Roguelike Origin section at Wikipedia

I added a new section to the “Roguelike” Wikipedia article on the origins of the “roguelike” term, based on my USENET findings.

I agree words should evolve based on their usage, but I think it’s important not to forget what they were originally used for. Lots of people just fall for “roguelike” games being “like Rogue” and stop there, leaving room for a lot of ambiguity. That’s also the reason why I proposed a “Traditional Roguelike” definition to make it easier to find games that better keep the spirit of the originals.

So far, the section has survived for about half a day with some minor edits, let’s see how long it survives!

Here are the references I used, for historical purposes:

1.  Solovay, Andrew. (July 27, 1993). “CFV: rec.games.roguelike reorganization”. Newsgroup: news.announce.newgroups. Usenet: rec.games.roguelike-CFV1@uunet.uu.net. I would like to propose formally that a new hierarchy be created, namely rec.games.roguelike. This hierarchy would contain groups dedicated to discussion of rogue-type games.
2. Panitz, Aliza. (June 18, 1993). “Time for a new level of heirarchy?”. Newsgroup: rec.games.moria. Usenet: 1vsuhk$mj7@bronze.lcs.mit.edu. Retrieved May 17, 2018. It seems to me that we’d do a lot better taking all of the dungeon-adventure games, including ones that don’t have their own newsgroups like larn and omega, and reorganizing them under rec.games.dungeon – recognizing the intrinsic similarities of all these games. It would make it a lot easier for people who like one of these games to find newsgroups about other, basically similar games, and would finally provide a home for all those random posts about Larn and other games of the same genre that keep popping up in rec.games.hack and other inappropriate places.
3. Solovay, Andrew. (July 2, 1993). “RFD: rec.games.dungeon.* hierarchy”. Newsgroup: news.announce.newgroups. Usenet: 211gvmINNsnp@rodan.UU.NET. Retrieved May 17, 2018. I would like to propose formally that a new hierarchy be created, namely rec.games.dungeon. This hierarchy would contain groups dedicated to discussion of rogue-type games.
4. Solovay, Andrew. (July 20, 1993). “3rd RFD: rec.games.roguelike.* hierarchy”. Newsgroup: news.announce.newgroups. Usenet: 22ie07INNbaa@rodan.UU.NET. Those people who agree on a name seem to favor “roguelike” as the least of all available evils.
5. Grabiner, David. (March 9, 1998). “RFD: rec.games.roguelike.development”. Newsgroup: news.announce.newgroups. Usenet: 889443102.8279@isc.org. With the large number of Roguelike games and variants in existence and in development, there are occasional discussions about programming problems such as dungeon-generation algorithms which are of interest to designers of several games.