Hello there, Roblox Wiki editors! We've recently made a few major updates to our policies, so here's a post going over all of them.
Notability policy updates
We have made some changes to the notability policy to better suit Roblox's evolution as a platform.
All changes to these policies are retroactive upon articles they apply to by default.
Event notability criteria
In the last five years or so, events on Roblox have massively changed, starting with the transition to the Live-Ops feature. Nowadays, Roblox rarely runs or contracts events, and instead much more focus is given to when developers run their own events or when companies contract development teams to create experiences, even going as far as to create an "Events" tab on experiences and groups so that these are easier for developers to promote.
However, considering all of these to be "events" has been a major pain point for Roblox Wiki. In the last few years, we have dealt with the increasing bloat of the Events template being filled with dozens of "events" that are more just... experiences associated with companies outside of Roblox that give out free avatar items. Roblox barely has to be involved with these now, too; besides arranging for asset types that users can't yet upload, or requesting an official account necessitating a username reset, the majority of recent "events" have had essentially zero involvement from Roblox.
In line with the goals of the notability policy, this is starting to get to a point of quantity over quality with article creations, which is not the intent. The criteria for events were exceedingly necessary to update.
The previous criteria involving events has been entirely removed. The new criteria for events are as follows:
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account that are awarded through badges
The main goal of these changes is to cut out things being considered events when they're just sponsored experiences with UGC. This does not prohibit experiences that will no longer qualify as events being documented, but they will instead have to meet experience notability criteria.
This is going to be a large change for a number of pages. This is a retroactive change, so past articles will be affected. Here's a list of things to expect to happen on the wiki following this change, and things you can do to help:
- Most of the pages that no longer qualify as events still qualify as notable experiences and can still be documented on Roblox Wiki. They should be migrated to being documented as experiences.
- This involves moving the article to the article naming format for experiences, removing any mention of it being an event, and reworking the content of the page to focus on gameplay.
- These articles can still discuss associated UGC, including how to get it, so this shouldn't be a concern.
- I made an example of migrating a formerly-considered-event to experience page to model how you can still document things like UGC on their articles: Rock Panda Games/My Hello Kitty Cafe
- In most cases, if an article doesn't qualify as a notable experience, it'll be moved to the userspace of whoever created the article, and be marked as a public user page in the case that it becomes notable later.
- The events template will be pruned of these experiences. Again, none of these will be considered events on Roblox Wiki, and should not be considered such.
- The vast majority of events prior to April 2019 will be left alone, as they mostly fall under one or more of the first three criteria.
It will take time to process through the five years of articles that qualified as events under the previous criteria, so please be patient. As mentioned, you can help with processing these changes, too.
We are still making smaller revisions to the policy to better clarify these things, and prevent it applying to more topics than intended. If any part of these criteria don't make sense or seem unclear for a certain topic, please let us know.
Contest notability criteria
What could be determined as a "contest", previously, was up to a lot of debate and confusion amongst editors. There are many more contests being run nowadays, resulting in a quantity-over-quality problem starting to show up with "contest" pages. Additionally, with smaller-scope, barely-promoted contests being run by Roblox in certain limited sections of the Developer Forum, along with experiences and communities on Roblox starting to run their own contests that give out real prizes, it was necessary to write better criteria concerning contests.
The new criteria for contests are as follows:
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Some of these specifications, which may seem to be overly specific, are intended to prevent reused rewards like the DevRel Virtual Prize series from automatically qualifying a contest as notable.
User notability criteria
One of the criteria for Users has been adjusted to be in line with the changes to the criteria for Contests and Events.
- Previous: Is a winner of an official Roblox competition
- New: Is a winner of a global Roblox-sanctioned competition in the top 10
The reason for this adjustment is to ensure this criteria only applies to actually notable users; the previous criteria were too vague and general, and could be applied to many more users than intended. Restricting to a certain set of winners (within the top 10 or less; to clarify) prevents winners of competitions with dozens of winners being considered notable.
AI policy
Due to a few recent incidents with pages being found to be full of inaccuracies due to editors being heavily reliant on the usage of large language models (LLMs) - or, more familiarly, having used AI to generate the article - we have established a policy discussing that using AI tools to generate or assist in creating any article content on Roblox Wiki is strictly prohibited.
You can read the full text of this policy here. There is no use case for AI use on Roblox Wiki. Content found to have been machine generated for the wiki will be promptly deleted.
Criticism sections & documenting reception properly
Roblox Wiki has had a long-standing issue with "Criticism" sections of articles. To be blunt, it's often just used as a soapbox for personal opinions and complaints about a topic, often phrased with weasel words to make it appear as a common sentiment. If not that, it was often otherwise just a nonsense complaint, such as that an FPS game wasn't interesting to people who didn't want to play an FPS game. These never really had a place on the wiki; it was against policy, but only indirectly, and that often proves to be a problem with this wiki. We've recently gained additional concern with that certain content creators were regularly using these sections on wiki articles to promote falsehoods about topics, presenting them as factual information.
To fix both of these problems, we have implemented better policies that more directly discuss this issue.
Starting off, "Criticism" sections on articles are blanket disallowed, and we will be looking into removing or revising all existing "criticism" sections of articles. Having a "criticism" section on a wiki with this scope of community unintentionally encourages people to add their own criticism; this is not intended, nor is it appropriate.
We are instead encouraging that, when it is notable to discuss and can provide reliable citations, that certain other types of sections can be used on articles, most notably "Reception". There are some specific rules on when these sections may and may not be used on certain topics and article types.
For more information, please read the policies on documenting reception here.
And to clarify something that will undoubtedly come up with this - no, we are not disallowing you from criticizing things, but we are making a strict move to remove it from and keep it off of articles. Please keep it to the Discussions boards or blog posts.
Questions?
We are still working on adjusting these policies a little bit - we aren't going to completely rewrite any of these, but minor tweaks may be made to phrasing and such to clarify things. If you notice anything that might be confusing, cases that may not work, etc. please bring them up so we can address them! We'll keep an eye on the comments of this blog post for some of these for a while. Please make sure to keep blog post comments on-topic!
