Wikipedia accused of trashing history

Historian and journalist Benj Edwards has accused "vigilante Wikipedia users" of deleting little-known scraps of gaming history. On Vintage Computing and Gaming, which Edwards runs, the article Wikipedia is Deleting BBS Game History detailed an ongoing battle between Wikipedia editors and users. The former stated certain games aren't notable enough for inclusion in the online encyclopaedia, in part because people don't still talk about them; historians and gamers from the era have been outraged by such sentiments.

This isn't the first time Wikipedia editors have taken to removing relatively niche subject matter from the online resource, something that seems at odds with infinite space on the web and an encyclopaedia's desire to encompass as much knowledge as possible. Speaking to .net, Edwards also suggested it ran counter to Wikipedia's own history: "The site began as a collection of under-documented, under-cited articles that originated from the knowledge of its many authors and plagiarism of websites. You can think of those early entries as seeds of knowledge that later bloomed into mature, verifiable sources of information. In the same sense, it is counterproductive to trim away every 'non-notable' or poorly-sourced article because that denies them a chance to grow into something better in the future."

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