User:Odysseus654/CommentSandbox

Creating userspace page for rants against webpages. Yes, this will be encyclopedic. Yes, it will be temporary.

Metaverse Exchange Protocol

I ran into this article looking for something very similar to what this protocol describes, so I was rather excited to see that it already existed as a specification currently in use. However, the article as written is confusing and almost unreadable. My initial focus was to add a "The Problem" section describing the reason why this protocol is necessary, but quickly ran into the fact that most of what I would write would be original research as very little source material describes the reasoning behind the project.

Further research shows that most if not all the content of this article was copied from either the primary source or from the related project page on OpenSimulator (and it does not link to the article??) It also appears that with the exception of one of the external links (that I added), all statements related to this (on the main website, OpenSimulator, or Wikipedia) appear to have been made by the one or two people that "own" the project. This (I hope) does not qualify the article for deletion, but does show some serious content issues that need to be resolved before it could be considered encyclopedic.

Criticizing both the Wikipedia article and the source material (since they are nearly identical), some comments are:

• ...second generation virtual environment protocol specification... - what was the first generation? This goes back to the lack of a "problem" to solve
• ...NVEs are in this context... - Can we please keep the number of TLAs to a minimum here, to improve readability a bit, especially if they aren't obviously adopted (or article-linked) anywhere else?
• ...Google Protocol Buffers... - The posted spec on the source appears to use optimized binary packets, not something textual (and more verbose) like Google Protocol Buffers. SecondLife (which this is fairly obviously a fork of) uses a hybrid approach of combining optimized binary packets where low latency is required and a textual protocol where flexibility is more important. I don't see anything describing whether one or the other (or both) is in use here. The question as to whether o not it is an optimized binary packet is pretty moot anyhow, as the spec on the source does not give any message ID values to be able to understand how to encode or decode anything anyway.

The only implementation of this is done in OpenSimulator, likely by the author(s) themselves. I'm not convinced that the "spec" described by the source is complete or understandable enough to base any implementation on (without studying other implementations of course), and there is really only one article that provides enough text to build an article out of without violating WP:OR, I really don't believe that this article could be made encyclopedic at this time.

My recommendation here (depending on how WP works) is either to wait for the source material to expand enough to satisfy the needs of an article to support it or merge the article into the OpenSimulator article, where most of the work seems to be based.