Save the Cantr article on Wikipedia

[Sho]

The Wikipedia article for Cantr (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cantr_II) has been proposed for deletion. If we want it to stay (and we do - a Wikipedia article is very good as a promotional hook), we have less than five days to make the article conform with Wikipedia's standards for articles.

The reason given for deletion is that the subject, Cantr, is not notable and fails to satisfy the Wikipedia guidelines for notability of Web content (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:WEB) or of software (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:SOFTWARE). If we can edit the article to fit the guidelines, proving that Cantr is notable, the article stays.

These seem to be the only criteria for notability that we have any hope of meeting:
1. The software is/was innovative, significant, or influential in some specific way, and this is verifiable from reliable sources independent of the software developer.
2. The content itself has been the subject of multiple non-trivial published works whose source is independent of the site itself.

So if you can write a paragraph (or more) explaining how Cantr is "innovative, significant, or influential in some specific way," or find some notable references to Cantr, post it here, or put it on the Wikipedia article yourself, following the given procedure for contesting the deletion. Unless you have experience on Wikipedia (registered username with a decent amount of contributions to your credit), it would probably be better for me to do the editing.

[Talapus]

I don't know how "non-trivial" this is, but Cantr was chosen as a "link of the day" by UserFriendly, a major web comic. I will keep my eyes out for any other references.

[tiddy ogg]

And this is probably considered even more trivial... but when my prowess as a poet is at last recognised, the influence of Cantr may well be cited. *grin*
http://www.tiddyogg.co.uk/marilee.htm

[Spillages]

Wiki and crims are very big contributors of new players.

[Duckers]

I am a very regular 'visitor' to Wikipedia, and I look for all sorts of stuff on there. That's where I went to find out more about Cantr II, before I joined.

[Avathar]

I'm not a registrated user of Wikipedia, but I translated the Dutch version of it.

Maybe somebody who is registrated could say something like:

Cantr is a totally new sort of MMORPG. The words 'Massive Multiplayer Online Role Play Game' cover its essence pretty well but it is very different than allmost all the MMORPG's that you can find on the internet. Those games don't really focus on the Roleplay but more on the Massive Multiplayer Game. In contradiction to Cantr which is focussing much more on the Roleplay element.

[Solfius]

I think the innotative point about Cantr is it is more than a roleplaying game, but also a society simulation. The unique selling point is the total freeform nature where only the game environment is programmed and only players are present, no NPCs

Perhaps that's the angle we can take to keep the article.

We could also perhaps include some OOC history as examples of the societies that have so far developed, even though it's against normal policy it may help demonstrate Cantr's inovative nature. Maybe also reference it as the brainchild of a certain Jos Elkink who is an academic/student (unsure which) in politics.

Basically, expand it from the basic marketing pitch into a better article

[formerly known as hf]

Which pages link to the Wiki's Cantr page?

I know the text-based MMORPG list does - any others?

I would suggest that most of our wiki traffic comes from those pages - people searching the wiki for browser MMORPGs - rather than the Cantr Page on the wiki.

At a strecth, we should make sure that more pages link to the Cantr wiki page, or if that has to go, direct to the Cantr homepage (and we should spruce that up...)

1. The software is/was innovative, significant, or influential in some specific way, and this is verifiable from reliable sources independent of the software developer.

The availability of various languages is of particular note - this is certainly innovative, as most MMORPGs focus on American/English speaking, whilst we have large communities of Polish and other lanugage speakers.

Unilang may have an independent review - if not, it should (Junesun? )

I think, though, that we may have been stumped - cantr probably isn;t worthy of a wiki page to itself.

I'd suggest we focus on updating pages that conatin links to cantr - add links to Cantr on other relevant pages - and spruce up our homepage, so that referals from the wiki have somehting impressive greeting them (see my suggetsion of news and so forth on the homepage)

EDIT: I just had a look at the wiki pages for the other games on the 'browser based MMORPG' list - many of them are up for deletion too. Some of the others have even less info than the Cantr page, and are smaller games - so should be up for deletion too. If the Cantr page does get taken down - would you be able to nominate other games on lists which Cantr appear to get deleted too, Sho - so that we aren't at too much of a disadvantage?

[kinvoya]

Positive (and possibly unique) things to emphasize:

Society simulator (but not like the Sims)
Every char has a real player behind it
Text based (at least one blind user)
Multi-language = educational

Sorry if I didn't word this well, I just woke up. Will rethink later.

We need our Wiki!

[Sho]

Cantr really isn't worthy of a Wikipedia article. But the deletion process is imperfect, and often having a few people stand behind an article is enough to keep it alive.

The Cantr article is linked to by three lists of games (MMORPG's, text-based MMORPG's and multiplayer browser games) and, improbably, by the stub article "Text-based." So if the Cantr article is deleted we could just change those article links to external links without a huge loss - we'll lose the MMORPG category listing, but I don't think we could be getting many hits from that. It would be a good idea to add mentions of Cantr to related articles.

[SekoETC]

One problem is that the article looks unprofessional. Putting the first word in bold and italics? Are we suspecting that the reader is half blind or has an attention span of one second? The writing is also clumsy, repetitive. There should be a section of game history (not ingame but from the outside, listing big changes like addition of clothing, iron to hematite, skills). There's still time, brother. At least the Finnish article is doing fine so far.

[kinvoya]

I don't quite understand what I'm supposed to do to help. I haven't done much on Wiki except edit one page one day when I was bored.

Nick did a lot of work on it. Maybe he would help.

[Junesun]

Unilang wanted to review Cantr in its webzine, except that the editing staff of the webzine resigned a few months ago and there won't be another issue.

I'll see if I can do anything to improve the article somewhat to make it more scientific-sounding later, but I'm at the Wikimedia conference in Boston right now.

We have to do something soon because it was posted for deletion on August 1st and there's only a few days period of deliberation. At least voice a protest and get the deletion up for discussion.

Having a page dedicated to Cantr on Wikipedia itself, rather than just in a link, is a great advantage because Wikipedia pages get great Google ranking.

[BZR]

Wikpedia is very important in Cantr's promotion.

Why?
Because I've first heard about Cantr in Wikipedia.

[kinvoya]

I remember people on the forums saying that their anthropology, sociology, language, whatever class recomends Cantr as a learning tool. I think we can make a case for it being unique among games as an educational resource.