Board Thread:Wiki discussion/@comment-4196050-20180210174720

It’s time for another announcement! Join me as we discuss some proposed features, changes to the rules, and general FYIs from  your favorite Roblox Wikia staff team! Well, we are the only Roblox Wikia staff team… so that must make us your favorite!

Project:Rules
The_JoTS and some of the other administrators have been working on the policies and guidelines to make them easier to read. The page can be found at Project:Rules. It is still a work-in-progress, and changes will be made to the page. We are looking for feedback regarding the formatting of the page, any unclear or confusing rules, and grammar errors. We are not asking for players to debate the rules themselves, such as removal of the notability policy.

Advertisement forum
As we want to provide a compromise for editor’s concerns that only super famous places will meet criteria for a page (even though you are welcome to make a userspace page), the admins have been thinking about implementing an advertising forum for editors to showcase their Roblox creations. We want to get some feedback about this idea in general. As we want to prevent the Roblox Wikia from becoming a place where everyone wants to advertise (and nobody wants to contribute to the wiki), we’re going to be having some strict rules for the forum. Additional information about the idea can be found on this google doc

In general, the rules are going to make it so that all advertisements need to be high-quality, as if you were advertising in the newspaper or TV. Just writing “come to my place plz” as your advertisement will not be allowed, and it would be deleted. To prevent spam, players will only be able to advertise something once every 3 days, and they can’t re-advertise the same asset (ie: you can’t advertise your place twice). Bumping will not be allowed. As asset copying is an issue, we also will not allow items that are copied or stolen.

Each advertisement needs to meet certain rules, such as having links to the Roblox page, photos, a description of the item, and prices. If we decide to create an advertisement forum, we will be creating examples of advertisements for each type of Roblox asset.

Notability policy
Last month, we asked you guys for feedback about increasing our notability policy requirements. Though there was some debate, what we saw through the poll results and discussion was that there were two main groups of people: those who wanted the notability policy kept at 750,000 for players/places and those who wanted it raised to 1,000,000. Though there was no unanimity as to a decision, we administrators feel like we explained our rationale for raising the notability policy requirements. Many of your concerns revolved around only “famous” people being able to meet the place visit requirements. We hope that the advertisement forum, ability to post non-notable pages in your userspace (User:/Page name), and asking for a notability policy exception through the Wiki Discussion board would be a good compromise. Once the notability policies are changed, pages that currently are notable will be grandfathered into the new notability requirements if they would not fit them otherwise.

The following are the new notability requirements:

Userboxes update
We have recently finished updating and fixing all of our userboxes. You can see all available userboxes at Project:Userboxes. You can put these on your user page, and show off your join date, favourite wiki staff members, and more.

Manual of style and references
This is a general FYI that editors are to refer to the Manual of Style if they have any questions about how a page should be formatted. Recently, we have been seeing a lot of editors formatting pages that necessitated these edits being undone. Such examples replacing an entire article using British English, not writing as concisely as possible when formatting headings (or making the first sentence of the section the heading) and including an Overview heading for the leading paragraph. As a tl;dr edition of the Manual of Style, please remember that articles need  to be formatted a certain way (especially when dealing with multiple templates like notices and infoboxes). American English should be used, and contractions should be avoided. Roblox is stylized as Roblox instead of ROBLOX (likewise with Robux, Robloxians, etc.). The leading paragraph that gives an introduction to the article does not need to have a heading.

As there’s been issues with what content should require references, we want to quickly address that. We understand that there are not many ‘’reputable’’ resources to reference when writing articles, and with the forums being removed it is a challenge to reference popular player opinions. On the other hand, many of the content that we’ve seen users asking for references for content that states obvious things. We want to remind you guys that you do not need to cite obvious things (see Wikipedia’s The Sky is Blue policy] for more information). Ideally, if you think that a reference should be added to a statement, it’s best to mention so in the page’s talk page as well as adding the citation needed template. There should be a consensus that a citation for it should be added; otherwise, the citation needed template would be removed from that section. Remember: this is a wikia about a kid’s game, not your PhD dissertation. :)

Edit warring
We’ve noticed that there’s been issues more recently with edit warring. Edit warring is when two or more editors disagree on what should be included on the page and how it should be presented. Often, an editor will make a change, another editor will disagree and immediately undo their edit, the first editor undoes the second editor’s undoing, and so on and so forth. It may progress to the point where vandalism occurs, such as someone blanking the page and writing “STOP IT!”.

When an editing conflict occurs, it’s best to stop and try to talk with the other editor about the issue. This can be done by posting on their message wall or on the page’s commentary. You can also contact an administrator if the conflict continues, and you need someone to mediate. Generally, editing conflicts should be resolved through consensus.

Fearmongering and Roblox “hackers”
Lately we have seen an influx of pages, blog posts, and forum posts discussing a huge variety of different “meeting a hacker” stories, account phishing stories, warnings about hackers/phishers and publishing “creepypasta” stories as fact. We’ve mostly cracked down on these, and deleted almost all pages like this. We may start cracking down on these a bit more as there is a very strange amount of them being created coincidentally by new accounts with similar stories.

As a general final warning, do not make pages to fearmonger, including stories about new “mass hackers”, random scammers, or even game exploiters. This is an encyclopedia and fictional pages do not belong in the namespace. While they are technically allowed in blog posts, if it seems to fearmonger it will also be deleted.  