Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-4812386-20121201192102

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 (using ROBLOX's catalog JSON API), 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, and would make it possible to get consistent item pages.

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 it 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 such attention? Do we really need a whole wiki page of only 2 paragraphs obn every single item ROBLOX ever released? 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, but not just the typical random items ROBLOX releases. And creating a page on an item without actually having something to say on that item should not be allowed.

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 with each others, we should put them in a category. However, when there are a lot of pages that have a certain relation with each others, we should put them in a namespace. And that's what I suggest: I suggest we add a 'Item' namespace to the wiki for items.

To go back to using a bot to document all the objects, if we do decide to do it, then we might as well try to benefit as much as possible from it by including all the information 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? And what about the fact that the website API by ROBLOX does not include item descriptions? 