ioquake3

The wikipedia admin going by the hacker alias Rjd0060 has apparently been concerned with the vast quantities of e-paper that the ioquake3 entry was wasting when that same e-paper could be used for fictional star wars characters which don’t even appear in movies or fictional cartoon characters from the 80s.  So, he has decided to delete it:

The argument against the deletion, as I see it, has been posted to the admin’s talk page, and reproduced here so you don’t waste any e-highway e-traffic by visiting wikipedia:

Once again the ioquake3 wikipedia entry has been deleted for being without notability when, in fact, this is wholly inaccurate. ioquake3 is the de-facto standard in quake 3 engine technology with many games and other projects being based on it. Some of those games include urban terror World of Padman andtremulous. I created ioquake3 in 2005 and it has continued since then with the help of many contributors. To say that it is irrelevant does the project and those that use it a severe disservice and I think contributes to the overall discouragement of smaller open source and free software projects, as if they and the contributions made to them are without merit. id software created the original code base and released it onto the internet. To say that projects based on the original source release are not notable is like saying that it wouldn’t be notable if Ray Bradbury released a book under a creative commons license solely to the net and someone took that and made an entirely new and interesting work of fiction based on it.

Of course, having created ioquake3 you can take my words with a grain of salt. Please don’t let that stop you from researching the notability of the project yourself. Perhaps starting with these links:

http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/566/1040566/two-free-games-based-on-the-quake-3-engine-tip-up

http://www.linux.com/feature/136752

–TimeDoctor (talk) 02:53, 21 February 2009 (UTC)

Note that this is the second time ioquake3 has been deleted from wikipedia, the first time in 2007 was apparently because the entry was an “Advertisement”. Quotes are there to enforce the ridiculousness of the idea that an entry for an open source project could be spam.

Please join me in showing support for the ioquake3 project and leave a polite and considerate comment here or on Rjd0060’s talk page.

Thank you for your continued support of ioquake3,

Zachary “Zimbo” Slater,

El Presidente of ioquake3, Time Doctor Dot Org, and related industries.

Update:

Already support is pouring in from fans and contributors to ioquake3. This post will continue to be updated with some samples of that support.

For example, this post to the admin’s talk page from our friends at id software:

ioquake3 is indeed the best updated version of id Software Inc.’s GPL release of the Quake III Arena engine source code. Over the years the project stayed true to it’s objectives to make the original code base easier to work with, available on a wider variety of platforms, and to provide a solid base for several projects that wanted to build upon the technology.

I was the maintainer of Quake III Arena for several years until the company released it as GPL, and I am pretty happy there are people like Zachary who stepped up to the plate afterwards.

It seems very odd to me that content would be removed based on an individual’s personal appreciation of relevance. If the article provides useful information and references, it should at least be valued for the efforts of the contributing individuals.

Timothee Besset,
Software Engineer
id Software, inc.

Here is another great measure of support from our friends at the RQ3 Team:

How can ioq3 not be relevent when some of the maintainers have, as part of the project, provided fixes that have made it into id’s official Q3 codebase? From the Quake 3 1.32c readme:

1.32c (5-8-06)
- Ludwig Nussel and Thilo Shulz discovered a vulnerability letting a malicious client download files from a server if auto download is enabled ( sv_allowDownload 1 ).
- A second issue fixed in this release (R_RemapShaders buffer overflow) would let a malicious server exploit a buffer overflow to execute a shellcode on connecting clients.

I would like to point out that both Ludwig Nussel and Thilo Shulz are active participants in the ioq3 project. If id, the producer of the original game that ioq3 is based on, recognizes ioq3’s work as being relevent, what more is needed? Isn’t that both verification and validation of ioq3’s contribution to software? I mean, heck, you can cite actual publications (not blogs or other sissy webpages) as references to show that ioq3 is recognized time and again as one of the premier OSS games released.

ioq3 is especially notable for its wide range of platform support and write-once-run-anywhere Quake Virtual Machine ability which lets ioq3 run on Windows (x86 and x64), Linux (x86 and x64), Linux PPC (32 and 64 bit), FreeBSD, Solaris (SPARC and x86), Irix (MIPS), Mac OS X (x86 and PPC), and was recently the initial basis for a port of Quake 3 to the iPhone, an ARM-based device. Just google for “quake 3 iphone” to see all the press and buzz THAT generated. If that’s not notable, I don’t know what is! There are many modern commercial game engines that don’t support what ioq3 supports such as in-engine VoIP and IPv6. Heck, the VoIP stuff is from someone recognized both in the professional game programming arena and also by Wikipedia itself: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ryan_C._Gordon

-Monk

Thanks to the best of the rest who also supported ioquake3 on the wikipedia admin’s talk page:

Shame you thought this article had to be deleted; this could have been a discussion on improving the article to wikipedia’s standard. But you might have too much work to do in the foreseeable future as probably so many articles, about softwares/video games, are failing to meet those same requirements and therefore need to be “cut off” (weird principle for a participative online encyclopaedia).

Regards,

Tam

Sad… Just plain sad.

-Richard ‘JBravo’ Allen.

Thanks to the support of these and many other people, the ioquake3 wikipedia page has been restored!*

*at least until the next Wikipedia administrator decides it isn’t noteworthy and deletes it

This entry was posted on Friday, February 20th, 2009 at 7:17 pm and is filed under ioquake3. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.