Forum:Generating catalog item pages automatically

There are many thousands of catalog items currently on ROBLOX. Documenting them all manually would take an incredible amount of time. Yet, almost all of the information is already available on the ROBLOX website. Therefore, why not just write a bot that would automatically parse all the catalog pages (on the mobile website, for faster speed, of course), generate the page (with the description, the template, the categories and everything) and publish it to the wiki using MediaWiki's API?

That would save us hours and hours of work.

However, this also brings another question. Why should we actually document all these items? There isn't really a point, since most of the information is already available on the ROBLOX website. In fact, the only information that isn't available on there is the information about what the item is. While the staff does give descriptions to items, most of the time, these descriptions do not actually describe the item, but are rather just silly, random or little descriptive. They don't actually explain what the item is or does (example).

For example, while the description of a contest item on ROBLOX may say something silly, the description on this wiki would indicate that it is a contest item, to which contest is belonged and how it could be acquired. For an item like a gear, this wiki would indicate details about what it does. For example, for the dark heart, this wiki could indicate its damage, its special abilities, etc.

However, is such information really worth all that attention? More information will be available on the ROBLOX website anyway (including non-permanent information about a item, such as comments or the current possessors of a limited item, which we couldn't replicate here), and there isn't really enough to say about most items for it to be worth any attention. Even though we give most of the information about an item (such as the price, the description, etc), most item pages are still too small. Imagine what it would be if we removed everything except the information that isn't on the ROBLOX website. Most item pages wouldn't even have any content.

Therefore, I suggest that we restrict ourselves to only documenting items that actually have something special about them. That would include historical items, contest items, famous items, controversial items, gifts and any item having something special about it.

The staff has also released many series of items. For example, take the noob attacks series, or the RedCliff items. I suggest we document all of the items belonging to a certain series on the same page. In fact, in cases like in the case of the RedCliff items, we could even put it all in a single page, that page being about the RedCliff group.

We will inevitably end up with a lot of item pages. In fact, we already have a lot of item pages. When there are many pages that have a certain relation, we put them in a category. However, when there are a lot of pages that have a certain relation, we put them in a namespace. And that's what I suggest: I suggest we add a 'Item' namespace to the wiki for items.

Now, Wikia does not give us server access, so we can't add the namespace ourself. But that's not a problem, because we can just request a new namespace to Wikia and they'll give us it (see Help:Custom namespaces). Since we're at it, we might also want to request a namespace for players and another for groups. Or maybe we should request one for players and the other for the scripting API objects? Or maybe we should request one for the scripting API and another for groups? Heh, quite good questions.

If we do use a bot to document all the objects, however, we might as well try to benefit as much as possible from it and do as much work as possible. We'd likely need to improve the templates to include whether an item is BC, TBC or OBC only, add the publishing time to the template and all the information we can. And what to do about the current item pages? -- Mark Otaris (talk) 02:48, October 7, 2012 (UTC)