Should Roblox hire full-time employees to work on the Roblox wiki?
Link to ROBLOX Wiki: http://wiki.roblox.com/
What is a Wiki? 'A website or database developed collaboratively by a community of users, allowing any user to add and edit content.'
How do I join the ROBLOX Wiki team? http://polls.roblox.com/roblox-wiki-writer-application-4
ROBLOX is an online game that is built on the principle of user-generated content. For that purpose, the developers have devised a system of building and scripting users can utilize to create their games.
Over the years, both ROBLOX building and scripting have undergone many updates. With new tools, increased efficiency, and a constantly changing Lua API, ROBLOX users can usually count on a gradually increasing ease with which they create their games.
However, if one takes a look at the statistics, they can easily notice a troubling fact. Very few ROBLOX users are actually adept enough to use ROBLOX Lua productively. A vast majority of the website's population has no experience with programming. Most users are also quite young, and therefore find themselves befuddled with basic programming concepts. These setbacks are a great barrier to game development on ROBLOX, which in itself degrades general user experience.
In order to promote scripting literacy, ROBLOX has always had a choice source: the ROBLOX Wiki. Unfortunately, the driving force behind the wiki is also its most fundamental issue. It is powered solely by ROBLOX users. Granted, these users are expert scripters and writers who were handpicked by the ROBLOX administrators, but the process is extremely flawed.
The idea behind having users write the wiki is based on two things: a relatable perspective, and a way to save the admins from more work. However, most wiki writers and editors can testify that that same lack of admin work severely limits the quality of the wiki.
Since wiki writers are merely ROBLOX users themselves, they are always ignorant of new ROBLOX updates until the developers see it fit to release information. Even when a developer informs the wiki writers about a new update, they usually don't say enough for the writers to provide decent documentation.
The main problem, however, is the limitations of the workforce. In reality, the wiki writers are just teenagers, and most of them have lives outside of ROBLOX. They have many other things to attend to; the ROBLOX wiki is never their highest priority. If there were ROBLOX administrators who were actually paid to write on the ROBLOX wiki, it is very plausible to predict the quality of the wiki would immediately jump tenfold.
Money is wonderful at a lot of things, and providing an incentive is one of them. People don't just "come up" with ideas. Ideas don't miraculously appear and then manifest themselves. Ideas have to be worked for, and a money is a fabulous way to inspire that work.
It would be inadvisable to pay underage writers for their work on the wiki, as the issue of their prior engagements would still come up. Instead, ROBLOX could hire new administrators (or old ones) to work full-time improving the wiki--writing tutorials, coming up with ideas, and teaching young gamers the science of basic Lua programming.
The only adults who are even remotely affiliated with the ROBLOX wiki are reesemcblox, gordonrox24 and MrDoomBringer, all of whom only organize the wiki, they don't write on it.
Other than the wiki, there are other learning resources users can utilize, like LuaLearners, and instructional books/videos. However, these resources have their own share of flaws, some even in common with the wiki. Namely, they are all powered by volunteers.
If the ROBLOX administration actively and directly promoted scripting literacy, ROBLOX scripters wouldn't be such a small fraction of the general population. Once there are hundreds, or even thousands, of expert ROBLOX scripters, the front page will be FILLED with fabulously scripted games. That will draw in more users, who will in turn learn to script, creating more games, drawing in more users, and the cycle would continue. ROBLOX would be more perfect than it has ever been.
tl;dr: There are too many people on ROBLOX who can't script, which limits the number of good games on the site. The resources created to teach scripting are flawed, mainly because they're powered by underage users who have priorities higher than ROBLOX. If there were full-time employees paid to write on the wiki, more people would learn to script, which would improve ROBLOX.