User talk:1Maven/Guild Roster

You might wanna reconsider this project

This is a flawed concept from the ground up. I've seen this on Everquest wikis and even on the big, fairly active WoW wikis. Player-maintained guild lists fall out of date very, very quickly. Typically only a few (sometimes even just 1) member of a guild will care enough to add their guild to a roster - if that person leaves that guild, or goes inactive themselves, the roster will have an entry for an "active guild" with no way to determine its accuracy. What if the guild broke up? What if it moved server? What if it went inactive? There's no way to tell.
This is part of the problem GWW's (gw1's wiki) ran into: we had a guild space, but no way to determine guild activity. At first we tried to guess if a guild was still active by visiting their forums, or trying to catch their members online in-game. But that ended up being a huge burden on the wiki editors, and we changed tack. We then decided that <an arbitrary period of time> without an edit to their guild page would render their guild "inactive" and let us delete their guild page, but that became a burden on both the regular wiki editors and the admins who had to run around deleting thousands of pages (in addition to being, yknow, a shitty way to detect guild inactivity). In the end, we stopped caring - we gave up trying to police it, which left the guild namespace overrun with out-of-date information on guilds, some which had disbanded entirely, leaving the guild namespace pretty useless for the purpose of finding a guild to play with. Unless your goal is to document every active guild that played at one point during the game's life (and what's the point in documenting that?), I don't see this project going anywhere. For any kind of a resource to help people find guilds, it will be counterproductive - and even as a simple documenting measure, it will quickly become so inaccurate it's not worth maintaining.
You've included a small note that any guild entry lacking an update for a year is subject to deletion, but again, who is "in charge" of the deletion, and will they be vigilant enough to police hundreds/thousands of guilds across dozens of pages? I mentioned our similar effort on GWW, but it ended up being more trouble than it was worth. Inactive guild pages were tagged for deletion, meaning regular editors had to be policing them/checking for activity or dates of last edit and admins had to come through and delete the pages. And there were thousands of pages. Please think about the full scope of this project. It will require constant maintenance from now until Guild Wars 2 dies - if at any point between now and then the maintenance stops, the entire project becomes useless. Is it worth it to the wiki to have to support that kind of project? Does the benefit outweigh the cost? If it's a personal project and you expect no outside involvement, will you be around (and interested in the game/its wiki) for years to keep the lists pruned? Just things to think about. I've seen this kind of project fail time and again, even on the otherwise phenomenal Guild Wars 1 wiki, so I figured it'd be best to comment on this early before you sink too much time into it. -Auron 01:43, 22 February 2014 (UTC)