Miss Rogue over at HorsePigCow posted Please Stop Crowdsourcing Me which gives food for thought and had me thinking about the history so far with Crowdsourcing and general Web2.0 abuse of the MMORPG gamer communities.

Videogames probably weren't on her mind when she wrote that article, but the gold-farmer purchase of player-created databases within the World of Warcraft community is the worst example of exploitive Crowdsourcing that I can think of.

I don't know what it is about the tolerance of gamers, but elsewhere on the ol' interwebs I would have expected more shock and dismay when scumbags like IGE purchased community-driven databases on the scale of Thottbot, Allahkhazam & Wowhead. In the case of Allahkhazam and Wowhead in particular, the communities were specifically told that they would never even work with IGE, let alone sell their entire sites + databases.

Nobody seemed to care that the collective efforts of the community were abused and traded in for cash from very questionable sources.

The WoW community didn't even care enough to stave off the IGE-directed whitewashing from Wikipedia. Pretty much all of the articles referring to the multiple fiascos have been removed for lacking "notability". The mess surfaces in the news now and then, or graces the occasional blog, but you can't even hear the collective gamer community give a gentle sigh over the matter.

The big question is, with this sort of nonsense tolerated so far, are the communities for upcoming games (Warhammer, Age of Conan, Secret World, etc.) doomed to be Crowdsource exploited as well?

I feel strongly that the MMORPG market is about to explode in a very big way. It would be nice to get this nasty aspect of the industry buried and gone before the big stuff really takes off.

Blizzard is testing the waters and looks poised to jump into the same pool shared by Thottbot, Allakhazam and Wowhead. They've opened the official WoW Item Database today. It makes sense, they've been accounting for these information databases for awhile now and if you can't beat 'em, join 'em.

There's potential for the official source to steal the thunder here, but my first impression is that much like the rest of Blizzard's websites, it runs as slow as molasses, no doubt due to their bandwidth shared with WoW's login system. Their competitors also have a head start on a lot of useful features like comments, quest links, etc..

While I'm on the topic, I've been thinking of adding a Wowhead search box directly on my blog (on the left or right sidebar). Here's a sample of what that looks like and well, give me your opinions if I should add it permanently. I appreciate Wowhead's lack of gold farming ads or associations and it works much faster than Blizzard's site.

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