Home Page
Need help with Wikipedia
I knew this would eventually happen and it would appear that the day is drawing near where someone is going to delete the Game Zero entry for on Wikipedia. I know there are problems with the entry and how it got created. I don’t consider it a promotion piece though, I consider it a supporting piece to other content within the Wiki where the magazine was relevant.
The key problem as I note on the talk page:
“The key problem here is that most of the web from 1994/1995 is no longer available. Some of the promotion we did within the newsgroups is still locatable, but none of the IRC based promotion we did is archived. Also, most if any of the early links to the magazine are no longer on the web anymore. Archive.org only has 1996 and on for the most part. I can personally vouch for all of these statements as can the entire staff of the magazine as we were pretty proud to be setting these milestones. Some notable examples of sites referencing Game Zero were the NCSA What’s New page which is now gone, as is Iway Magazine (which was an early Internet spotlight magazine) which ranked Game Zero as one of the top 25 gaming sites/top 500 on the web in 1996.”
The magazine was a staple read for most game studios, we were the only one of two non-traditional news publication invited to the Meridian 59 launch party thrown by Trip Hawkins after Studio 3DO bought them out (yes, I got to shake hands with Trip and talk with him for a few minutes). The other was a Canadian TV based videogaming program.
It is with great distress that I can’t locate supporting information about this magazine and I fear that Wikipedia’s shitty content protocols will consign the historical significance of this magazine to the delete bin.
Who cares about this stupid Wikipedia anyway? Half the entries aren’t even true.
You’ll just have to maintain that Game Zero predated Intelligent Gamer through oral history.
No one cares about anything anymore anyway. So what if the entry is churned up in all the noise and rumor that the internet has become.
The Game Zero site itself is perfectly capable of hosting its own history.
Comment by doomsday cock — December 15, 2008 @ 7:53 am
Well, while you are correct to some degree, the problem is that really that Wikipedia is the voice of truth for the uninformed masses. I’m more worried about being able to support other informational elements of data within the Wiki by backing it with information about the publication. It’s frustrating when at it’s peak the Game Zero site was pulling over 1 million views a month in late 1995 early 1996 which was phenomenal for the time. My biggest distress as a archivist is really with this historical window of the Internet from 94′-96′ that is effectively going to becoming lost, and I’m trying to do what I can to preserve our small slice of that history.
Comment by Bryan — December 16, 2008 @ 1:07 pm