User blog:Mark Otaris/Detailed analysis of the place page requirements

I have been asked by PeterPeter5000 for my ideas about what should qualify a place to have an article on this wiki. First, I thought we should make the place visit criterion go up higher over time as place visits get more and more visits, but I realized that we also needed to bump it higher because it was ridiculously low right now. The best way to do that without causing a major change on the wiki suddenly would be to do it progressively: therefore, we could make the place visit criterion go up higher in time a little faster than it would need to to keep up with the place visit numbers increasing on the ROBLOX website, until we achieve a reasonable amount, at which point we'll slow down the increase and just make it go up at the speed it needs to to keep up with the place visit increases on ROBLOX.

However, I realized that while this was the best idea for the place visit criterion, it didn't tell us how fast exactly we should increase the criterion and to which point. I have therefore decided to use a bot on the ROBLOX website to calculate some statistics.

Statistics
First, please note that all of these statistics are entirely accurate, with a margin of error of 5, meaning that the actual numbers may be higher or lower than the results displayed here of a value of 5 at most. This is due to the way the statistics were calculated by the bot (it parsed the popular ranking on the games page by rows, and rows have 6 places in them, but it looked at the last one so the margin of error is of 6 - 1, therefore 5). All these statistics are sufficiently accurate to be relied upon.

In the table below, the first column is a range of place visits, while the second column is the number of places whose number of place visits belongs in that range. The second row of the table indicates that there are 432 places on ROBLOX with more than 1,000,000 place visits. The third row indicates that there are 48 places on ROBLOX with more than 900,000 place visits but less than 1,000,000 place visits. The fourth row indicates that there are 72 places on ROBLOX with more than 800,000 place visits but less than 900,000 place visits.

The table below indicates that there are 432 places with more than 1,000,000 place visits, 480 places with more than 900,000 place visits, 552 places with more than 800,000 place visits, 636 places with more than 700,000 place visits, 756 places with more than 600,000 place visits and 888 places with more than 500,000 place visits.

Analysis
432 articles on places is more than what we would be able to maintain and handle, but it is important to keep in mind that not all of these places will have a page and that we cannot make the criterion go up to 1,000,000 place visits in a single change. I think we should make a big bump to 500,000 place visits and then make it go up by 50,000 every month until it reaches 750,000, at which point we'll stop bumping it. We'll keep making it higher to keep up with the increasing number of place visits on the most popular ROBLOX places, but not by as much as this.

Thoughts
The solution described above is in my opinion the best thing to do about the place visit criterion, but it does not solve the problem we have with place pages: places can be important enough to have a page even without having 750,000 place visits. We therefore need to have other criteria which are exclusive of the place visit criterion. This means that we need other criterion that, if fulfilled, allow a place to have a page on this wiki even without having 750,000 place visits.

I recommend that all places which are official ROBLOX places or that get featured in an entire article on the blog (that is, the place must have an entire article only about itself on the blog) get to have a page on this wiki. Most official ROBLOX places are for events and should have a page anyway, and places that get featured on the blog have information that we can refer to on the blog and are generally of a reasonable quality.

Finally, I recommend we let anyone wanting a place to have a page on the wiki ask the community about its opinion on the wiki's forum. We'd need a reasonable number of users (at least 10) to post on the thread and give their opinion, if this number is not reached, the place cannot have a page until it is reached (which may very well never happen). If it is reached, then the discussion (it shouldn't just be a vote, it should be a discussion where users give their opinion and explain it) can be left going on for a while and at some point, an administrator will look at all the posts, determine what the consensus is, post on the thread and indicate what the consensus was and close the discussion.

In this way, whether a place can have a page on the wiki would be determined by the community consensus that resulted of a discussion. This is exactly the system Wikipedia uses for all its decisions about notability (and all its decisions in general) and it works very well. I recommend that we use this system to make exceptions to the criteria mentioned before.

Furthermore, I recommend that we use exactly the same system for determining whether a user can have a page on the wiki. If the user is a ROBLOX employee or has had a full blog post featuring him on the blog (just being mentioned in a random blog post isn't enough), he can have a page. If he has a enough place visits (we'll use the same number of place visits as we use for place pages), he can have a page. If community consensus determines that he can have a page, he can have one. In all other cases, he cannot have a page.